CRM Analytics: Reaching the Heart of the CRM Process

JEEVES SOLUTIONS UNVEILS JeevesOne

Jeeves Solutions, a division of Ask Jeeves Inc, announced general availability of JeevesOne. Its first packaged, question answering software product, JeevesOne delivers cost-effective, intelligent self-service. For the last three years, Jeeves Solutions has delivered its technology as an outsourced service or Application Service Provider (ASP) to companies such as Dell, Ford, Nike, British Telecom, Verizon and other industry leaders. With JeevesOne, the two thirds of the U.S. market that prefer a self-service solution that is customer-resident and delivers valuable customer insight, will be able to benefit from Ask Jeeves' technology. A competitively-priced, enterprise software application, JeevesOne delivers highly relevant answers and unparalleled customer analytics while simultaneously giving companies the independence and control they seek. In addition to significantly reducing support costs, JeevesOne will help companies deliver better products and services by learning from every question customers ask.

"With the successful launch of JeevesOne, we've delivered a product the market needs on time, and achieved a major milestone we set out for ourselves at the beginning of the year," said Skip Battle, CEO of Ask Jeeves. "The availability of JeevesOne for Jeeves Solutions and the acquisition of Teoma, the leading next generation search technology, for our Web Properties division represent significant advances in our technology and products. I believe Ask Jeeves now has the tools to compete effectively in both our business units -- even in this difficult market place."

Jeeves Solutions expects JeevesOne will increase its global market opportunity more than five fold. According to the American Marketing Association's Honomichl Report, companies spend an estimated $7 billion dollars on market research annually in order to better understand the needs and preferences of their customers. IDC reports that the worldwide call center services market totaled $23 billion in revenues in 1998, and is projected to grow to $58.6 billion by 2003. These expenditures indicate an enormous opportunity for effective and satisfying self-service that actually helps companies cut costs while gaining vital customer insight.

"Cost-effective, intelligent self-service solutions are crucial for companies in the current environment of demanding customers and limited budgets," said Robert Mirani, director of CRM strategies for Yankee Group. "Although companies have invested millions of dollars in CRM, content management and other solutions to interact and respond to customers, many still execute ineffectively in using self-service so that customer communications is managed optimally. Solutions like JeevesOne can help provide the missing link through high value customer analytics tools and an easy-to-use question answering system -- all controlled within a company's firewall."

Eighty percent of Jeeves Solutions customers renew year after year because of proven, consistent return on investment. Customers have achieved 30 to 50 percent reductions in support costs, and have identified critical improvements to product and marketing strategies based on Jeeves' customer analytics.

"While answering questions is seen as an absolute necessity for corporate Web sites, the opportunity to profit from the insight gained in question answering analysis has been largely ignored. JeevesOne uses natural language to provide an unconstrained medium for users to freely express their desires, wants, interests and intentions," said Claudio Pinkus, president of Jeeves Solutions. "JeevesOne provides companies with a window into customers' thinking at key points in the customer life cycle helping them maximize the lifetime value of their customers."

Formation of Strategic Alliances Group

Jeeves Solutions' evolution to an enterprise software company gives it the opportunity to create strong alliances with other leading technology and service providers, and will provide an attractive sales package for third parties. These alliances will enable Jeeves Solutions to deliver more value to a greater set of customers by integrating deeply with customers' content systems and contact center infrastructures. The ability to integrate with applications that are important to Jeeves' customers will offer greater value to systems integrators focused on delivering the industry's best of breed solutions. To take advantage of this opportunity, Jeeves Solutions recruited an experienced group of software professionals to form its Strategic Alliances Group.

"JeevesOne is a breakthrough product that clearly leverages the company's track record of innovation in this space, while positioning Jeeves Solutions as a much stronger provider of intelligent self-service solutions to the enterprise market," said Allen Bonde, director of management consulting at Extraprise.

JeevesOne New Features

• An Enterprise-Class Application JeevesOne is an automated, enterprise software application that is deployed, maintained and controlled within the enterprise. A scalable,fault tolerant solution, JeevesOne is designed to meet the demanding security and availability requirements of today's Global 2000 IT organizations. Published APIs enable seamless integration with existing systems.

JeevesOne can be installed by companies within hours and a customized implementation can be up and running in three weeks. JeevesOne ships with easy-to-use tools that facilitate rapid customization and functional adaptation by business units.

• Complete Suite of Administrative Tools JeevesOne gives companies control over the answers they deliver to customers. Product, service, policy and information inquiries can be easily customized to serve not only the customer but also the changing needs of a company's marketing, product or communications strategies. JeevesOne tools also enable fast customization of the user experience to escalate customers to email, chat, voice or a call center representative when appropriate.
• Industry leading analytics JeevesOne ships with 14 Summary, Content Optimization and Customer Analysis reports that track and aggregate customers' questions to provide critical insight into their preferences, needs and wants. This customer-driven insight helps tune the effectiveness of the product by highlighting content holes and information gaps. This drives increasing cost savings as customers get a higher percentage of their questions answered through self-service. With a built-in ROI calculator, companies can assess how many customer inquiries they are offsetting with the JeevesOne product on a daily, weekly or annual basis. Companies can customize all of the reports to serve their unique needs.
• Advanced Natural Language Processing The JeevesOne Engine uses a method known as "document-driven question answering" to access and categorize unstructured data and 255 document types, including PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It then interprets the information using advanced natural language techniques and automatically builds a semantic Answer Matrix which enables a "publish once" content strategy. When a user asks a question via the familiar Jeeves question box, the Answer Matrix is analyzed and the appropriate answers are delivered through a flexible and intuitive interface. This approach, when combined with deep analysis of customers' questions, has a proven track record of delivering the most relevant answers to customer queries.
• High Value Knowledge Packs JeevesOne Knowledge Packs leverage thousands of hours of human editorial work and experience handling millions of queries from some of the world's leading companies. Knowledge Packs act as implementation "booster packs," delivering pre-built, highly relevant, industry-specific information such as product research, problem resolution and general customer support questions. JeevesOne Knowledge packs make applications highly relevant to a particular industry shortly following installation. In the first release of JeevesOne, Knowledge Packs are available for banking, brokerage, hardware, software, networking and data storage companies. Additional Knowledge Packs are currently under development.
• Published APIs and JeevesOne Connector for Vignette JeevesOne ships with a suite of published APIs for enterprise integration with companies' existing CRM and content management systems, as well as the necessary APIs to enable elegant escalation with existing email, chat and voice systems.

An optional component for companies using Vignette's VAF platform, JeevesOne Connector for Vignette creates a closed loop content management system that alerts Web administrators to content holes and information gaps by analyzing customers' questions. The JeevesOne Connector for Vignette will be available in Q4, 2001.

• Multi-lingual Capabilities JeevesOne is optimized for multi-lingual support and localization tuning. The product currently supports eight languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, and Dutch through document-based language recognition. Additional languages are currently under development.
• Intranet and Extranet Support JeevesOne can be implemented on any customer-facing Web site, whether internal or external and can easily integrate with the information systems companies choose. For the large variety of standard and routine questions, JeevesOne automates direct communications, leaving companies free to deploy precious customer service experts to difficult and sensitive situations.

Pricing and Platforms

JeevesOne is available now and competitively priced starting at $100,000. JeevesOne supports Windows NT and Windows 2000 platforms in the first release. Support for additional platforms is under development.