IVR

Resellers are the key to marketing, delivering and enabling customers’ success with vendors’ sophisticated, value-rich technology solutions. They are the professionals that work with buyers to assess needs, find the right products and features, do the lifting on the installs and provide that one-call-away for questions, support and for making modifications and supplying enhancements.

To be sold by resellers therefore suppliers must offer well-marketed and supported products that provide significant value for money that are rugged, easy-to-deploy and are readily upgradable i.e. can stay current but are obsolescence-proof.

eGain appears to offer just that with its cloud-and premises-installed customer interaction management products with the addition of seven new solution providers to its eGain Econet partner program. Joining the growing list of reseller and systems integration partners in eGain’s ecosystem are Cameo Solutions, CDW, INX (News - Alert), Nexus, Presidio, Universal E-Business Solutions, and VoiceRite that will focus on delivering eGain’s line to mid-sized businesses.

The Econet program provides sales enablement, including training on how to demonstrate and sell eGain solutions, multi-tiered professional services training, covering a range of topics from simple configuration training to deeper solution extension, customization, and integration and support training, extending from problem reporting to troubleshooting. Partners receive eGain Certified logo designation and accreditation and an endorsement of quality that it says “enables eGain partners to provide trusted services (including implementation, support, and training) to their clients.”

“At every interaction, the customer experience affects future company revenue and profit,” said Johan Jacobs, research director at Gartner (News - Alert) in his research note "Ten Imperatives for Optimizing the Multichannel Management Customer Experience", dated October 30, 2009. “Proper channel management ensures that these customer experiences across channels reinforce the organization's basic brand value proposition and differentiate its business.”

“Consumers are increasingly using the phone in conjunction with electronic channels such as chat, co-browse, e-mail and the web, and want a seamless multichannel customer experience,” said Marc Thomas, president of VoiceRite (News - Alert), a leading provider of unified communications solutions. “Our business clients will be able to deliver that experience to their customers with our contact center offerings, fully integrated with eGain’s best-of-breed eService applications.”

In turn eGain continues to enhance its product line. It is enabling its resellers meet customers’ needs for solutions to support social media interactions integrated with others via the next generation of the eGain Social Experience Suite, which empowers contact center agents and social community managers to efficiently handle inquiries across all traditional and social channels.

The new version, announced in mid-September includes a social-blended agent desktop, integration with Facebook (News - Alert) to complement already available integrations with Twitter and web search and a single-sourced knowledge publishing capability for proactive social engagement.

eGain also recently achieved Oracle (News - Alert) Validated Integration of eGain Knowledge 10 with Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management, Release 8.1 through the Oracle PartnerNetwork “OPN”. The integrated solution enables contact center agents using Siebel CRM to find answers to a broad range of customer queries with the simple click of a button and record the entire interaction in Siebel CRM. eGain is an OPN Gold level partner. For resellers carrying both eGain and Oracle and who have eGain and Oracle clients this development could drive in more business.

“Medium-sized businesses are looking to provide enterprise-class phone customer service and eService,” said Ashutosh Roy, eGain chairman and ceo. “But, they want integrated solutions that are easy to deploy and use. We look forward to fulfilling this market need with our Econet partners.”