NETTING IT OUT

Your customers want answers to questions about your business, your policies, and your products and services. They also want solutions to the problems that they have with your products and services. Your agents want those answers and solutions when your customers seek assisted-service. Knowledge management-based customer service products support these customers and agent activities through your implementation of their content management and search facilities.

empolis:Service Lifecycle Suite (e:SLS) is the knowledge management-based customer service offering from empolis GmbH (one of 270 companies in arvato AG, which, in turn, is one of six divisions in Bertelsmann AG). e:SLS was introduced in 1996. Its current version is 5.4. empolis offers the suite for on-premise deployment to the largest organizations in a range of industries. To date, empolis claims that one or more of its modules has been purchased and implemented in over 500 customer organizations.

On the PSGroup Report Card for knowledge management-based customer service products, e:SLS exceeds requirements in search and UI content management. We gave it “needs improvement” grades in escalation to case management and in analytic functionality.

e:SLS is more a set of customizable and configurable technologies than it is a set of packaged facilities that are ready for deployment right “out of the box.” If you have the resources and the organizational style to undertake the development work necessary to implement e:SLS, then we recommend that you consider it to help you deliver key elements of your cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service experience—especially for customers’ activities to diagnose and resolve problems with your products both on self-service and assisted-service channels.

CUSTOMER SERVICE TO ANSWER QUESTIONS AND RESOLVE PROBLEMS

This report presents our evaluation of empolis:Service Lifecycle Suite (e:SLS) against our framework for knowledge management (KM)-based customer service products. These are products that help customers get answers to their questions about your organization, your policies, and your products and services as well as to diagnose and resolve problems with those products and services. These customer service products are considered knowledge management products because they combine content management and search technologies to build customer service applications that create the “knowledge” that answers your customers’ questions.

Decision Tree Designer

© 2008 empolis GmbH

Illustration 3. This illustration shows the workspace of the Decision Tree Designer.

EMPOLIS:SERVICE LIFECYCLE SUITE

e:SLS is the knowledge management-based customer service offering from empolis GmbH, a Gütersloh, Germany-based software supplier. empolis is one of 270 companies in arvato AG. arvato is one of six divisions in Bertelsmann AG.

e:SLS was introduced in 1996. Its current version is 5.4. empolis offers the suite for on-premise licensing and deployment. To date, empolis claims that one or more of its modules has been purchased and implemented in over 500 customer accounts, mostly large organizations across a wide range of industry segments.

e:SLS has these modules:

• Dynamic Decision Trees, which guide customers or agents through an automated question and answer dialog to approach and reach the answer to a question or the solution to a problem.

• Intelligent Search, which is based on empolis:Information Access Suite (e:IAS). It provides search and navigation capabilities. e:IAS is bundled within e:SLS but is also available as a separately packaged and priced product.

• Efficient Knowledge Repository, which provides knowledge modeling, content management with rich metadata, workflow management, and translation management.

You deploy e:SLS on Liferay Portal, which also delivers the suite’s UI. e:SLS packages portlets that provide support knowledge management and search management services as well as end-user search and navigation. Deployment on this open source portal platform speeds and simplifies e:SLS implementation and ongoing support and management.

Once customized, configured, and deployed, e:SLS provides the tools and the reusable samples that enable administrators and business users to implement and manage.

e:SLS is more a set of powerful and flexible tools and technologies that your developers, administrators, and knowledge authors and editors customize and configure than a packaged, ready-to-use offering. You’ll need developers’ skills and, likely, the skills of empolis’s professional services staff to deploy e:SLS. Critical activities are:

• Knowledge modeling using Web Ontology Language/Resource Description Framework (OWL/RDF) tools

• Knowledge classification (metadata) design

• Knowledge metadata specification to support conditional and dynamic guided search via Dialogs

• Knowledge authoring and editing for knowledge documents and Decision Tree documents to support conditional and static guided search

• UI customization via portal and portlet configuration, customization, and personalization, as well as JSP/JSF development

CUSTOMERS WANT CROSS-CHANNEL, CROSS-LIFECYCLE HELP

Before we get into the details of the evaluation, let’s take a step back and put knowledge management-based customer service products into the context of cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service. Here’s what we mean ...