Contact Information: eGain EMEA media contact: Hilary de Rover eGain Communications Ltd. Tel: +44 (0) 1753 464689 Email: hderover@egain.com
eGain Powers Customer Service at UK Energy Giant
Scottish and Southern Energy Plc Enhances Customer Service Infrastructure With eGain's Intuitive Web Self-Service System
| Source: eGain
SLOUGH, UK--(Marketwire - April 29, 2008) - eGain (OTCBB : EGAN ), the leading provider of
multichannel customer service and knowledge management software, today
announced that one of the largest energy companies in the UK has chosen
eGain SelfService™. Scottish and Southern Energy Plc (SSE) will use
eGain to further develop its customer service strategy, enabling customers
to resolve queries through a sophisticated online portal. Once implemented,
eGain will help support the organisation's fast-growing customer base,
further develop customer loyalty and lower overall support costs.
SSE's extended online presence and the introduction of new services such as
e-billing has driven its organic growth, expanding its customer base from
4.5 million in 2004 to 8.5 million in 2007. In turn, the volume of customer
enquiries has increased dramatically and SSE looked for additional methods
of customer service to complement the telephone, email and SMS options
already available.
John Evans, Senior Technical Architect at SSE, comments: "We've experienced
a steady but relentless growth in email volume: from 2,500 four years ago
to 42,000 today. Having deployed eGain's email management system in 2002,
our customer service teams have been able to cope with this dramatic
increase efficiently and effectively. However, we wanted to give our
customers more options and further reduce the strain on our customer
service team by introducing web self-service technology. With the eGain
Mail solution a proven success, it made sense to work with eGain to
implement the next stage of our customer service strategy."
With a centralised knowledge base already in place with eGain Mail, eGain
SelfService will enable SSE to offer its customers a new range of ways to
access information in the common knowledge base including FAQs, search,
browse, guided help and virtual agents. The software will provide SSE's web
customers with dynamic and intuitive service on the frontline, 24 hours a
day, 7 days a week.
Evans explains: "Our customer service agents currently have at least a
10-fold repetition with email enquiries. Encouraging more customer
interaction through our website, the eGain self-service system can take
away that repetition and free up our customer service staff to concentrate
on more complex tasks. With the new web self-service system, we are aiming
for 20% email deflection. This will not only reduce support costs but
shorten queues and improve the customer experience all round."
In addition, eGain's self-monitoring feature automatically identifies
knowledge bottlenecks through self-service usage analysis and user
feedback, generating alerts and review tasks for appropriate content
owners. The powerful context-sensitive escalation provided by eGain
SelfService will provide SSE with a continual record of each individual
session, while escalating the interaction to an appropriate agent.
In addition to the eGain SelfService, SSE is also upgrading its existing
eGain Mail software to the latest version. The solution will be rolled out
in SSE's Perth headquarters and its offices in Basingstoke, Reading and
Portsmouth and is due to go live in July.
Andrew Mennie, Vice President and General Manager, EMEA at eGain,
concludes, "In such a cost-competitive environment, customer service is a
critical differentiator for utilities companies like SSE with such a wide
spectrum of customer type and inquiry. Embracing the next generation of web
customer service will provide the speed and accuracy of information that
will enable them to reap cost benefits, increase customer retention and
continue their growth as a business."
About eGain
eGain (OTCBB : EGAN ) is a leading provider of multichannel customer service
and knowledge management software for in-house or on-demand SaaS
deployment. For more than a decade, the world's largest companies have
relied on eGain to transform their traditional call centres, help desks,
and web customer service operations into multichannel customer interaction
hubs. Based on the Power of One™, the concept of one unified platform
for multichannel customer interaction and knowledge management, these hubs
enable dramatically improved customer experience, end-to-end service
process efficiencies, increased sales, and enhanced contact centre
performance.
Headquartered in Mountain View, California, eGain has an operating presence
in 18 countries and serves more than 800 enterprise customers worldwide. To
find out more about eGain, visit www.eGain.com or call the company's
offices: 800-821-4358 (US headquarters), 1753-464646 (UK and Continental
Europe).
eGain, the eGain logo, and all other eGain product names and slogans are
trademarks or registered trademarks of eGain Communications Corp. in the
United States and/or other countries. All other company names and products
mentioned in this release may be trademarks or registered trademarks of the
respective companies.