Designed to make customer service agents informed and efficient in resolving service inquiries, eGain Knowledge also enables companies to establish high-impact Web self-service sites. Given that staffing costs typically represent 55 percent of a contact center’s budget, and that self-service inquiries cost as little as 10 percent of agent-assisted service, eGain Knowledge routinely delivers a high return on a company’s customer service investments.

Incorporating feedback from very large-scale knowledge implementations in North America and Europe, the new version of eGain Knowledge includes pragmatic features for supporting enterprise knowledge deployments that are used by thousands of customer service agents and hundreds of thousands of end-customers via Web self-service. The software’s key new features include community authoring with a flexible review and publishing process, security options to meet the requirements of top global banks, new links to "unstructured data" found in enterprise databases, and expanded language support.

These new features complement the way companies actually work, rather than prompting any organizational re-engineering. As a result, eGain Knowledge is consistently a high-yield addition to a company’s customer service infrastructure, enabling companies to achieve first call resolution rates of up to 95 percent, speed call-wrap-up times by up to 50 percent, and reduce escalations to second-level support by 30 percent. Since Gain Knowledge supports both novice and expert users from a single knowledge base, it enables companies to publish user-appropriate information to a Web self-service site, deflecting common inquiries to a fast-and low-cost channel.

eGain Knowledge 5.3 supports a new and flexible process for keeping the knowledge base up-to-date, bringing together the best of community and agent-based knowledge suggestions, while preserving a flexible and effective process for reviewing, editing and approving new knowledge base additions. Unlike systems that promise to make everyone a knowledge author, eGain Knowledge offers a way to harness the input of service agents and users, without creating inconsistent or duplicate entries in the knowledge base, or populating the knowledge base with trivia that might be distracting.

eGain Knowledge 5.3 allows any user of the knowledge base to submit proposed additions or changes, automatically capturing the logical path the user has followed up to the point of making a suggestion. To maintain consistency in the knowledge base, all user suggestions are routed to designated authoring teams and knowledge base owners via an automated workflow process so that there is a single point of approval/rejection for any suggestion. Authors also can request clarification from users prior to approving or rejecting suggestions.

eGain’s strategy of combining community suggestions with a controlled publishing flow reflects the review processes most enterprises use for their knowledge bases and Web sites. "Our goal is to give call center agents and end-customers greater access to knowledge, while also leveraging user insights to help improve the knowledge base and a company’s overall customer service," said Ognjen Pavlovic, director of product management for eGain’s self-service and knowledge solutions. "Ultimately, we want to enable agents to be more efficient, and end-customers more satisfied. eGain Knowledge has the very practical goal of helping companies improve their customer service and customer satisfaction."

eGain Knowledge 5.3 now offers both standard and enhanced security features, with optional access control features that are comparable to those commonly utilized by large financial institutions. As a result, enterprises can enforce a standard and tight security policy across all applications, with consistent policies for password composition and rotation, expiration, history, inactivity periods and automatic user lock-outs after certain activities. In addition to the enhanced security options, eGain Knowledge has passed penetration and stress testing conducted by an independent third-party firm on behalf of a prominent eGain client in the financial sector.

Whether used by call center agents or by customers for Web self-service, most knowledge systems follow the Pareto rule for content: namely, the overwhelming majority of customer inquiries pertain to a small percentage of topics -- typically 80 percent of inquiries are solved by 20 percent of available solutions. eGain Knowledge also supports this guideline, enabling companies to build structured or diagnostic knowledge cases that will answer the most common inquiries they receive.

In addition to structured knowledge cases, eGain Knowledge provides "gateways" to access a company’s unstructured knowledge indexed from sources such as user manuals, archived emails, and corporate materials. Unlike other solutions, eGain Knowledge leverages the same user interface and underlying information hierarchy across both structured and unstructured documents, giving users direct, conversational access to information stored across the enterprise, with no need to leave the eGain Knowledge environment.

Expanding upon the previously supported Gateway access to indexes from Microsoft Site Server and Lotus/Domino Notes, eGain Knowledge 5.3 adds support for Verity K2 and Microsoft SharePoint. Gateways speed and simplify the process of implementing eGain Knowledge, enabling companies to deploy a basic knowledge implementation in as little as one week, and an information hierarchy within three weeks, while they simultaneously build structured diagnostic cases that expand the underlying knowledge base.

With the addition of support for traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese and Korean, eGain Knowledge 5.3 now supports 16 languages, a base broad enough to reach 86 percent of the world’s online users. Specific languages supported are Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian (2 official versions, Bokmal and Nynorsk), Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.

eGain Knowledge 5.3 is available now, and runs on Windows NT, Windows 2000, Solaris 7 and Solaris 8. Pricing for eGain Knowledge starts at $65,000 (USD), and varies depending on the number of seats or concurrent users supported.

eGain (NASDAQ: EGAN) is a leading provider of eService software. Selected by 24 of the 50 largest global companies to improve phone and Web-based customer service, eGain solutions increase service efficiency and customer retention - thus delivering a significant return on investment (ROI). eGain eService Enterprise - the company's integrated software suite - includes applications for email management, Web collaboration and self-service, and enterprise-wide knowledge management. eGain has an operating presence in 18 countries and serves more than 800 enterprise customers worldwide - including Vodafone, DaimlerChrysler, and ABN AMRO Bank. To learn more about eGain, please visit http://www.eGain.com or call the company's offices - United States: (888) 603-4246; London: +44 (0) 1753 464646; or Sydney: +612 9492 5400.

Trademarks: 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 their respective companies.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-looking Statements: All statements in this release that involve eGain's plans, forecasts, beliefs, projections, expectations, strategies and intentions are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements, which are based on information available to eGain at the time of this release, are not guarantees of future results; rather, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in this release. These risks include, but are not limited to, the challenging economic environment; the uncertainty of demand for eGain products; the anticipated customer benefits from eGain products; increased competition and technological changes in the markets in which eGain competes; eGain's ability to manage its expenditures; and other risks detailed from time to time in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the company's annual report on Form 10-K filed on September 28, 2001, and the company's quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. eGain assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

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Cathy Morley Foster

Upstart Communications

(510) 457-3112

© 2002 eGain Communications Corp., All Rights Reserved.