Motorola purchases Clarify customer service system; Information Systems Group looks to strengthen remote customer support

Business Wire, Nov 28, 1994

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 28, 1994--Clarify Inc., the market leader in customer service management systems, today announced a major sales agreement with Motorola Inc. The agreement calls for the installation of the entire Clarify product family at Motorola's Mansfield, Mass.-based Information Systems Group, a supplier of high-speed data communications and networking products.

The Motorola Information Systems Group (ISG) selected Clarify as part of a strategic reengineering effort. The effort is aimed at increasing the number of customer problems satisfied over the telephone, thereby reducing the need for more costly and time-consuming field service visits. "Our goal is first call satisfaction," explains Mike Pinto, Motorola's Director of Global Support Operations. "If we can resolve a customer problem remotely, the response time is measured in minutes, not hours."

A key component of the Clarify system, the patent-pending Diagnosis Engine, enables Motorola personnel to resolve customer problems over the telephone by creating and using an easy-to-use knowledgebase of known and previously-solved solutions. By automating the problem resolution process, Motorola will be able to solve customer problems more quickly, often during the first call. And field engineers, as a result, will have time to focus on more value-added customer services, such as on-site network implementations.

Initially, about 250 service representatives, field engineers and dispatchers will utilize the Clarify system to handle the 1,000 or more calls received daily from distributors and end users of hundreds of Motorola products. A call to the toll-free technical support center in Mansfield can range from a basic modem question to a complex LAN/WAN networking issue.

Ongoing Drive to Improve Customer Service and Support

According to Pinto, Motorola purchased the latest version of the Clarify system, Clarify 3.0, as part of an ongoing drive to improve customer service and support. By 1992, the division's support organization had outgrown its call tracking system and needed a more powerful solution that could speed problem resolution and provide greater flexibility in terms of call routing and customization.

Motorola formed a cross-functional Total Customer Satisfaction (TCS) team which evaluated a number of software packages. It selected the entire suite of Clarify support automation products because Clarify met four key criteria: advanced problem-resolution capabilities, integration with Aspect ACD and other corporate information systems, highly-flexible customization tools, and support for Macintosh platforms. o Advanced problem-resolution capabilities. The Diagnosis Engine in

ClearSupport combines a full text search (FTS) engine with Clarify's deductive logic reasoning system to speed the problem resolution process. With this integrated design, Motorola's support technicians have immediate access to a wide range of problem-solving information -- from product documentation and technical notes to the continually-growing knowledgebase of problems and solutions. o Integration with Aspect ACD. Clarify supports a key component of Motorola's customer service solution by providing the Aspect Application Bridge which integrates the Clarify system with Aspect ACD call centers and creates screen synchronization with Aspect ACD-routed calls. This feature enables service representatives to view the most updated customer information on a screen that appears as soon as a call comes in.

In addition, Motorola will use the ClearExtensions API Toolkit to integrate the Clarify knowledgebase with GEM, an internally-developed application for order processing and contracts administration. This integration will further enhance Motorola's efficiency by automatically updating customer records on the Clarify system each time a new product is sold, for example, or by forwarding time and expense records to the GEM system for invoicing each time a field engineer is dispatched. o Highly-flexible customization tools. Clarify provides both user-level and system-level customization facilities. Using ClearCustomize, Motorola can easily modify the customer service management system to accomodate new products, new workgroups or new business processes -- without assistance from MIS or outside consultants. o Support for Macintosh platforms. Support for the Macintosh was key as the entire service staff works on a desktop or portable Macintosh computer.

Customer Bulletin Boards A Future Step

Motorola's plans for the Clarify system will also include providing customers with bulletin-board access to information about current "hot" problems and solutions, according to Pinto. "One of the beauties of an easily maintained knowledgebase is that we can readily extract the most frequently-occurring problems and solutions for a given period and then electronically publish that information," he says. "That's the next level of remote support -- empowering customers to trouble-shoot and, in certain cases, to even diagnose their own problems."