Pivotal Ships Pivotal Contact Center

Business Wire, August 29, 2002

Business Editors & High Tech Writers

VANCOUVER, British Columbia--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 29, 2002

The Industry's Leading Contact Center Application for

Mid-sized Enterprises

Pivotal Corporation (Nasdaq:PVTL)(TSX:PVT), the leading provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software for mid-sized enterprises, today announced the availability of Pivotal Contact Center - the industry's leading contact center application specifically designed for mid-sized enterprises. This cost-effective product addresses crucial mid-enterprise contact center requirements including advanced customization and integration capabilities.

Pivotal Contact Center is fully integrated with the Pivotal CRM Suite and features a highly flexible architecture; a smart desktop that consolidates and supports multiple channels; and easy integration to enterprise applications, transactional systems, telephony infrastructure, and data sources within and beyond business boundaries.

"A smart contact center strategy can significantly improve a company's top and bottom line - that's why there is significant demand for contact center technology in the mid-enterprise market," said Bo Manning, president and CEO, Pivotal. "For many companies, the contact center is the epicenter of the customer relationship - it's where smart marketing, selling and servicing converge every day to create satisfied customers."

100% Purpose-Built for Mid-Sized Enterprises

According to Greg Freeze, COO, CAM Commerce Solutions, "At CAM, we began our CRM strategy with Pivotal and it has quickly become the hub of our customer activity. After evaluating numerous vendors, it was clear that Pivotal was the best fit for our mid-sized business. The product provides key capabilities out-of-the-box, while enabling us to easily customize and integrate the solution to meet the processes that are unique to our business. It provides a smart set of functionality at a practical cost."

Mid-sized enterprises have a unique set of buying criteria for choosing a contact center product. Until now, they've been constrained by a set of product options that were specifically designed with the needs of the Global 1000 in mind. Unlike these large corporations, mid-sized enterprises and divisions of large enterprises, place a high premium on the following:

Fast Integration

Every second counts in a contact center. A customer service representative's ability to swiftly understand and meet a customer's needs can mean the difference between a satisfied customer that comes back time and time again, and an angry customer that decides to try a competitor the next time around. The faster every service agent can complete a customer transaction without compromising service quality, the more cost-efficient and effective the contact center becomes.

To improve service agent performance, companies are looking for contact center applications that provide agents with an easy-to-use, consolidated desktop with seamless access to all of the information they require to do their jobs effectively. The desktop integrates disparate data sources to provide everything from pricing and product information, to credit histories and inventory status.

Fast Customization

The key to successfully maximizing revenue and decreasing costs in the contact center is ensuring that the contact center application is precisely customized to the business processes the company has in place - so that service agents can depend on the technology to accelerate their tasks, not slow them down. This means customizing the portal, workflow and business rules precisely, and integrating seamlessly with other applications and data sources.

Pivotal Contact Center is fast and easy to customize and integrate. The product leverages the highly flexible Pivotal Intelligent Internet Architecture, which is built on open standards and features the industry's most advanced customization, integration and synchronization tools. As a company evolves its processes over time to adapt to new market opportunities, the application can be easily changed to match these new requirements Other contact center applications are rigid, over-engineered and complex - requiring pricey systems integration services to make even simple changes.

Distributed Contact Centers: An Emerging Trend

Managing costs and ensuring reliable service can be daunting in a thousand-agent contact center. High turnover rates are a significant challenge for large contact centers - and it is extremely difficult to continually find and train first-rate customer service representatives. To mitigate this challenge, companies are now choosing to establish smaller, distributed contact centers across multiple cities. As a result, mid-sized contact centers of 100 to 250 agents are a booming trend. This distributed contact center model requires fast synchronization of customer and corporate information across multiple satellite locations. Pivotal's proven and scaleable synchronization capability provides companies with the ability to cost-effectively create distributed, mid-sized contact centers around the world.