Leading Retail Company in New Zealand Goes Live with Pivotal Contact Center; Warehouse Stationery Delivers Superior Customer Service Using Pivotal's Sensible CRM Software

Business Wire, March 6, 2002

Business Editors & High Tech Writers

VANCOUVER, British Columbia--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 6, 2002

Pivotal Corporation (Nasdaq:PVTL)(TSE:PVT), the leading provider of sensible customer relationship management (CRM) software, today announced that Warehouse Stationery, a subsidiary of The Warehouse Group, has gone live with Pivotal's CRM software including, Pivotal Contact Center. Warehouse Stationery is using Pivotal to revolutionize its business by creating a seamless customer experience across all communication touch-points.

Building a New Practice From the Bottom Up

In mid 2001, The Warehouse Group recognized the vast opportunity in the corporate stationery supply market and committed to building a new and fully operational business division in six months. As a result, a new business-to-business sales channel was added to the existing retail operation of Warehouse Stationery, which now operates 36 retail outlets throughout New Zealand. Warehouse Stationery quickly and cost-effectively created a full-service contact center using Pivotal as its technical foundation.

"We set ourselves the insane goal of six months to get a an entire business unit up and running - from a zero to full-scale offering in an area of the market that Warehouse Stationery had never before operated," said Alan Mayo, General Manager IS, Warehouse Stationery. "We selected Pivotal to help us build our practice. Pivotal's deep functionality, seamless scalability and ease with which it integrated with our other systems enabled us to create and launch the service in just six months."

Comprehensive Customer Insight

To improve customer satisfaction, Warehouse Stationery is linking its multiple sales and customer touch points - call center, telesales, customer service and accounts receivable-to create a single, comprehensive view of its customers across the business. By accessing Pivotal's CRM software, sales marketing and service professionals gain instant access to customer profiles including, contact history and order information.

According to Claudia Vidal, Systems & Technology Manager, Warehouse Stationery, "Pivotal's broad CRM functionalities and powerful customization tools allow us to configure the solution in the most suitable way to address the workflow of the different service and sales teams."

Professionals are able to access customer information in a format that best suits their daily activities and workflow requirements. As a result, Warehouse Stationery is quickly identifying up-selling and cross-selling opportunities, improving customer response times, and maintaining the highest level of service and customer satisfaction.

An End-to-End Customer Contact Center Solution

Pivotal Contact Center transforms call centers into a next-generation contact centers that support multiple channels of customer interactions, including voice, email, text chat, Web collaboration and fax. By managing customer interactions across all channels, service organizations have the tools and information they need to cost-effectively deliver excellence in customer service.

Warehouse Stationery is using Pivotal's multi-channel customer service solution to easily resolve service requests, deliver consistent service, minimize service costs and up-sell and cross-sell using intuitive, personalized service portals. By empowering its service professionals with the latest CRM and interaction management technologies Warehouse Stationery is able to efficiently handle customer orders and requests over the phone, email or fax. The solution enables professionals to capture, track, manage, escalate and resolve customer service requests - and to easily identify new sales opportunities.

Smarter Integration, Faster Synchronization

Using the powerful interaction capabilities in Pivotal Contact Center as a universal queuing mechanism, Warehouse Stationery is able to instantly distribute and route customers' interactions to the most suitable agent in the contact center to resolve the customer's query. When a telephone call, email or fax is received it is routed to the right person, in the right team. Simultaneously, a pop-up screen with the customer's contact history is displayed to the contact center representative to allow fast, intelligent service.

According to Bo Manning, president and CEO, Pivotal, "The Warehouse is yet another example of a technology savvy company that is choosing Pivotal over the competition to increase customer satisfaction, drive revenue and improve margins. As a leading retail company in New Zealand, The Warehouse knows what it takes to be successful and that is the ability to understand its customer needs."

About Pivotal Corporation

Pivotal Corporation offers clear, complete and sensible Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that delivers results for a fraction of the cost of typical CRM software. Pivotal's customers are companies and business units in the revenue range of $100 million to $3 billion. Pivotal and its partners provide the software, services, and support required to produce significant improvements in marketing, sales, and service effectiveness for mid-enterprise companies. More than 1,400 companies globally use Pivotal including: Hewlett Packard, CIBC, HarperCollins Publishers, Hitachi Telecom Inc., Intrawest Corporation, Vivendi, Royal Bank of Canada, Southern Company, and Ziff Davis Media Inc.