Lucent Technologies and Siebel Systems Announce Global Strategic Alliance; Industry Leaders Team to Deliver Powerful Customer Relationship Solutions - will integrate their call-center management software - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Sept 6, 1999

Lucent Technologies and Siebel Systems Tuesday announced a global strategic alliance to integrate Lucent's state-of-the-art customer care and workflow management solutions with Siebel's market-leading front office software.

With these combined, advanced solutions, organizations will be able to consistently deliver and intelligently manage customer interactions and tasks across their entire enterprise.

Siebel Systems and Lucent will jointly sell and market these tightly integrated solutions worldwide, and work with systems integrators to help businesses optimize the way they handle all their customer interactions.

"Customers around the world are demanding personalized and efficient service regardless of their chosen method of interaction," said Thomas M. Siebel, chairman and CEO, Siebel Systems, Inc. "By integrating Siebel Systems' market-leading front office applications with Lucent's advanced work management technologies, organizations can rapidly deploy customer service solutions that dramatically improve the one-to-one relationship with their customers."

"Businesses today are constantly seeking new ways to accomplish top-line growth," said Janice P. Anderson, vice president, Lucent Technologies Customer Relationship Management Solutions. "One way to address those challenges is by consistently delivering a compelling experience for their customers -- one that keeps them coming back again and again. The tight integration of our solutions will make it easier for businesses to create the exceptional, fast-response, high-touch service customers crave." To deliver comprehensive customer care today, organizations face a series of complex challenges. They must be able to provide customers with a consistent experience regardless of how and when they choose to contact them -- whether in person or through voice, email, fax, mail or the Internet. They must also ensure that all customer requests are quickly and efficiently managed, tracked and fulfilled. In addition, organizations need to find the most cost-effective way to quickly integrate new technologies as they become available.

To solve these problems, Lucent and Siebel Systems are teaming to deliver powerful, state-of-the-art customer relationship solutions. Lucent provides a comprehensive array of multimedia customer care, intelligent work management software, computer telephony applications, predictive dialing, professional services and interactive voice response products. These solutions complement Siebel Systems' Web-based front office applications, which allow organizations to significantly improve customer service and call center operations, increase sales force effectiveness and better leverage marketing knowledge throughout the enterprise.

Delivering Integrated Solutions

In the first part of the planned multiphase technology integration effort, Siebel Systems and Lucent will integrate Siebel Call Center and Lucent's CentreVu Computer Telephony software. The solution, which will be available in the third quarter of 1999, will provide seamless computer telephony integration applications to help call center agents work more effectively and deliver better service. It will provide agents with timely access to business and customer information at their desktop; allow them to control their telephone through their PCs for more efficient calling; and help call center managers monitor the effectiveness of their operations by providing real-time performance data.

Lucent and Siebel intend to expand the scope of their relationship with collaborative development aimed at integrating Lucent's recently announced CRM Central 2000 with Siebel front office solutions. This joint effort would enable both companies to deliver robust, world-class customer relationship tools and solutions that eliminate the need for organizations to integrate disparate products from multiple vendors. The capabilities that the two companies intend to integrate include:

* Multi-media customer interaction and universal queuing. Regardless of the communications channel -- phone, e-mail, Web, fax or IVR (interactive voice response) -- all customer inquiries are treated with the right priority. These capabilities ensure that customers have multiple communications channels available, allowing them to obtain service and support using their preferred method of interaction.

* Intelligent routing of customer inquiries to the right resource. Every customer inquiry is automatically matched to the most appropriate agent or resource. Using unique predictive algorithms, the expert system software makes real-time decisions based on customer requests, service levels and agent skill, availability and workload.

* Automatic workflow routing, delivery and completion. Once the customer contact is made, work is automatically assigned and routed to appropriate individuals across the enterprise based on pre-defined business processes and service objectives. As a result, customer requests are tracked, processed faster and completed with more consistently, thus streamlining customer interactions and improving overall customer satisfaction.