ePeople Builds Support Solutions Through Teamwork

Speaking with VARBusiness last week, Chris Derossi, ePeople founder and CTO, observed that existing support solutions frequently fail in situations where vendors and partners share support responsibility, resulting in customer dissatisfaction with both organizations.

Teamwork 4.0 consists of three main modules to provided enhance collaborative support and problem resolution. "Team Sourcing" enables the ad hoc building of support teams, and provides for skills-based searching for team members, potentially including customer, solution provider and vendor representatives. "Team Collaboration" provides a workspace for members to communicate and share information, and the "Collaboration Analytics" module stores metrics on solutions, enabling improved problem-solving and ongoing analysis of support strengths and weaknesses.

Derossi contrasts Teamwork with other solutions that businesses use in support. In complex situations, he says, "the traditional help desk breaks down," when support issues can't be addressed by a single individual. Groupware applications "don't understand the concept of support" and don't provide analysis of solution practices. Derossi says Teamwork can enhance the value of enerprise CRM systems.

"We're not coming in to replace Siebel, [or other CRM products we're making it better," he says. "We'll talk to a vendor's CRM systems and a partner's CRM system [to enable problem resolution."

EPeople's growing partner program includes system integrators experienced in CRM and support solutions. A J2EE-based server application, Teamwork 4.0 is available as a hosted application from ePeople, and as a standalone enterprise application. Typical installations run from $250,000 to $500,000, according to to Derossi. The product should be generally available this quarter.