eASSIST EXPANDS ENTERPRISE CAPABILITIES IN INTEGRATED CUSTOMER CARE WITH eASSIST SOLUTION SUITE 2.1

UNIX Platform and Database Scalability Extension Key Components in Next Generation CRM Customer Care Suite

SAN DIEGO, CA.-February 20, 2002. eAssist Global Solutions, a leading provider of integrated customer care solutions, today announced general availability of the latest release of its flagship offering, eAssist Solution Suite 2.1. The eAssist Solution Suite is the only fully integrated suite of customer care software and services; it enables companies to gain a unified view of their customers across geographies, products, and points of interaction.

With version 2.1, eAssist adds support for Oracle databases running on UNIX platforms including Sun Solaris and Linux. The Oracle database support provides an alternative option for clients, enabling them to maintain a single skill set in database and operating system support across their enterprise while at the same time leveraging existing hardware and software investments. Additionally, performance improvements at the networking levels have lowered the total cost of ownership by enhancing agent performance at the desktop while lowering the dependency on bandwidth. As part of eAssist's commitment to keeping current with the latest platform technology, the 2.1 release adds support for the Windows XP operating system and the latest Internet Explorer version, 6.0.

"eAssist is unique in its ability to deliver a fully integrated customer care solution that takes into account CTI, web-based support, and legacy systems. This release demonstrates eAssist's ongoing commitment to expand the capabilities of its core customer care product," notes Dan Plashkes, eAssist Global Solutions President and CEO. "Version 2.1, with its multi-platform database support, increases our competitive advantage by increasing our infrastructure utilization and decreasing the total cost of ownership."

Version 2.1 also includes enhanced operational and real-time reporting to provide a 360 degree understanding of contact center operations, including customer satisfaction, agent productivity, staff planning, and measurement of efficiency gains and time savings. Reporting functionality provides unprecedented ability to aggregate information across multiple contact channels and contact center locations, and to drill down into any level of detail. Reports are broken into five categories: volume, service level, performance, request and content. These reports provide managers with the robust reporting necessary to effectively run multi-channel, multi-location contact centers.

Excellent customer care is the lynchpin of a customer-focused organization, and eAssist enables companies to deliver this capability by quickly and appropriately responding to incoming customer requests over any communication channel, and by tightly integrating self-help capabilities into customer care practices. With eAssist's superior self-help capabilities, companies can shift interactions to more cost-effective channels, and can also escalate them to live representatives when human interaction is preferable. Customers enjoy the immediacy and efficiency of servicing themselves, but can readily shift to a representative with no loss of context or history in the transition.

At the core of the solution is the eAssist Integrated Customer Care Platform. The platform's integration architecture protects existing investments through an open platform that can be easily plugged into telephony, web site, back office, and CRM systems. The technology features guaranteed messaging; universal queuing and routing; a unified agent interface; knowledge-base management methodologies; workflow management; and back-office connectors. The suite's many channel, self-help, and personalization options deliver a highly tailored solution for each customer's needs.