ARTG 2.60 ATG Introduces Commerce Service Center to Unify e-Commerce Sites and Contact Centers
Agent-facing application suite bridges the gap between the Web site and contact center, streamlining agent-assisted order administration, sales support, and customer care
Jun 27, 2007 7:57:00 AM
Copyright Business Wire 2007
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc., NASDAQ: ARTG), whose e-commerce suite powers more top online sellers than any other, today announced the launch and general availability of ATG Commerce Service Center (ATG CSC), a new software application suite that integrates personalized online commerce with order administration, sales support, and customer care in the contact center. Serving as the agent face of ATG Commerce, the company's industry-leading e-commerce and personalization software suite, ATG CSC extends ATG's e-commerce suite. Ultimately, this capability is designed to drive higher conversion rates, larger order sizes, and stronger customer loyalty.
By creating a smooth bridge when consumers move from the Web site to a telephone, e-mail, or chat with a live agent, ATG CSC shows sales and service agents the same catalog, promotions, coupons, cross-sells, up-sells, and customer information as the Web store, so that customer inquiries can be quickly, accurately, and consistently addressed, even when multiple interactions across multiple touch points (phone, e-mail, web, or chat) occur.
Increasingly, companies are finding that contact center agents have inadequate access to customer information and order data from the Web site, despite the reality that customers browsing and purchasing products online often talk to a contact center agent. By providing real-time visibility and insight into each customer's Web interaction history, ATG CSC empowers contact center agents to deliver a personalized, positive customer service experience when they are helping customers complete a purchase, follow up on an order, or request other assistance.
ATG CSC features personalization capabilities that increase customer satisfaction and conversion rates. The new application actively identifies and presents opportunities for agents to respond to signs of a shopper having difficulty or needing assistance, to ensure customer retention.
Going far beyond the limited agent support other e-commerce vendors offer, ATG CSC also incorporates award-winning knowledge management, e-mail and text message response management, and Click to Call/Click to Chat from eStara (an ATG company), used by more retailers than any other Click to Call product.
The development of ATG CSC is in part inspired by ATG customers like American Eagle Outfitters and Idea Forest (which owns and operates Jo-Ann.com). Jo-Ann.com built a Web store using ATG Commerce and tightly integrated its e-commerce operations with customer care features to drive impressive sales increases and approximately 90 percent transaction completion rates.
"There's no arguing the fact that training customer service representatives on multiple applications and user interfaces is expensive and much more complicated than it needs to be," said Juan Gonzalez, director of IT for Idea Forest and Jo-Ann.com. "Working with ATG allows us to closely align contact center operations with our Web retail efforts and provides a seamless shopping experience for our customers. With the customer service agent having full access to any shopper's present and previous purchase history, time and money are saved, and most importantly, our customers are given the superior level of customer care that they deserve. Further, once we're certain that our customers' needs are satisfied, ATG software helps us present relevant cross-sell and up-sell offers that complement a customer's purchase. So the value is not only the completion of the sale - it's also about adding dollars to the shopping cart."
"Providing excellent customer service is a critical part of selling on the Web, and ATG has long believed that contact centers should be profit centers," said Cliff Conneighton, senior vice president, ATG. "The new ATG Commerce Service Center represents a unity between customer service and e-commerce that was desperately lacking in the marketplace. Agents can now present relevant and personal offers at the right time, in the right way, throughout the entire buying process. This unique level of customer service results in increased customer satisfaction, bigger order size, and more conversions, while reducing contact center costs, which results in higher sales and profits for the retailer."
ATG Commerce Service Center is available immediately as licensed software, or as part of the ATG Commerce OnDemand software-as-a-service offering.
About ATG
ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc., NASDAQ: ARTG) makes the software and delivers the on demand solutions that the world's most customer-conscious companies use to power their e-commerce web sites, attract prospects, convert them to buyers and ensure their satisfaction so they become loyal, repeat, profitable customers. Our e-commerce suite is ranked the #1 current offering and #1 in strategy by the industry's most influential analyst firms, and powers more of the top 300 internet retailers than any other vendor. Our eStara brand provides customer interaction solutions to enhance conversions and customer support, and delivers the world's most widely used click-to-call service. ATG's solutions are used by over 900 major brands, including Amazon, American Eagle Outfitters, AOL, AT&T, Best Buy, B&Q Cabela's, Carrefour, Cingular, Coca Cola, Continental Airlines, CVS, Dell, DirecTV, El Corte Ingles, Expedia, France Telecom, Harvard Business School Publishing, Hewlett-Packard, Hilton, HSBC, Intuit, J. Crew, Macy's, Meredith, Microsoft, Neiman Marcus, New York & Company, Nokia, OfficeMax, PayPal, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Sears, Sony, Symantec, Target, T-Mobile, Urban Outfitters, Verizon, Viacom, Vodafone and Walgreens. The company is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with additional locations throughout North America and Europe. For more information about ATG, please visit www.atg.com.
(C) 2007 Art Technology Group, Inc. ATG and Art Technology Group are registered trademarks, and ATG Wisdom is a trademark of Art Technology Group, Inc. All other product names, service marks, and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.
This press release contains forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause ATG's actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Important risk factors affecting ATG's business generally may be found in its periodic reports and registration statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission at www.sec.gov . Risk factors related to the subject matter of this press release include the possibility that the ATG product deployment will not be successful, on time or significantly enhance the user's Internet experience or will not increase customer revenue across brands; that those customers leveraging ATG will not have the opportunity to increase revenue and decrease future costs; the need to adapt to rapid changes so products do not become obsolete; the possibility of errors in ATG's software products; the possibility that the solution will not make customer implementations faster or more flexible or permit the customer to meet its customer-facing or infrastructure requirements; that the ATG product will not continue to be integrated with third party applications servers or will not support all Web services enabled systems; that ATG's product strategy may change in the future; and the risks and costs of intellectual property litigation. ATG undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements after the date of this press release.
Source: ATG
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ATG
Tucker Walsh
617-386-1159
twalsh@atg.com
www.atg.com
or
Matter Communications for ATG
Jesse Ciccone
978-499-9250 x230
atg@matternow.com
www.matternow.com
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