June 27, 2008 -
Integrating case management, knowledge management, and community collaboration, Helpstream Summer 2008 helps companies understand customer attitudes, tap into community knowledge, and build positive relationships. Users can author knowledge base articles in any format, convert Microsoft Word documents into knowledge base articles, and create articles in rich text format. With iframe design layout for customer self service portal, program can be embedded into existing websites.
Integrated Self Service Portal, Enhanced Content Management and Agent Productivity Tools Transform Service Effectiveness
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 16 /-- Helpstream, a leading provider of on-demand collaborative customer service solutions, today announced the general availability of the Helpstream Summer 2008 release, which contains over 130 enhancements to help companies understand customer attitudes, tap into community knowledge, and build winning relationships. By further integrating case management, knowledge management, and community collaboration, companies can leverage the power and familiarity of the Web to engage their customers in a rich, collaborative self service experience.
"Many companies turn to call deflection as a way to deal with increasing service demand, but in doing so they fail to engage the customer at a point where their attitudes and needs are conspicuously obvious," said Anthony Nemelka, CEO of Helpstream. "By placing Community at the forefront of customer service, Helpstream enables anyone in a company or its community to be an effective customer service agent. This truly modern approach significantly expands the pool of knowledge available to each user by leveraging the Internet for what it does best -- connecting people to information quickly and effectively."
The challenge for many companies is that their interaction with customers is too often one dimensional -- centered on resolving issues and ending the interaction. Consumer familiarity with Web 2.0 tools has led to higher expectations. Helpstream provides a convenient and affordable alternative to this one-size-fits-all service approach and helps companies embrace the web-enabled world to build customer loyalty through relationships.
"Helpstream bridges the gap between knowledge management and community content," said John Ragsdale, vice president of research at the Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA.) "Companies are struggling with the issue of where to find useful customer service content -- do they tap into the knowledge base first, or start with a Web search? It's imperative that customers and service agents have the ability to access both the knowledge base and forum content to solve problems quickly and efficiently. Helpstream has created the first product that solves all of these issues with a single, out of the box, intuitive product and user interface."
Helpstream is an approachable application designed to engage users in a company's customer community with an easy to learn and use interface, while offering internal service organizations the same benefits combined with ease of administration and a low cost deployment model.
The Helpstream Summer 2008 release continues to build on this idea by leveraging end-user familiarity with common office productivity tools, such as email and calendaring software.
Highlights of the Summer 2008 release include the following:
-- A new "iframe" design layout for the customer self service portal now provides greater flexibility to embed Helpstream into existing web sites and supports single sign-on. This provides end-users a consistent experience across corporate and customer support websites and enables improved branding and control over the customers' self-service experience.
-- Ability to author knowledge base articles in any format, convert Microsoft Word documents into knowledge base articles and create articles in rich text format. Group-level permissions and category-level content mapping enable knowledge capture and discovery in the format most appropriate for end-user consumption and makes documents easy to maintain and access.
-- Integration with Microsoft Outlook through open APIs allows email-based case creation and task synchronization between the service agent's office productivity tools and the Helpstream services delivery platform. A case can be created from an email, tasks synchronized with the Microsoft Outlook to-do list and updates emailed into the system, all without logging into Helpstream.
By offering instant availability of these capabilities to users through the Freemium model, Helpstream's Summer 2008 release sets a new high water mark for integrating case management, knowledge base and community collaboration.
Pricing and Availability
The Helpstream Summer 2008 release is immediately available at http://www.helpstream.biz/. Standard Services are available free. Pricing for the Premium Service Package pricing begins at $79 per user, with a la carte services available at lower price points. Please visit http://www.helpstream.biz/ for details.
About Helpstream
Helpstream is leading the development of highly collaborative customer service and help desk solutions. Designed as an enterprise-class SaaS solution built for collaboration from the ground up, the Helpstream solution allows organizations to greatly improve the customer service experience while keeping cost to a minimum and vastly increasing visibility into the customer experience. Helpstream has over 15,000 users in a variety of industries, including high tech, consumer electronics, government, healthcare, financial services and professional services. For more information, please visit http://www.helpstream.biz/.
News provided by ThomasNet Industrial Newsroom® (TIN). TIN is a comprehensive source
of new and timely product information in the industrial marketplace. TIN supplies new product
information to the web sites, e-marketplaces and print publications that serve the
industrial marketplace. For press release submissions please go to
http://www.productnews.com/SubmitPRPage.html.
BY ACCESSING, BROWSING AND/OR USING THIS WEB SITE AND/OR ANY WEB SITES PROVIDED BY
ProductNews.com, YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF USE
AGREEMENT.
![[Get Copyright Permissions]](http://license.icopyright.net/images/icopy-w.gif){kind=small}
