Press Release

CustomerSat’s Newest Release Optimizes Enterprise-wide Survey Management

eCEM 5.0 Delivers New Touch Rules that Ensure Customers are asked the Questions that Count Most and Protect Customers from being Over-Surveyed

Mountain View, Calif. -January 27, 2003 -CustomerSat, Inc., the leader in real-time feedback analytics and intelligence, today announced the newest release of its Enterprise Customer Experience Management (eCEM™) system with new technology enabling enterprises to optimize and conserve a key resource: customer time and willingness to answer surveys.   eCEM 5.0 supports advanced controls and business rules, called touch rules, that optimize when and how often customers are invited to complete surveys conducted by an enterprises many divisions and departments.

"CustomerSat eCEM 5.0 touch rules help us protect VeriSigns valuable customer relationships, explains Lynn Clark, Director, Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty Programs, VeriSign, Inc. "VeriSign is committed to gathering and acting continuously on feedback from our customers, while respecting their time and preserving their privacy.   eCEM 5.0 will allow us to fulfill these commitments across all VeriSign lines of business.

Coordinating Feedback Requests Enterprise-wide

CustomerSat eCEM 5.0 touch rules conserve, and maximize the benefit enterprises derive from, customers time and attention in answering surveys.  In the course of a month, an enterprise may invite customers to complete surveys from headquarters, technical support, web operations, market research, field service, and other divisions and departments.  These surveys provide crucial information to the enterprise, but in aggregate, they can overwhelm customers.  CustomerSat eCEM 5.0

• Protects customers from being over-surveyed

• Ensures that customers are asked to complete the surveys for which their feedback is most valuable

• Presents a consistent look-and-feel to customers for all surveys across the enterprise

• Ensures that sufficient customers are invited to make results statistically significant 

• Stops surveying customers, if desired, after statistically significant numbers of responses have been gathered 

• Controls and automates the acknowledgement and follow-up with the customer, if applicable, after feedback is provided.  

"The Internet makes it easy for enterprises to inundate customers with survey requests," said John Chisholm, CustomerSat Chairman and CEO.   "CustomerSat brings order to this chaos, enabling enterprises to co-ordinate feedback requests enterprise-wide and present a consistent face to customers, while delivering the timely, invaluable feedback that divisions and departments require."   

Simple to Complex Touch Rules

Touch rules may be as simple as ensuring that no customer is invited to complete any survey from the enterprise more frequently than once every so many weeks or months.   Or touch rules may be rich and complex, including such factors as:

• Size of each surveys available sample (number of eligible respondents)

• Number of responses each survey has recently gathered

• Importance of a customer to the business process the survey covers (for example, the number of transactions the customer has had with a support center, or the size of customers investment in products and services)

• How recently the customer previously responded, or was invited to respond, to a survey. 

An example of a group of surveys that can be controlled by eCEM 5.0 touch rules is:

• Semi-annual relationship survey from headquarters

• Case-based surveys from customer support center

• Ad hoc surveys from corporate marketing research

• Transactional surveys from e-commerce operations

• On-site visit feedback surveys from field service.

CustomerSat touch rules can be set to reduce or stop sending invitations, reminders, or both to stakeholder segments as statistically significant numbers of responses for those segments are reached.   Touch rules also enforce opt-out preferences, prohibit survey invitations from being sent to individuals who have indicated that they wish not to be surveyed, and control the language of email invitations and surveys are presented. Touch rules are managed through a simple user interface available to eCEM administrators.    

About CustomerSat, Inc.

CustomerSat is the leading provider of enterprise solutions for measuring, analyzing, and managing enterprise-wide action responding to real-time customer feedback. With advanced technologies and proven market research techniques, CustomerSat solutions have helped companies such as AMD, Ariba, BellSouth, Hilton, Lucent, and VeriSign take timely action to address customer opportunities and concerns and build high customer retention and profitability.  CustomerSat is headquartered in Mountain View, California.  For news, product demos, and other company information, visit www.CustomerSat.com or call 1.800.372.7772.