Transforming the
Customer Experience

Transforming
the
Customer Experience

contact@accelsior.com

A world leading software company was using a Siebel application to manage Service Requests (SRs) and provide support to their customers. The installation included both a customer facing eService application to allow users to create and manage SRs and service profiles, and an employee facing Call Center application to process and resolve them. The eService application had not been updated for several years, however, and was out of date and rather cumbersome to use.

Next to this text there are a few screenshots, the first is of the landing page for the eService application before any enhancements were made, the remaining show the application after enhancements were implemented by Accelsior. The screenshots are from live applications, and have been modified only to conceal our client's identity.

Others said it was impossible

The client was considering the future for their customer facing application, and was planning to update the look and feel by either replacing it with a different software solution, or updating the eService application. The client had been in touch with several Siebel consulting companies; they had all said that it would not be possible to deliver the desired functionality in Siebel eService. The client then got in touch with Accelsior and we worked through the requirements together.

Accelsior demonstrated the possibilities

Through a series of proof of concepts, Accelsior demonstrated that the Siebel eService application could be configured to:

Meet the core requirements
Provide valuable functionality and features above and beyond what had been originally considered
Integrate seamlessly with the modern Web 2.0 look and feel of the rest of the clients’ web sites
Be much simpler to use

We also demonstrated how updating the eService application was a considerably lower risk solution than replacing it with new software, and showed how we could deliver the update at one third of the cost suggested by other vendors.

The main features that Accelsior developed were:

A look and feel which integrated seamlessly with the rest of the customer portal
A landing page which gave customers easy access to all their latest information and most important functionality
Context based action menus, to reduce the number of clicks required to perform critical functions
“Quick Search” functionality, to allow customers to easily find their Service Requests
Context based help functionality, depending on where in the application the user were
The ability to include embedded content to promote events, new products and up-sell

The project was completed on time and on budget in just 3.5 months from requirements confirmation to production roll-out, at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions. Not only was the project a success, but the redesign was also a hit with the client’s end-customers, with much unsolicited positive feedback received praising the re-design!

Relevance now that Open UI is available

Open UI is the new standards-based, browser-independent user interface available in the recent versions of Siebel. It replaces Siebel’s High Interactivity (HI) client, which most companies use for their employee-facing Siebel applications.

So how does the release of Open UI impact you, if your company is running a Standard Interactivity (SI) application such as eService, eCustomer or other? And how are enhancements like the ones shown above still relevant?

Consider the following:

Existing customer-facing applications like eService, eCustomer and eSales are supported in some earlier Siebel versions that also supported Open UI, and will continue to work in standards-based modern browsers as they do today. This means there is not the same urgency to deploy Open UI for existing SI client applications, as there is with HI client applications that only work with Internet Explorer (find out more here, link will open in new window).
While some views in the out-of-the-box customer-facing applications have been enabled for Open UI, many have not, and converting an existing SI application to Open UI would require considerable development effort – an effort which may not be justifiable for all organizations.
The web technologies used to develop the enhancements shown above are essentially the same technologies used in Siebel Open UI (e.g. HTML, CSS, JavaScript & DOM Manipulation). These enhancements and the underlying development techniques are also relevant if you are considering migrating your SI application to Open UI.

While the arrival of Open UI allows for greater flexibility and latitude in implementing usability improvements, migrating a customer-facing Siebel application to Open UI is not the right option for every organization. For such organizations it is possible to make radical improvements to the SI application at a small cost.

But if you are planning a migration to Open UI, consider what our consultants did within the constraints of a SI application and imagine what we could help you achieve within the flexible Open UI architecture!

If you are managing a customer facing Siebel Application and are interested in hearing about the changes above and additional possibilities in more detail, and discuss how you can improve your application, whether staying within SI framework or migrating to Open UI, reach out to us.

It’s time to get excited about your Siebel application: contact us to find out more!