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EGain Communications Corp. will release Wednesday eGain Assistant 5.0, the latest iteration of its intelligent agent application.
Egain Assistant 5.0, which mimics an online customer service representative by responding to natural language queries with answers culled from a knowledge base, has been upgraded so that it automatically converts knowledge, typically from Web FAQs, into “cases”—sets of questions for which there is a definite answer.
This results in a success rate for the application finding the correct answer of 90 percent, more than double the previous rate, eGain officials said. It also can build more than 1,000 cases a day. In addition, its dictionary has been expanded to 30,000 words, including basic retail terminology.
Assistant 5.0 comes with over 40 standard reports for analyzing log files. Its available as a stand-alone product or as a module of eGain eService Enterprise (E3). As an eGain eService Enterprise module, Assistant 5.0 can escalate a conversation to an automated e-mail management system via eGain Mail or to the appropriate live assistant via eGain Live, preserving a transcript of all interactions to that moment.
In other Web customer service news, RightNow Technologies Inc., announced Monday, a new offering called Hosted Management System, which allows its hosted application customers more control over upgrades.
The new system lets customers set up test or pilot servers for their upgrades and then schedule an automatic upgrade of their hosted production servers when theyre satisfied with the results of the trial. All upgrade control functions are provided via a secure Web interface and the trial application is populated with existing live data.
Both eGain Assistant 5.0 and the RightNow Hosted Management System are available now.