Jacada Defines Next Generation Contact Center Desktop with Release of Jacada WorkSpace

April 5, 2006; 02:00 AM

Jacada Ltd. (Nasdaq: JCDA), a leading provider of contact center productivity solutions, today announced the availability of version 3.0 of its unified desktop solution, Jacada WorkSpace, and outlined the company's vision and strategy to meet the demands of the growing number of contact centers that must modernize the agent desktop.

Jacada WorkSpace 3.0, formerly branded Jacada Fusion Agent Portal, represents the next generation of the contact center desktop, a single agent console that unifies customer interaction tools with a single access point to all the mission-critical applications required by the agent to effectively complete a customer interaction. Jacada WorkSpace 3.0 delivers a wealth of capabilities that enable companies to freely implement optimal contact center processes and maximize customer service representative (CSR) productivity. Enhancements to this new version include universal agent capabilities, support for multiple, simultaneous call sessions, support for Linux servers, and Asynchronous JavaScript Technology and XML (AJAX) controls and features found in the new Web 2.0 rich client foundation.

"Most companies today utilize a wide variety of tools to service customers, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, computer telephony integration (CTI) screen pops, call scripts, knowledge bases, email, chat, and a growing number of business applications required to retrieve and input customer data," said David Holmes, executive vice president of marketing for Jacada. "As a result, the CSR's desktop has become extremely complex, resulting in costly operational inefficiencies and frustrated agents and customers. Jacada WorkSpace 3.0 is designed to remove complexity from the customer interaction process, allowing the agent to spend less time navigating systems and more time nurturing relationships."

New Features in Jacada WorkSpace 3.0

Universal Agent. The Universal Agent feature in Jacada WorkSpace 3.0 automatically displays the right tools and applications on the agent desktop based on any number of parameters, including the task or role the CSR is to perform, the geographical location of the caller, the number dialed, or information captured from the interactive voice response (IVR) system.

Contact centers face pressure to find better economies in operations as well as to enable agents to respond more effectively to customer inquiries that concern multiple products or services. As a result, more and more businesses are turning away from the traditional idea of the specialist agent and towards the well-informed generalist or the universal agent. The universal agent feature of Jacada WorkSpace 3.0 enables one agent to handle inquiries from multiple geographies that may span multiple products by providing exactly the information and tools they need for each interaction.

Web 2.0 Rich Client Foundation. Web 2.0 has been steadily increasing in popularity, driven by consumer-facing applications, such as Google Maps. Jacada WorkSpace is one of the first business applications to leverage rich client, browser-based application design techniques to provide a rich user experience for the enterprise worker. Using Asynchronous JavaScript Technology and XML (AJAX), Jacada WorkSpace now delivers client/server-like features and controls in a web-based, thin client solution.

For example, the AJAX implementation in Jacada WorkSpace enables the support of CTI integration for thin client desktops. As a result businesses can employ remote or work-at-home agents and provide them with contact center functionality that is usually available only within the walls of a contact center operation, such as screen popping, the technology that provides agents with the information that a customer has entered into an automated system so that the customer does not have to repeat his or her details.

Jacada WorkSpace also leverages AJAX to deliver real-time notification and alerts to the desktop without requiring a page refresh. Utilizing AJAX also significantly reduces bandwidth and server load requirements.

Jacada and its Vision for the Next Generation Contact Center Desktop

"Market experts and industry visionaries continue to place significant importance on the adoption of a unified CSR desktop," remarked Gideon Hollander, CEO of Jacada. "But while desktop unification is a top priority in many contact centers, what this next generation desktop should actually be has, until now, remained undefined."

According to Jacada, the next generation contact center desktop must be an interaction hub built on an open architecture that leverages the latest advancements in web technology, and can be extended out of the contact center into the enterprise and beyond.

The next generation desktop must go beyond simply providing a central platform for customer communications, but must empower the contact center with flexibilty and agility in regards to the business systems required for customer interactions. Contact centers inherit a multitude of applications from the business and have been forced to design their processes around these applications.

"A next generation desktop needs to be built on an open platform, such as a service-oriented architecture (SOA), to work seamlessly with existing applications and technology. This enables the contact center operation to align external business systems with their own internal processes," said Sheryl Kingstone, director, Yankee Group Customer-Centric Strategies. "In addition, an enterprise contact center using SOA can now leverage components from their existing CRM application, such as Siebel, or create web services for legacy applications to create a true, real-time single view of the customer from data scattered across the enterprise."

About Jacada

Jacada is recognized as a leading provider of contact center productivity solutions. The company's solutions help customers rapidly simplify and improve high-value business processes without the need for long and expensive systems replacement projects.

Jacada provides two award-winning solutions that have been proven to make a significant impact on contact center efficiency and effectiveness. Jacada WorkSpace is a unified desktop that incorporates all critical functions required by the contact center agent to successfully complete customer interactions. Jacada Fusion is a process optimization solution that leverages patented technology to enable contact centers to improve customer satisfaction and increase revenues by providing customer service representatives with more time for customer care and revenue-generating activities.

By significantly reducing call handle times, training costs and error rates, Jacada solutions deliver a rapid, easily measured return on investment, with payback typically achieved in weeks or months. Jacada solutions are deployed in hundreds of contact centers worldwide, and to millions of users through self-service applications designed to off-load contact center activity.

Jacada has over 1200 customers worldwide including many Fortune 1000 corporations and government organizations. Founded in 1990, Jacada operates globally with offices in Atlanta, Georgia; Herzliya, Israel; London, England and Munich, Germany. Jacada can be reached at www.jacada.com or at 1-800-773-9574.