Enriching Clientele

TEN YEARS FROM NOW, no doubt we’ll look back at our time and find it unbelievable that enterprise applications were built with so little disposition to communicate with the outside world. But thanks to SOAP and XML, a new day is dawning, as the recent release of Clientele Customer Support 8.0 by Epicor Software indicates. In fact, Epicor’s CCS (Clientele Customer Support), a customer service application, has been completely re-engineered for the Microsoft .Net platform. Epicor plans to apply the same treatment to other CRM applications, including its Sales, Marketing, and Customer Self-Service Portal apps, with the objective to make available a Web services-based CRM suite by the middle of next year.

Epicor offers its solutions under license or as hosted applications in partnership with service providers. For our review, Epicor made available a hosted instance of CCS 8.0, providing us with administrative and user access to CCS from local Windows 2000 clients over the Internet.

Epicor has adopted the Microsoft .Net architecture to Web services-enable their applications. We won’t list the reasons for the choice of the Microsoft approach in this space, but it is interesting to note that one of Epicor’s main motivations for adopting Web services is to provide customers with more flexible solutions that will be easier to integrate with custom-developed applications, as well as with Web services-enabled suites from Epicor or other vendors.

Let’s also note that between the two client paradigms that .Net supports, a browser-based client and a fat client (for the latter Microsoft’s adjective is “smart”), Epicor chose the fat-client option, which is easily downloaded and installed over the Internet.

The result is a somewhat more conspicuous but also more connection-friendly client that exchanges only business data with the server because all the structural information and presentation logic, such as screen forms, reports, and local code, is automatically downloaded, once and for all, at installation or update time.

We found that the fat-client approach makes much sense from a design perspective, and allows more efficient interaction between the user and the server-side application. The obvious downside is the time needed to rebuild the client should the user move to a new PC.

Installing the fat client was a breeze. When we pointed our browser to the Epicor Web server for the first time, our browser did not present us with an application to run, but a list of software to download and install, essentially the Microsoft .Net Framework (about 26MB, including the latest service pack), followed by the tiny Epicor client for CCS.

The download and installation took a few minutes. Finally, after a PC reboot (due to installing .Net, not CCS) our Epicor application appeared in our machine’s Windows Program Menu, and we were able to launch it as we would any other local program.

Once we were logged on to CCS, we felt immediately comfortable using the GUI. As in other Windows applications, the screen displays the familiar toolbars and menus on top, and users can easily customize menus, associate menu choices, and other actions with keyboard shortcuts to speed data entry, for example.

Beneath the menus and tools, the screen is split into two panes, one bearing a list of icons to quickly call application modules such as Organization, Contact, Support Call, RMA (to authorize customer returns of defective items), and Service Agreement information. Clicking on an icon in the left pane opens the module in the right pane. We appreciated being able to open multiple windows at once and quickly switch among them, allowing us, for instance, to add a new contact on the fly while creating a support call.

CCS’s well-designed and helpful GUI should facilitate user acceptance. We found its user-friendliness applied consistently across its modules. For instance, selecting a company narrows the context to that organization, so that subsequent queries retrieve information — such as support issues, service agreements, or supported products — related to that company only.

Furthermore, CCS’s powerful consolidation feature allows users to quickly combine data for two contacts or companies (in an acquisition, for example), or simply to consolidate duplicated information. Simply select two candidates for consolidation, and CCS automatically transfers all items, including service agreements, support calls, and products, to the specified entity.

CCS allows customer service and support reps to manage a variety of different service agreements, including free support for products under warranty and service contracts billed on the number of incidents or support time. Depending on your business rules, administrators can force support reps to handle support calls strictly according to existing agreements (for instance, to choose a billable option when a product or service is not covered by the agreement) or allow them to take a more flexible approach, bending the rules or not on a case-by-case basis. An intuitive traffic light metaphor helps customer support reps by flagging support calls that are not covered by a maintenance agreement.

In summary, our first experience with the Microsoft .Net-based Clientele Customer Support 8.0 from Epicor was quite satisfactory, with the only exception of occasional sluggish responsiveness — a surprise, considering that the fat client should lighten the bandwidth requirements. And although the full benefits of the new architecture await Epicor’s upcoming release of the complete .Net-based CRM suite, CCS is clearly a good start.