Many factors have contributed to the increasing challenge of providing high quality support. Help desks are handling increased workloads, supporting a wider array of applications, and communicating with end users through a growing number of communications channels. At the same time, the ability to fulfill service and support needs has become a key customer satisfaction driver and competitive differentiator. Analyst firms support this notion indicating that help desk and CRM platforms can fulfill a critical need by automating customer support options, creating efficiencies, generating revenue and shortening sales/service cycles. To ensure those results occur, companies are increasingly turning to quality monitoring and performance analysis solutions.

According to the terms of the partnership, Witness Systems' eQuality(TM) multimedia recording and analysis suite integrates with Remedy's Action Request System(R) - the underlying technology platform supporting its help desk and CRM application suite - to monitor and evaluate complete customer contacts. This integration will provide businesses using Remedy Help Desk(TM) with valuable insight into the effectiveness of their employee and customer interactions. Witness Systems' certification in Remedy's Product Partner Compliance Program further reinforces the integrated solutions' capabilities.

"One of the greatest strengths of the Remedy Help Desk application lies in its tremendous flexibility and quick customization - traits that the eQuality solution can help optimize by capturing how the software is being used," said John Taylor-Wilson, director of business development for Witness Systems. "Integrating the eQuality recording and analysis software into Remedy's applications provides businesses with critical information to evaluate the people, processes and technologies within their enterprise and continually enhance their help desk and customer relationship management initiatives."

Examining a service desk's contacts provides valuable insight into the quality and effectiveness of that service, as well as measures progress against performance goals. With Witness Systems' eQuality suite, users can establish "business rules" to initiate recording based on the entry of user-defined content in select fields of the Remedy Help Desk application. Recording these interactions based on business drivers defined by the enterprise helps enhance service delivery. It also provides supervisors and managers with great insight into how effective their business processes are, what type of training and coaching initiatives should be implemented, and how to better streamline the flow and navigation from within the Action Request System.

"Remedy's nearly 10,000 customer sites consistently enjoy early access to best-of-breed technology," said Lonny Oswalt, head of worldwide business development for Remedy. "Integrating Witness Systems' eQuality monitoring software with Remedy's solutions provides our users with yet another advantage to deliver the highest quality support and service in the marketplace."

Witness Systems (NASDAQ: WITS), a leading provider of customer interaction recording, analysis and e-learning software that enables companies to optimize their customer relationships, today announced a new software integration and co-marketing alliance with Remedy(R)(NASDAQ: RMDY), a leading provider of Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions.

Witness Systems also announced successful certification of the integrated solution through Remedy's Product Partner Compliance Program, assisting help desks in showcasing their organizational efficiencies by monitoring and improving agents' performance.

This partnership is designed to help organizations improve all support processes, especially those requiring highly efficient self-service support. Since improving support quality in today's complex and fast-paced business environments has become a growing challenge, organizations are increasingly turning to technologies and practices focused on the performance evaluations tied to their help desk customer interactions in an effort to continually enhance service delivery and heighten customer loyalty.