PRESS RELEASE

 

May 8, 2002				Contact: Maureeen Richey
				Phone: 510-543-3420

 

AskAnything Chosen by Microsoft to Showcase .NET Technology

 

 

San Francisco, CA, May 8, 2002—AskAnything Technologies, a provider of web-based customer support, announced that Microsoft has chosen AskAnything to showcase how startup companies are using the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET to develop their software.  All of AskAnything's new customer support software was developed using Microsoft's .NET platform, including XML Web services, the core of AskAnything's new technology. "Microsoft provided us with all the components needed to quickly enable XML Web services and execute our complete design, and their tools offered us more security and more power than any other tools," explained Stephen Roth, AskAnything president. Roth said that Microsoft is also providing AskAnything with additional resources and support to aid in the .NET implementation. Microsoft will soon publish a case study describing how .NET aided in AskAnything's software development.

 

AskAnything first released its customer support software in 1999 in response to the growing need for automation in customer-company correspondence. Traditionally, online and telephone-based customer support has been a manual process: customers email or telephone when they have questions, and the company must respond to each customer individually. "With an estimated 80 percent of customers asking the same 20 questions, companies find themselves with a time-consuming and often costly burden," said Roth.

 

AskAnything's first release automated part of this process with a "dynamic FAQ system"—Web-based software that automatically created and updated a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs). Customers went to the support website and typed their questions in plain English, and the AskAnything software presented them with a list of relevant FAQs. If the FAQs did not answer the customers' questions, the software forwarded the questions to a customer support representative, who would email the customers back with an answer. Finally, the software added each question and answer to the knowledgebase so that the next customer with the same question would not have to contact a customer support representative.

 

For its latest release, AskAnything has integrated its dynamic FAQ system with two of the top-selling mid-market customer relationship management (CRM) systems: FrontRange’s GoldMine and Interact Commerce Corp’s SalesLogix. These systems are designed to track interaction with customers by providing a database for customer support representatives to log correspondence with customers. "We felt that our dynamic FAQ could enhance the time-saving and money-saving capabilities of existing CRM systems by reducing the number of repeated questions that reach CRM systems and by automatically populating CRM databases with any novel questions," explained Roth.

 

To achieve integration with its CRM partners, AskAnything had to address two problems: 1) it needed a way to penetrate a company's firewall so that it could access the CRM system, and 2) once inside, it needed a way for its application to communicate and share data with the CRM application, despite the fact that the CRM application might be written in a different language and might run on a different operating system.

 

AskAnything solved both integration problems using .NET to create a Web service based on XML and SOAP. Web services allow applications to communicate with each other by translating data into XML, which is a meta-language most software platforms can understand. Once data is translated into XML and SOAP, it travels across the Web via the standard HTTP protocol and easily passes through corporate firewalls without jeopardizing the security of the network.  

 

AskAnything expects its successful integration with FrontRange and SalesLogix to pave the way for smooth integration with other CRM systems. AskAnything also plans to expand its software capabilities to import information from a wide variety of sources, including email messages, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Web sites. "We feel fortunate that Microsoft has decided to support us in this way," concluded Roth. "By using .NET to integrate with CRM systems, we have broadened our range of potential customers."      

 

 

 

 

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