Enkata
Company: Enkata, San Mateo, California
Company Description: Enkata provides Operational Performance Management solutions for businesses with large service organizations. The company delivers the only industry-specific solutions available that analyze both front and back-office customer lifecycle data and provide actionable information needed to reduce costs while simultaneously increasing customer loyalty.
Nomination Category: Company, Office & Product Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best New Product or Service
Nomination Title: Enkata 5 Operational Performance Management Solution
1. Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 500 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and sales to date. You may include hyperlinks to product photos and data sheets. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:
Enkata addresses a critical intelligence gap that traditional BI and analytics solutions don’t solve: helping companies understand not only what is going on within their customer service and business operations, but why things are happening.
For large, complex service organizations, the key to constantly optimizing costs and customer loyalty is in uncovering the root causes of increased call volumes, dissatisfaction and churn and taking action to correct these issues. The problem is, traditional BI and analytics tools typically only gather information about what is taking place (a spike in service calls, for instance) but not why certain operational failures are happening or how to avoid them. Targeting service-focused industries such as healthcare, financial services and telecommunications, Enkata’s Operational Performance Management (OPM) platform is specifically designed to address the what, why and how, helping businesses capture, integrate and analyze both front- and back-office operational data to gain the actionable insight needed to reduce costs while simultaneously increasing customer loyalty. Introduced in February 2005, the Enkata 5 OPM platform includes three application suites: Enkata Back Office Performance, Enkata Contact Performance and Enkata Voice of the Customer. Together, these solutions deliver an integrated view of the end-to-end customer experience – bringing together data from disparate channels ranging from the contact center and CRM systems to back-office applications managing tasks like billing and claims – so that organizations can both uncover operational failures that lead to increased call volumes, added expense and customer defection, and take corrective action that improves service and cost effectiveness.
Unlike other solutions on the market, Enkata offers a fast, cost effective way for businesses to understand and leverage valuable operational and customer data. Built from the ground up to drive operational improvement, Enkata’s out-of-the-box solution includes pre-built key performance indicators (KPIs,) taxonomy, analytics and workflows unique to industry-specific operations and customer service interactions. In contrast, BI and analytics tools are expensive, time consuming to implement, and typically built for general query and reporting – rather than industry-specific – business issues. Furthermore, because of the amount of analysis time required to wade through the data, these solutions often don’t deliver information in a timely enough manner to impact service in real time.
Enkata’s patent-pending data integration adapters enable users to analyze data across both front- and back-office systems and apply performance metrics so that information can be reviewed in various segments – such as by customer service history, contact channel, product usage and more. As a result, users can quickly identify the root causes behind common service issues, take action that improves performance, cost effectiveness and customer satisfaction, and achieve very fast ROI. The Enkata OPM platform is also available in an on demand model, offering fast time to value and a lower total cost of ownership.
Enkata 5 is a direct result of the company’s close collaboration with existing customers across the health insurance and telecommunications market sectors, including five of the top ten service organizations in the U.S. and Canada. The solution is already delivering tens of millions in savings annually to market-leading companies such as UHG, CIGNA, Aetna, Sprint, AT&T and Accenture. Early in 2006, the company launched Enkata 6, furthering the evolution of the product by adding greater vertical industry depth in financial services and healthcare, increasing scalability, delivering advanced collaboration and initiatives management functionality and enhancing reports, dashboards and analytics.
2. List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, product reviews, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:
An August 2005 Report by Richard Snow of Ventana Research sums up Enkata’s
competitive position in the market. The full report, “Enkata Enhances Contact
and Operational Performance” may be downloaded at
http://www.enkata.com/forms/ventana-opm-report.html
To read more about the Enkata solution on the web:
http://www.enkata.com/products/
Press releases related to Enkata product:
Enkata 5 Delivers Integrated, Industry-Specific Solutions for Operational Performance Management
http://www.enkata.com/news/press_releases/021505.php
Enkata Signs With Aetna To Drive Claims Improvements
http://www.enkata.com/news/press_releases/022305.php
Enkata Bolsters Offering with Acquisition of Technology Assets from ePeople
http://www.enkata.com/news/press_releases/112105.php
Enkata Receives Customer Inter@ction Solutions Magazine’s Product of the Year Award for 2005
http://www.enkata.com/news/press_releases/010906.php
Enkata Advances Leadership of Industry-Specific Operational Performance Management Solutions with Launch of Enkata 6
http://www.enkata.com/news/press_releases/022706.php
A selection of news stories on Enkata:
http://news.tmcnet.com/news/2005/nov/1210611.htm
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2005/12/12/story7.html?page=1
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2006/02/06/smallb1.html
http://www.callcentermagazine.com/shared/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=181401144
http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/html/news/NewsStory.cfm?articleId=13124
3. Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:
The Enkata OPM platform is the brainchild of the company’s two co-founders and presidents, Ron Hildebrandt and Stan Stukov. After graduating from Harvard Business School and working with service organizations in healthcare, automotive and hospitality, Ron Hildebrandt realized there was a wealth of valuable data with the power to transform business operations just gathering dust because no one had figured out how to connect the dots. He also believed that the tools available to access this information were not granular or targeted enough. A light bulb went on: develop a best-of-breed solution capable of quickly pinpointing service and operational failures, and focus on several key verticals where this information could make a big impact.
Working as a software developer and senior technologist at companies such as Intel and Broadbase/Kana, Stan Stukov was frustrated that BI and analytics could only tell him “what” was happening in the business, not “why.” Rather than spend endless cycles trying to retrofit existing BI and analytics tools, he wanted to design something from the ground up to address the “why.” Meeting Ron was meant to be – Stan’s deep technical expertise and Ron’s understanding of the operational challenges facing large service organizations were united under a common vision for operational performance management.