Cambridge, Mass.-based Pegasystems (News - Alert), which sells business process management and customer relationship management (CRM) products, unveiled a new tool that helps financial service institutions “address a growing and critical need to dramatically improve the process for capturing and resolving customer inquiries across channels.”

The Service Request Manager “features case management capabilities, automates work activities and guides front-office staff for optimal customer service,” Pegasystems officials said, adding that it streamlines multi-channel customer inquiries and requests by consolidating and simplifying information capture through a centralized inquiry and request process” that can be specialized by channel.”

It’s also designed to ensure consistent and accurate customer service with intelligent and guided processes, and to provide transparency and insight into each request and its status through real-time information and tracking.

Company officials commented, “Approximately four out of every ten customer inquiries and requests to financial services firms require front-office employees to pass along work to the back-office in order to resolve. In many cases, both departments waste valuable time doing manual, and sometimes duplicate, work across siloed systems to process a single request.”

This leads to errors and lag time, increases operational risks and costs, and lowers customer satisfaction.

The Service Request Manager uses decision management to coach both front office staff and customers (via self-service channels) through the process of properly initiating a service request or inquiry, company officials continued, “This control helps improve the level of service delivered right at the point of contact.”

In April, TMC’s (News - Alert) Brendan Read reported that Pegasystems acquired CRM firm Chordiant (News - Alert) Software in an all-cash deal for approximately $161.5 million, or $5/share.

Chordiant brings to Pegasystems its Customer Experience inbound and outbound CRM, predictive analytics, adaptive decision making, cross-sell/upsell, retention and process monitoring software and services.

Chordiant’s product, announced in early April, just before stepping to the altar with Pegasystems, was Chordiant Cx Outbound. It offers businesses the opportunity to use a common set of customer strategies to systematically determine the best next action for a customer regardless of the direction of the communication and the channel.

The new outbound product combined with the other capabilities, provides self-learning, so companies can have a continually adapting, holistic and complete picture of each and every customer communication, resulting in, it says, better inbound and outbound customer interactions.