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Mountain View, Calif. (March 11, 2008): In a new market study, eGain Communications Corporation (OTC BB: EGAN.OB), a leading provider of multichannel customer service and knowledge management software for in-house or on-demand SaaS deployment, found that North American enterprises are significantly under-performing in customer service. Companies benchmarked included 120 leading businesses in the U.S. and Canada with over $250 million in annual revenue across the financial services, communications, retail, consumer electronics, insurance, and travel sectors.

Conducted during 2007-2008, eGain’s “2008 State of Customer Service” research makes a comprehensive assessment of the state of customer service. In the study, eGain evaluates the “customer service IQ” of companies with “SQ,” a new metric that uses a multidimensional framework to measure the customer service competence of companies. The following dimensions were evaluated as part of the research:

• Choice of communication channels: The choice of interaction channels offered is important as consumers and business customers continue to adopt new channels such as chat and web collaboration to complement traditional ones like the phone. This is measured by the Choice Quotient™

• Email customer service: Email is second only to the phone in interaction volume. The study measures email responsiveness as well as the quality of responses with the Email Quotient™.

• Web self-service: While web self-service usage has continued to increase, many industry studies show that customer satisfaction with self-service is not where it needs to be. Inability to find information through web self-service and to seamlessly escalate to agent-assisted service continues to be significant barriers to self-service adoption. Self-Service Quotient™ measures the range of information access options in web self-service, ease of escalation, and responsiveness to escalated requests.

• Multichannel consistency: Customers are increasingly using multiple channels to communicate with businesses and, often, to complete a single transaction. They expect consistency of answers and service processes across channels, which is measured by the Multichannel Quotient™ metric.

• Multi-agent consistency: Customers often contact multiple agents to get answers to questions or resolve issues. They expect consistency of answers and service processes across agents, which is measured by the Multi-agent Quotient™ metric.

These dimensional metrics or sub-quotients were then abstracted to an overall Service Quotient (SQ), on a scale of 0.0 to 10.0, for each of the companies that were assessed as well as for each industry sector and the overall market. The sub-quotient and SQ scores were then categorized as "poor," "below average," "above average," or "exceptional."**