Press Releases

Contact:
Ian Yellin
SparkPR
415-962-8200x234
ian@sparkpr.com

INQUIRA POWERS BEA SYSTEMS' "AskBEA" CUSTOMER SELF-SERVICE WEBSITE

InQuira 5 Natural Interaction Application increases Web site usage threefold, reduces customer support costs, improves CSR productivity

SAN BRUNO, Calif., June 10, 2002 — InQuira Inc., the leading provider of enterprise self-service and search applications, today announced that BEA Systems (NASDAQ:BEAS), the world's leading application infrastructure software company, has deployed InQuira 5 for Self-Service to power its customer self-service Web site, AskBEA (located at http://support.bea.com). InQuira 5 automatically indexes all of BEA's customer support information, allowing customers to ask questions in plain English, and receive accurate, precise answers. As a result, BEA has been able to deflect non-critical customer service inquiries away from call centers - reducing customer support costs and improving productivity among its customer support representatives. Overall, AskBEA has experienced a threefold increase in Web site usage and, most importantly, happy customers.

"We believe that AskBEA delivers one of the most powerful, web-based customer self-service systems of its kind today," said Terry Barrett, Vice President, Worldwide Customer Support, BEA Systems "With InQuira, we are able to offer our customers highly accurate self-service for a fraction of the cost - and none of the maintenance - of a custom-built system."

"AskBEA is a great example of how a company can exploit the full potential of the Web," said Chuck Williams, president of InQuira. "BEA has extended the value of their corporate Web site beyond use as a marketing and communications tool and has really empowered their customers to interact with the company on their own terms. As a result, BEA benefits in cost-savings, and BEA's customers benefit in better, more efficient service."

High Quality Customer Service — For Less
BEA Systems wanted to provide their customers with access to content from several different sources, including product documentation, white papers, a Clarify knowledge base, general website information, and even newsgroups. In addition, they were supporting 33 product/version combinations and had created over 10,000 different documents through multiple content management systems. After a comprehensive evaluation of available offerings, BEA installed InQuira 5 in July 2001 and has since realized a number of key benefits including:

• Decreased call center support reliance and costs: BEA customers rapidly adopted the AskBEA application and the website experienced a three-fold increase in usage in a period of six months. This activity helped deflect a dramatic percentage of cases offline over the web.
• Scalable customer service: with InQuira 5, BEA is able to scale their customer support function to keep pace with their high-growth business. The InQuira solution has enabled BEA Systems to maximize customer satisfaction while minimizing total customer service costs. The system allowed BEA to handle more cases while reducing total customer support costs.
• Improved CSR productivity: the AskBEA site deflects a significant amount of calls that would otherwise be handled by Customer Service Representatives (CSRs). Customers are empowered to answer their own questions whenever possible, allowing CSRs to focus on more complicated customer needs where high-touch service is essential.

InQuira 5, announced today, (see separate release) is already deployed within other leading companies, such as Bank of America, Fidelity Investments and Sun Microsystems. InQuira 5 is an enterprise software application for creating and implementing natural language information retrieval solutions for self-service and search. InQuira 5 tightly integrates natural language processing used in Self-Service applications with information retrieval technology used in enterprise search applications, preserving the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither. As a result, InQuira 5 is uniquely able to deliver highly accurate self-service and search solutions in a low maintenance, low total-cost-of-ownership environment.

About InQuira
InQuira, Inc. is the leading provider of enterprise self-service and search applications that enable companies to empower their customers and customer service representatives to interact in natural, everyday language with the vast information and service assets across the enterprise. Using InQuira's natural interaction applications users are able to get precise answers to their own questions, find practical solutions to their own problems and effectively escalate their own service needs. As a result, companies such as Fidelity, Bank of America, BEA Systems and Sempra Energy are realizing unprecedented levels of customer satisfaction and retention, while at the same time slashing the costs typically associated with high-touch customer service. For more information on InQuira 5, please visit www.InQuira.com or call 1.650-246-5000.

Copyright 2002. All rights reserved. InQuira, Inc., InQuira 5 are trademarks of InQuira, Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.