Best suited to the high-tech, engineering, and financial services industries, Teamwork 4.0 is designed to help companies bolster customer satisfaction by delivering faster, more accurate answers to complex issues. It does this by enabling people within and outside of an organization to collaborate. For example, a vendor's internal salesperson, an internal engineer, an external integrator, the customer's purchasing manager, and the customer's engineer can interact via Teamwork 4.0-and the vendor company can select what interactions are made available to the customer at any given time.

Creating the right team can be "limited by who you already know, especially outside the organization," says Chris Derossi, ePeople's fournder and CTO. The solution is designed to help select the most appropriate people to be on the team, whether the team leader knows them personally or not.

Teamwork 4.0 also integrates third-party diagnostics and productivity tools. And it uses a data warehouse for analytics and reporting.

Teamwork 4.0 aims to create a closed loop of: identify the team, resolve the problem, track the process necessary to do so, analyze the process, and improve the process next time. According to Derossi, companies rarely capture the information acquired when resolving a problem, yet 75 percent of companies feel information collaboration negatively affects customer satisfaction. In fact, Derossi says, it can take up to four times longer to resolve a problem that requires informal collaboration. Hence, the benefits of formalizing the collaboration, as well as recording and analyzing the results. This is what makes ePeople's Teamwork 4.0 different than other collaboration tools: It allows companies to learn from and leverage the problem-resolution process and to reuse and search acquired knowledge.