Viking Freight deploying Clarify for competitive advantage in e-business market

Singapore, 9 March 2000 - Clarify (Nasdaq: CLFY), provider of e-business solutions for the front office, announced today that Viking Freight, is deploying Clarify eFrontOffice for enterprise-wide customer relationship management (CRM).

Viking Freight is a subsidiary of Federal Express, providing next-day regional freight services, as well as a full range of electronic information services, in 11 western states. To increase its competitiveness in today's e-business market, Viking Freight is embarking on an ambitious plan to remodel its business systems, including using Clarify for integrated sales and service across multiple customer touch points.

"The new e-commerce-driven market is compelling businesses to adopt just-in-time inventory processes and streamline supply chains," said Randy Gardner, vice president of information technology at Viking Freight. "This challenges transportation providers, including Viking Freight, to capture and manage the increasingly varied and unique shipping, billing and reporting requirements of their customers."

"With Clarify, we have a system that integrates all of the customer touch points into one system," said Keith Lovetro, Viking Freight's vice president of marketing. "This will help us understand our customers' needs better and allow us to help them proactively. That's a compelling advantage in a market where Viking Freight already delivers 99 percent on-time performance. By enhancing our level of service and our customer responsiveness capabilities, we believe Clarify will help us grow our business."

Viking Freight also plans to enhance its web services, enabling anytime, anywhere access for its customers. "We will leverage the information in our Clarify environment to develop new e-business initiatives for our web site," said Randy Gardner, vice president of information technology at Viking Freight. "Clarify is the foundation on which we are building our new enterprisewide business systems, making it even easier for our customers to do business with us."

Clarify Creates a Competitive Advantage
At the heart of Viking Freight's Clarify solution is a comprehensive customer data model defining the company's multi-faceted customer relationships. Gardner estimates that Clarify's out-of-the-box solution reduced the amount of the work it would have taken the company to create such a data model from scratch by at least 75 percent.

"Previously, we had customer information spread across multiple databases throughout the enterprise," Gardner explained. "By consolidating these and defining customer relationships in relevant ways, Clarify will provide an integrated view of every customer account, so we can implement a consistent relationship management strategy."

Bill Books, Managing Director Clarify Asia Pacific, said, "With e-business dissolving regional, national and international boundaries, the transportation industry has to be ever more creative to attract new customers and develop their loyalty. Clarify empowers Viking Freight to dazzle its customers by consistently demonstrating an understanding of its customers' unique shipping, packaging, reporting and tracking needs, and create a long-term return on relationship."

Clarify Integrates Easily with Legacy Systems
The implementation will also involve the integration of Clarify eFrontOffice with Viking's legacy back-end computer systems.

"We evaluated other vendors and conducted a rigorous proof-of-concept. Clarify emerged the clear winner," Gardner noted. "The ease with which we could integrate the Clarify solution into our legacy infrastructure and leverage our existing mission-critical IT investments was very important for us."

Viking will roll out the first phase of its Clarify deployment to 160 employees, including 55 customer service representatives at its two contact centers in Salt Lake City, Utah and San Jose, California. Assisting Viking with its deployment is ZAMBA Solutions, a systems integration partner of Clarify.

"Clarify's ability to introduce us to an experienced implementation partner was an advantage," noted Gardner.

Paul Edelhertz, ZAMBA Solutions president and CEO, added, "Our work at Viking is a direct result of our strong relationship with Clarify. The combination of Clarify's industry-leading technology with our expertise with systems integration will give Viking a CRM solution that will help it revolutionize how it interacts with its customers."

About Clarify
Clarify is a prover of e-business solutions for the front office. Clarify eFrontOffice combines customer relationship management, Internet relationship management and e-business capabilities in a single solution allowing companies to quickly deploy e-business sales and service initiatives. Clarify's client list does include Aussie Home Loans, British Telecommunications, E*Trade, General Electric, giggo.com, Maxis, Microsoft, Prudential, Sony and Toyota. Founded in 1990, Clarify is headquartered in San Jose, California, and has strategic alliances with Cap Gemini, eLoyalty, Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Its products are marketed through resellers, including Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, as well as a direct sales and service organisation with offices in Australia, Singapore, Japan, Europe, North America and South America.