Integrated Clinical Systems, Inc. (www.i-review.com) is a major provider of data visualization and reporting software solutions to the pharmaceutical industry. The Frenchtown, NJ based company's data analysis tools – Integrated ReviewTM and JReview – are used extensively in clinical drug trials for patient profiling, reporting, graphing, ad-hoc data mining and other complex analytical tasks.

"We were looking to replace a costly existing system that had been in-place for about six years, but just was not a good fit for our business," said Bob Stephens, the company's director of professional services. "A key ICS objective for any prospective solution was to improve communications, both internally and with customers, so that issues could be jointly addressed and resolved." Among other top goals: Enhancing the software development process with greater feedback and end-user interaction, and boosting efficiency throughout the organization.

"TeamSupport really matched what we needed: It's very focused on software development, defect tracking and feature management; it has a customer portal and it's hosted – reducing our IT overhead. Plus, it's intuitive and easy to use, both for us and our customers ... it was such a nice scaled-back approach compared to some other products that need months of training just to learn the basics," said Stephens.

The ICS team worked with TeamSupport staff to extract and import data from the existing support application, "We had a lot of historical data; our biggest concern was retaining all of it so we wouldn't have to start over from scratch. The TeamSupport folks walked us through the conversion process and make it all seem easy. We have a great new system and all of our old data – the best of both worlds!"

ICS deployed their licenses across three separate, but interrelated functional groups: the customer-facing Professional Services team, Quality Assurance andSoftware Development. As is typical when anything new is introduced into the workplace, initial reactions were "Oh my gosh, how do I use this?" But after spending a few minutes with TeamSupport, they'd say "Gee, that was so easy!" related Stephens.

One critical feature before ICS could go live – a non-realtime "web conversation" capability for the self-service customer portal – was committed to and quickly implemented by TeamSupport. It enables actions to be tracked and emails linked to the record of any ongoing issue. Using the portal, end-users can interact with ICS staff, as well as monitor the status of their own issues and feature requests. "When customers get a positive response and timely feedback, then they'll like [the portal] and continue using it," said Stephens. "It's not enough for the programmer to pick-up a bug and start to work on it; the customer needs to know what's happening ... it gives them a sense that we're doing something!"

ICS has been up and running for about six months now and the improvements are perfectly obvious to Stephens, "TeamSupport has eliminated the guesswork and given us positive control over communications and issue tracking. Our people are using it to boost productivity and our customers value the interactive dialogue available through the web portal. I would definitely recommend TeamSupport to others!"