NEWS RELEASE
For further information: 
John Tata 
xpient Solutions, LLC
info@xpient.com
603.379.2101

XPIENT Solutions Appoints John Shannon as Vice President, Customer Care

Charlotte, NC (July 10, 2006) ~  Christopher Sebes, Chief Executive Officer of XPIENT Solutions, LLC, a leading technology solutions provider to the quick service, family dining, fast casual and line service restaurant segments, today announced the appointment of John Shannon as Vice President, Customer Care. “As we continue to expand upon our technology provider leadership position in the QSR industry, delivering world-class help desk service becomes an increasingly important part of our mission,” Sebes said. “John Shannon has 23 years of experience delivering customer solutions primarily in the high technology field. He will play a key role in helping us to continuously improve our help desk service. John’s customer-centric philosophy meshes very well with XPIENT’s own laser-like focus on proactively addressing the needs of those who use our software.”

“My goal is to enhance XPIENT’s customer support capabilities by building the best Customer Satisfaction Center (CSC) in the point-of-sale business,” Shannon said. “In addition to providing support for our own software we plan to expand our services by delivering assistance to our customers for third party applications and we will eventually provide our customers the option of supporting their in-house applications as well. As we establish these capabilities, customers will have a single number to call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to get help with any systems issues they might encounter. In addition to expanding our support offerings we are also committed to continuously improving our overall customer service capabilities. We are targeting for improvement certain performance metrics, such as the number of incidents that are resolved on the first call, with the intention of establishing xpient’s performance to a level well above industry benchmarks.

My formula for success in customer care is fairly simple - continuous improvement plus employee satisfaction equals customer satisfaction,” Shannon added. “We have initiated a Continuous Training Program for all CSC team members. This will provide them with ongoing new product training, continually expanding their in-depth understanding of the software. We will benchmark performance of the CSC in order to identify ways to optimize the team and their tools and are developing a plan to deploy a Customer Portal to assist our customers in reporting and tracking issues. Finally, I will personally be easily accessible to customers and work closely with their store operations staff to learn and understand how we can help them improve their businesses.”

John holds a Batchelor’s of Science Degree in Computer Science from Boston College. His most recent endeavor was to create a global enterprise support center for OATSystems, a leading supplier of radio frequency identification (RFID) solutions. Prior to that, John managed outsourced technical support teams for Entex serving many Fortune 100 companies. He supported and deployed point-of-sale solutions such as ERS, RetailDNA, and Greenshoe to most of the major retail chains. Earlier, John spent 8 years at Petals Catalog building a 7X24 Customer Service Center while expanding the staff from 12 people to over 100. He previously managed the office automation center for Unilever’s Chesebrough-Ponds unit.  John began his career as a help desk analyst at Wang Labs. He is relocating to XPIENT Solutions headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina.

About XPIENT Solutions, LLC.
XPIENT Solutions ( www.xpient.com ) is an organization of highly qualified restaurant and software development specialists devoted to business process improvement and professional support services for the foodservice industry. XPIENT offers a full complement of integrated technologies including Point-of-Sale, Back Office and Enterprise Management. From applications that help efficiently take orders and improve kitchen throughput, to labor management, production prep, inventory control, customer loyalty, speed of service, surveillance enhancement and data management tools, XPIENT's solution suite allows the restaurant operator to better and more easily manage every aspect of their restaurant operations.