Industry Vertical: Telecommunications

Since telecommunications companies deal with a large amount of unstructured information on a daily basis as a result of phone calls, SMS messages and internet traffic, it is essential to use a cutting edge enterprise search solution that can deliver relevant content to employees quickly and intuitively. Autonomy's IDOL platform is format and repository agnostic and understands the meaning within content so it can automatically classify and rank information according to concept, rather than manually and according to arbitrary keywords or popularity rankings. This is important in a technology-driven organization where, often, the most relevant product briefs or technical manuals may not be the most popular pieces of content, or may be stored in specific, dispersed silos. Autonomy IDOL can also provide seamless search federation, which is hugely powerful when searching for specific product keys, using technical part numbers or within phone directories, common requirements for telecommunications companies.

Autonomy can also provide a powerful collaboration tool, enabling telecoms engineers and developers to find colleagues working on similar projects in different departments, or even different countries. By understanding what a user reads and writes, IDOL can build up an understanding of their area of expertise, meaning that when another user searches for an expert in this area, IDOL can put the two in touch with each other automatically.

Alcatel Lucent uses Autonomy's Collaborative Expertise Network (CEN) solution to power its R&D department, having chosen Autonomy due to its ability to access over 400 different repositories, and in particular its seamless integration with Microsoft SharePoint.

Avaya, for example, uses Autonomy IDOL to power an internal search portal which accesses all technical manuals, product briefs and user guides for Avaya products and is fully searchable by employees and partners. This enables resellers to access genuine Avaya technical support and documentation to support their sales process.

AT&T also employs Autonomy IDOL to power their internal MyCSP system, which allows all call center agents to search for answers to customer queries using conceptual search, enabling rapid response times and highly accurate, targeted information. This system is also available to all employees and partners, meaning if a customer buys an AT&T phone, they buy AT&T service.

Since there seems to be a growing tendency to abandon sites that can't provide relevant and desired information in just a few clicks, telecommunications companies need to employ a cutting-edge website search solution that can understand both what users are interested in and also what information will best satisfy their needs.

Autonomy is uniquely positioned to provide this functionality due to its ability to understand the meaning within unstructured information. This allows Autonomy technology to build accurate implicit and explicit profiles of user interests based on an understanding of the content they are creating and viewing. In addition to this, IDOL automatically groups disparate pieces of information into clusters according to conceptual similarity, and provides fully automatic hyperlinking between related pieces of information – regardless of format – in real time at the moment a document is viewed. In combination, this means that users are presented with only highly targeted information that is relevant to what they have shown an interest in or what they are looking at.

Another key differentiator for many telecommunications organizations is Autonomy's language agnostic capabilities – Philips and Avaya both use the same IDOL extranet search technology to handle queries and generate results in up to 100 different languages.

Philips, for example, was experiencing problems with simple keyword search on its extranet because manually determined keywords simply couldn't keep up with the pace of Philips' business. Philips chose Autonomy to power its search due to the sheer number of functions made possible with IDOL, such as implicit querying, audio and video search, and automatic clustering, all of which dramatically decreased the percentage of visitors leaving the Philips domain after executing a search, and increased visitor satisfaction.

Similarly, T-Mobile realized that the legacy keyword and author-generated metadata search technology used on its website was insufficient. The search system often failed to produce any appropriate results to browsers' queries and T-Mobile knew that in the cut-and-thrust of online retailing, any website component that could lead to an increase in abandon rates had to be improved. IDOL's unique conceptual search proved the perfect fit for T-Mobile and customers now benefit from advanced IDOL features such as directed navigation, conceptual retrieval, hyperlinking and spelling correction, enabling them to find highly relevant products and services based on the meaning of their inquiry.

Because telecommunications companies are continuously releasing new hardware products to stay ahead of the competition, keeping website information up to date in this area is a constant challenge. This is made more difficult by the prevalence of rich media content such as pictures and videos of new handsets, accessories and branding images. Autonomy Virage MediaBin is the industry leading Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution, providing a single repository for all worldwide marketing assets to ensure a consistent look and feel for corporate websites and allowing pin-point search and retrieval of rich media content.

Even when content is accessibly stored in a DAM system, the process of publishing new or updated content to the site in line with product releases is traditionally time consuming and requires significant IT input. Autonomy Interwoven TeamSite allows marketing departments to take responsibility for the maintenance and analysis of, and the publishing of content to, websites, avoiding issues of divergent branding and messaging, and improving website usability and customer satisfaction.

Autonomy Optimost gives marketers powerful multi-variable testing (MVT) capabilities out of the box, giving them the power to update the website to increase click through rates, conversion rates and customer satisfaction. MVT automatically presents different variations of the website to site visitors and tracks their interactions to ascertain the best combination of elements to increase revenue and satisfaction.

Let'sTalk, an independent reseller of wireless products and services for consumers and enterprises discovered that over 90% of site visitors were abandoning the sales process before completing an order. Let'sTalk used Optimost to improve and optimize the performance of a key landing page that sold mobile phones and service plans. Based on a test plan that included 10 variables and 74 different versions of those variables – one million possible permutations of the page – Optimost identified the most effective combination of creative and content, and, as a result, increased annual online revenue by over $2m.

Since so much of the telecommunications industry is based on customer interactions, and in particular voice communications, it is inevitable that telecoms companies will need to handle high volumes of audio data, whether to monitor and improve service, take telephone orders or manage calls to call centers. Autonomy etalk's range of solutions allow complete control over audio assets, leveraging the power of IDOL and Meaning Based Computing to enable automatic indexing, search and analysis over recorded items.

Since customer interactions are the subject of ever more stringent regulation, the general trend is towards 100% recording of call center interactions. However, this raises issues of intensive and expensive storage, and the challenge of extracting meaningful intelligence from vast silos of recordings. Autonomy Interaction Control Element (ICE) is the first solution to enable multichannel data capture, interaction tagging and classification, and realtime compliance by intelligently synchronizing employee desktop and web usage with live enterprise interactions. This goes beyond just recording all interactions and blindly storing them, and enables enterprises to capture only relevant contact center interactions based on defined business parameters, increase business insight by analyzing critical business data within captured interactions and manage recorded audio and text interactions in line with compliance obligations. Qwest is a leading global telecommunications company which has recently deployed ICE to deal with the growing number of call recordings and to aid a move towards policy-based retention rather than storing everything indefinitely.

Orange, the key brand of France Telecom, needed to improve its system of tracking trends and analyzing recorded customer conversations. Orange purchased Autonomy etalk's Qfiniti suite to enable automatic screen and call recording, allowing managers to check for and analyze call resolution rate and agent behavior. As a direct result of this enhanced capability, Orange was able to reduce call center call volume, customer call backs and man hours spent manually tagging recordings, freeing up employees for more creative tasks aimed at growing the business.

Customers no longer rely on one channel of communication to research and make buying decisions, nor do companies communicate and interact with customers in one format. Researchers agree that harnessing customer interactions and leveraging patterns-based computing is the new frontier for competitive differentiation. Autonomy's multichannel analytics can give companies the power to track customer interactions across all touch points.

Autonomy's Multichannel Optimization is unique in understanding customer interactions across all channels, including social media, website, in-store and contact center. Autonomy is the only solution provider that offers a multichannel solution that can link the call center and the web with a customizable view of advanced analytics while allowing telecommunications companies to react to potentially damaging conversations and take advantage of potential emerging trends.

Autonomy is seeing great interest in this area. One existing speech analytics customer, for example, is looking into Autonomy's multichannel analytics solutions to improve competitor information, customer retention and to deal with customer queries. During a recent test, multiple complaints were received from customers via different contact points regarding shipping issues. Using Autonomy's multichannel analytics, Virgin Media could quickly correlate these comments and contact the shipping company to deal with the problem and provide customer satisfaction.

In a tough competitive environment, the key challenge for mobile operators is to increase Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) by increasing the uptake of higher-value services. IDOL Mobile Edition (IDOLme) allows companies to leverage the power of Autonomy's Meaning Based Computing on mobile devices so, for example, automatic user profiles can be created to deliver tailored commercial content direct to the user, even when they would not have known to search for it. Therefore, mobile operators can offer a highly personalized service that will monetize content immediately and keep customers coming back for more.

IDOLme offers telecommunications companies the ability to automate the delivery of targeted, premium content, create a unique mobile eCommerce experience, offer advanced personalization and create mobile collaboration and social communities.

AT&T is the world's largest communications company by revenue, and carries on average 18.7 petabytes of data per day to customers worldwide. With 85.1 million customers, it is essential that AT&T can respond to customer queries as quickly and to as high a standard as possible, and to this end AT&T has standardized on Autonomy IDOL for agent search in their call centers. IDOL allows agents to rapidly search through technical manuals and product information for relevant results to customer queries.

AT&T has also standardized its corporate web solutions on Autonomy, using Autonomy Interwoven TeamSite and OpenDeploy to streamline web content management and publishing. Autonomy's solutions allow marketers to analyze website performance and publish site content without IT resources, and impressed AT&T by being the most fully featured WCM solution on the market and having a reputation as an industry leader according to independent analysts.

Qwest serves 95% of the Fortune 500 and maintains the leading coast-to-coast fiber-optic network in the US. Qwest has used Autonomy etalk solutions for over 10 years to enable intelligent agent performance analysis, quality assurance and call recording. Qwest's current initiative to move to 100% Call Recording exposed a number of challenges in the business with regard to making sense of all those transactions and how to find relevant calls for sales, legal, and Quality Assurance purposes. More specifically, the business desired a way to classify, categorize and segment recorded calls based on specific information entered into the agent CRM application to verify legal disclosures, sales transactions, and promotional pricing for future review and archiving. PCI Compliance and NACHA Mandates were also secondary drivers for this sale.

Qwest chose Autonomy because of its innovative approach to policy management and application integration with its Qfiniti call recording platform. By allowing the business to be more intelligent in how it segments call center transactions and classifies customer interactions, it could more effectively coach agents using successful examples, to quickly resolve disputes, and intelligently manage calls for potential legal issues. ICE is deployed to 3,000 users in the Western US enabling categorization, classification and segmentation of calls in a 100% call logging environment.

Avaya, a global leader in business communication applications, systems and services, designs, builds, and manages communications networks for more than one million businesses worldwide. With 19,000 employees spread over 59 countries, and a customer base that includes 90% of the Fortune 500, Avaya is the embodiment of a complex global business. Avaya inherited more than 880 worldwide websites from Lucent Technologies in 2000, based on a number of different technology platforms and serving many different purposes, and as a result Avaya was faced with a system rife with divergent branding, messaging and product information.

Avaya's first move was to implement Autonomy's TeamSite solution as a company-wide standard to power a unified, global enterprise extranet which could deliver personalized content for specific internal and external audiences and avoid issues of divergent branding and messaging by giving control of the website to marketing, rather than IT. With avaya.com in place, Avaya then turned to Autonomy Virage MediaBin as a Digital Asset Management solution to provide a single repository for all worldwide marketing assets, including rich media, to ensure a consistent look and feel. Finally, Avaya integrated Autonomy IDOL into the external website to provide conceptual, multilingual search in more than 70 countries.

Orange is the key brand of France Telecom, the fourth largest telecommunications company in the world by brand value, and covers 131 million of the group's 193 million customers in 32 countries. Analyzing customer feedback and intelligence is critical for Orange to maintain its competitive advantage and continue to grow the business. Orange previously tracked trends and analyzed recorded customer conversations manually, requiring a huge number of man hours and depending on 'human intervention' to gather accurate and relevant information. This limited Orange to analyzing only a small portion of the calls (approximately eight percent). Orange turned to Autonomy to provide a solution that would automatically perform extensive analysis of customer interactions in order to gain comprehensive insight into call trends without having to manually sift through all of their recorded interaction.

Orange chose the Qfiniti solution suite, including Qfiniti Observe, Advise and Explore which gave contact center managers the ability to automatically analyze interactions and apply the results to agent coaching and training and deliver real-time intelligence for business process improvements. An additional goal was to provide real-time information back to the organization for insight into consumer buying behaviors and product and competitive analysis. By employing the Qfiniti solution suite, Orange was able to reduce call volume and customer call backs, provide more relevant feedback for quality assurance and agent training, and add the ability to automatically search for calls rather than perform manual searches. All told, this led to a reduction in contact center costs of 30 percent.