Autonomy Answer™ & Response Online customer service plug-in to existing infrastructure to build an automated customer response application

A recent report published by Datamonitor emphasises that companies and specifically retailers must focus on establishing excellent customer service or face losing $173 billion in "potentially salvageable" sales. Almost 4 times as many online transactions are abandoned than are completed, according to this study. The report says that decent customer service could have rescued 7.8 percent of those abandoned purchases and made $6.1 billion in revenue for Internet retailers.

E-mail is rapidly becoming the business medium that companies rely on in customer service applications because of its speed of delivery. However, the increasing volume of generically addressed e-mails or customer requests received each day, represents a major cost-burden and efficiency drain, especially in the areas of customer service help desks, corporate affairs or investor relations. The need for a reliable system that can answer any queries automatically is essential to a company's success. Indeed, most companies do not realise these benefits: another study from marketing consultancy Rainier shows that more than two in every five of US and UK public companies fail to reply promptly to customer queries submitted online. "All too often, companies focus on the content and look and feel of a site without considering its integration with existing customer contact systems" commented Stephen Schuster, chairman of Rainier.

As profitability and competitive advantage become necessary for a company's success, sales cannot be lost as a result of poor customer service. Essential customer service tools include e-mail management, and web-based self-help.

The Solution

Autonomy has produced Autonomy Answer & Response to automate the process of responding to customer queries. Autonomy Answer & Response is an e-mail management system that automatically responds to common e-mail enquiries, allowing 'experts' or help desk staff to focus on those questions requiring a manually generated response. The system is self-reinforcing, ensuring the knowledge base is continually updated with new responses from the 'experts'. The system 'learns' from each new response provided by the 'expert' or help desk resource.

Using Autonomy's advanced pattern-matching technology, Autonomy Answer & Response understands any piece of digital information, including e-mails. The fact that it analyses context rather than keywords makes it a powerful and precise tool for matching natural language queries with questions it already has knowledge of, to present a set of potential answers, or a further set of questions.

Autonomy Answer & Response represents an add-on module to other Autonomy products, including Autonomy Server™, Portal-in-a-Box™ and Commerce Application Builder™.

Features & Benefits

Autonomy Answer & Response retrieves e-mails sent by customers to a designated account, automatically analyses the content to build up a conceptual understanding and breaks it into individual questions. The concepts identified in the questions are then used to automatically suggest relevant answers based upon the responses to previous questions. The system then automatically creates an outgoing e-mail message, replying to all the queries submitted by the customer, adding any formatting required, specified in templates.

Questions that cannot be answered automatically by the system with a specified confidence are automatically routed to an expert based on the conceptual analysis. Experts / administrators have access to previously answered questions and any outstanding questions via a web interface which allows them a number of different views onto questions and answers based on:

Using this interface experts are able to add/modify/delete questions and answers. Questions that currently have not been answered and are awaiting processing can be assigned to an individual to be dealt with. Once a question has been answered and the answer submitted to the system an e-mail is automatically created and sent to the customer who originally asked it.

As well as being able to send questions to the system via e-mail, customers are able to browse answered questions using an ad-hoc web based retrieval tool.

In addition, Autonomy's active products such as Active Knowledge™, can be used to allow helpdesk operators to automatically be prompted for suitable similar answers as soon as new questions arrive.