Call Center App Detects Customer Anger

The rollout, Autonomy's major release during the next three quarters, also better leverages functionality it acquired from etalk a year and a half ago, Scott Shute, president and CEO of Autonomy etalk, told CRM Buyer. These include etalk's recording, evaluation and survey capabilities, he said.

Multichannel Analysis

Since the acquisition, the company has introduced stand-alone products in which etalk's processing software was enhanced by Autonomy's search capabilities. The new application has integrated a lot of this functionality and further enhanced it.

Much of the focus in the new release has been around managing multiple channels of customer interactions and the subsequent data. The system is able to capture both structured and unstructured data that comes through the contact center, including text, e-mail, IM, audio or video.

"Typically, data sets are siloed differently in most organizations," Shute said, adding, "with e-mail in one place, for instance, voice calls in another. We normalized those data sources, make them searchable and bring together in what we call an episode."

The system then catalogs the interaction data for future searches, he said, along with any other interactions customers had with the company.

Detecting Anger

One of the more advanced features in the application, Shute said, is Autonomy etalk's sentiment analysis functionality that can detect emotion or anger in a customer-rep exchange.

Organizations are able to identify callers who are angry or upset from their voices and respond appropriately during the call or afterward. This feature can be run automatically or manually to monitor agents' work, he said.

"The software can actually pinpoint the place in the conversation where the customer raised his or her voice," Shute added. Along with the voice analysis, e-mail, chat and IM are also studied.

Last year, Autonomy introduced Qfiniti Explore, a back-end analytical application that is able to process a large volume of client calls and then analyze the content according to category. In this release Automony etalk has leveraged this functionality in its emotion detection feature.

'Assist' Is Enhanced

Another etalk product, Assist, has been enhanced in this version. The product provides contact center agents with knowledge management support during a call by combining speech recognition and enterprise search technology.

The feature then identifies the information the agent needs in order to answer a client's question and automatically routes that information to the agent's desktop.