Autonomy announced today the integration of multichannel interaction analysis for its call center monitoring software etalk. By combining proprietary audio mining and speech analytics with other forms of communications, such as emails, etalk allows organizations to gain a more granular understanding of their customers and to quickly understand the trends and issues that could have a profound effect on the business.

By understanding the concepts contained within all interactions, whether conducted over the phone, in email, chat on the Web, and by grouping together related concepts, Autonomy etalk can uncover emerging trends and alert contact center supervisors and managers. 

"There is too much customer information coming into a business from too many sources for a company to realistically keep up with everything that's being communicated by their customer base," Scott Shute, Autonomy's chief executive officer, said in a press release. "Trend detection and analysis simplifies this task by showing common threads of communication that could reveal product defects, fraud or, competitive intelligence before issues bubble up to legal action or lost clients."

Autonomy etalk also provides visual representations such as cluster maps and trend graphing to help managers gain a holistic, easy-to-understand view of the information. Clustering displays customer communication information in a two-dimensional map, which allows the visualization of similarity and differences. Results are ranked by conceptual similarity, which is essential to locating calls or emails that share the same meaning, even when they contain different keywords. These concepts are displayed in a visual cluster map, giving organizations a quick and easy way to uncover customer intelligence. 

According to Kathy Kuehne, Autonomy’s director of marketing, the system’s technology uses mathematical formulas to get through and detect patterns in the communication. "Based on that," she adds, "it places a contextual meaning on words and phrases that it pulls out of the transcript."

But it’s etalk’s ability to consolidate and analyze this information through a variety of channels that is the true selling point."That’s the way call contact centers are heading," says Judith Markowitz, president and founder of J. Markowitz Consultants. "That’s the direction they have to take in order to really understand what their customers are thinking and doing."