By extending the capabilities of its etalk Contact Center portfolio, Autonomy is taking a new approach to contact center management to include not only quality recording and performance analysis, but also to capture, share, and analyze the critical structured and unstructured data that flow through the contact center.

This new approach is rooted in three new intelligence-based functions that are being touted as the Intelligent Contact Center. Among the components is a multichannel interaction analysis function that captures, processes, and analyzes customer interactions, whether they come in as text, email, instant message, or voice. It includes advanced speech analytics and sentiment analytics that allow organizations to search by keyword matches or call categories, and to automatically identify callers with a heightened state of emotion for an immediate response.

Also included is Real-Time Agent Support, based on Autonomy's etalk Assist product, using speech technologies to transcribe all of a customer's previous interactions, either with the interactive voice response (IVR) system or live agent, and to retrieve that information to be relayed to a live agent's desktop prior to her taking over the call. The third function is Contact Center Performance, delivering call recording, quality management and compliance, eLearning, surveys, and performance management capabilities. All of these technologies sit on top of the Autonomy Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) platform, the foundation for its meaning-based computing.

"Our vision around the Intelligent Contact Center takes a much broader view of how a contact center should operate," explains Roger Woolley, senior vice president of marketing at Autonomy etalk. "It leverages our meaning-based computing technology that is the backbone of what Autonomy stands for.

"We've leveraged the speech analytics or voice processing capabilities, so that we can search, query, and react to these calls based on what was spoken in the conversation," he explains. "Before now this was a very manual process. Now the technology is there to do all of the heavy lifting, categorize the calls, and make them available to the user."

"Globally, enterprises are coming under increasing pressure to convert their archives of customer calls into data assets," says Ri Pierce-Grove, an associate analyst at Datamonitor. "As the multichannel contact center gains ground, the ability to synthesize multiple types of communication into a single thread of business intelligence will be increasingly sought after."