InQuira’s New Release Automates Customer Service
InQuira, a San Bruno, Calif.-based provider of Web-based CRM applications, earlier this week announced the release of InQuira 6.5, which features multi-lingual support, Siebel 7 Integration Adapter, a dictionary builder, and automated e-mail response functionality.
InQuira software is designed to allow businesses to use their Web sites as tools for acquiring new customers, cross-selling and up-selling products and services, reducing call center costs, and improving customer satisfaction. According to a company statement, InQuira 6.5 is designed to offer interactive Web self-service by helping customers find answers to their service or sales questions with 85 to 95 percent accuracy directly on the company's Web site.
Mike Murphy, CEO at InQuira, said that the heart of InQuira's accuracy rate is its capability to understand what the customer is looking. Murphy said the semantic processing engine improves the effectiveness of call center agents by enabling them to quickly and effectively find information from across a variety of applications, databases, documents and knowledge repositories from within their call center application. For example, if a customer sends an e-mail that says “do not send me any more catalogs,” it doesn't read that just see “send” and “catalog” and instruct mail room to send a catalog to that customer.
Murphy said InQuira has nine industries specific dictionaries that help the search engine understand content of the search or natural language request whether it comes from the Web browswer, phone, chat or e-mail. The InQuira service doesn't replace anything. “We optimize systems in place.”
“InQuira leverages advanced technology that understands customer and employee needs for information. This enables e-commerce and technical support sites to reduce costs by answering questions without human intervention,” said Sue Feldman, vice president Content Technologies Research at IDC.
New features in InQuira 6.5 include the following:
Multi-lingual Support: Introduces multilingual search for French, Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese. It also offers advanced semantic processing techniques to deliver improved accuracy over other engines, the capability to select sentence-level excerpts from searched content to deliver exact answers, the capability to integrate personalized marketing offers using business rules and synonym support, localized dynamic results user interface.
InQuira 6.5 Siebel Adapter: Designed to leverage corporate investments in Siebel implementations by providing access to Siebel business objects. In addition, the InQuira Siebel 7 Adapter allows users to search directly from within a Siebel application across all relevant content, regardless of where it exists within the enterprise. InQuira 6.5 can search natively within a variety of enterprise applications, databases, knowledge repositories, and Web sites, each of which can contain a variety of document formats. The InQuira Siebel 7 Adapter, the company said, has been developed using the Siebel EAI architecture and has been certified by Siebel Systems.
Dictionary Builder: Automates the creation and management of a company dictionary, which can include product names, product codes, feature names, company acronyms and other company-specific information.A GUI-based administration tool is designed to let customers scan product and service content for new concepts and relationships. These new terms can be merged into the existing dictionary.
E-mail Deflection: Optimizes investments in applications with the InQuira semantic processing engine. The E-mail Module is designed initially responds to customer e-mail requests with a small set of highly accurate and precise responses. If the customer is not satisfied with the response, the e-mail request is then passed on to the ERMS system. By deflecting these e-mails, InQuira 6.5 claims greatly reduce the volume of e-mails that need to be handled through the EMS.
InQuira 6.5 is available immediately and is certified to run on Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP, Unix Solaris v7, v8, v9 and Linux Kernel v2.2 and higher. The company said the software also supports all major application servers and Web servers. Structured data access is available for IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and any JDBC-compliant database.
