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Summary
Benchmark research from Ventana Research shows that while telephone-based communication is still the most popular way for customers to interact with companies, different forms of written communication are growing in importance. These present companies with a challenge in that responding to written communication is labor-intensive and therefore costly. Numero, a U.K.-based software company, has developed products based on natural language processing to help speed up this process and make it more effective. Ventana Research believes that companies’ responses to written communications can have a critical impact on their customers’ experiences, and so we urge companies to pay more attention to how they handle such correspondence.

Assessment
These days customers interact with companies through a number of channels, many of which are text-based: e-mail, postal mail, Web-based self-service and instant messaging. Processing text-based communications has been labor-intensive because the majority do not have a fixed and thus predictable data structure and therefore require employees to interpret them and respond individually. Numero has developed software products that address these issues and so help to ease the handling of text-based communications.

Numero began as an analytics company, evolved to develop automated e-mail response software and smarter analytics, and lately has developed products that automatically analyze the content of electronic text-based documents and automate the production of responses using rules and a workflow engine. The core of its current product suite, called SmartAgent, is a natural language-based text analytics tool. It can automatically analyze the content of electronic documents and, according to rules the user company defines, categorize the communication by type (for example, the cancellation of an order) and extract text from it into a structured record. The user can enhance this record further by applying more rules to locate additional data in other data sources, such as the customer’s full name and address.

Using further rules and workflow, SmartAgent then can prepare a suitable draft response to the communication, which an employee can personalize by inserting both the content of the original communication and the additional information collected from other data sources. The output can be placed in a template that has been customized according to the company’s internal standards for style and format. The workflow tool then directs the response to the most appropriate person or group for final review and dispatch. Creating responses automatically reduces the amount of manual effort, thereby speeding up the process and also making it more effective by customizing the content to both the type of communication and the customer. Numero claims that case studies it conducted  show that when the user applies the right rules and carefully crafts the standard response paragraphs, agents can handle three times as many e-mail messages compared to responding manually.

This overall process can be applied to most forms of text-based communication, including scanned documents and forms. A more innovative use is to improve Web-based customer self-service scripts.  SmartAgent allows companies to build question-and-answer scripts in a more natural language style, making them more intuitive for customers to use. These can include automated recognition of what the customer inputs, which can then be used in combination with built-in rules to automatically collect other relevant data or cause branching to different places within the overall script. This helps to reduce the amount customers have to input and makes the transaction more personalized.

SmartAgent also includes a comprehensive set of analytic reports that can help users identify processes that need improvement and agents who need more training.

Market Impact
Numero’s products draw on a combination of technologies that separately are used in other products to advance the processing of text-based communications and self-service. Vendors such as egain, RightNow and Talisma also have products that automate aspects of responses to email. Microsoft’s Automated Service Agent (ASA) uses natural language processing to help companies develop more intuitive Web-based self-service applications, and the product also can help develop scripts that are easier for agents to use. Numero combines all these techniques in an integrated product set that supports all these uses. We anticipate it will achieve market penetration in two areas of customer service that are critically important to companies: responding to e-mail and improving self-service.

Recommendation
Benchmark research from Ventana Research shows that as consumers shift to channels other than the telephone, e-mail volumes are increasing and so is the importance of handling them for companies. Similarly more customers are turning to the Web to transact business using self-service. How companies handle both of these channels is going to have a major impact on their customers’ experiences and thus retention rates. We recommend that companies examine carefully how they handle these interactions; as they look for ways to improve how they do so, we recommend that they evaluate Numero as a vendor to support those efforts.