intelliresponse virtual agent

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Patricia Seybold Group / Product Review

IntelliResponse Virtual Agent Virtual Agents that Are Fast and Easy to Deploy and that Deliver One Right Answer to Customers Questions

By Mitch Kramer, Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group May 10, 2013

NETTING IT OUT IntelliResponse Virtual Agent (IntelliResponse VA) is the virtual assisted-service offering from IntelliResponse Systems, Inc., a privately held supplier founded in 2000 and based in Toronto, ON, Canada.

Organizations purchase subscription licenses for cloud deployment of IntelliResponse VA. To date, IntelliResponse claims that 155 customer organizations have licensed it and have deployed more than 450 virtual agents.

IntelliResponse VA earns excellent grades on the Customer Service Report Card for Virtual Assisted-Serviceit Exceeds Requirements for Answers, for Question Analysis and Matching, Analytic Functionality, and Product Viability, and it Meets Requirements for customer service integration and company viability.

Use IntelliResponse VA to deploy virtual agents on web, contact center, social, and mobile channels. Customers can ask questions in any language and, on mobile devices, they can speak their questions. Virtual agents can deliver answers in any language and can answer in speech on mobile devices.

We recommend that B2C companies of any size consider IntelliResponse VA to add cross-channel virtual assisted-service to their customer service application portfolio. Its virtual agents are fast and easy to deploy and can deliver accurate and consistent answers to any customers questions, lowering cost to serve and improving customer satisfaction.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Answer Customers Questions and Solve Customers Problems Customer service products help organizations deliver answers to their customers questions and

solutions to their problems through their case management, knowledge management, search, account management, and social network management capabilities, capabilities that support self-service, as-sisted-service, and social-service channels. These products help answer and solve customers ques-tions and problems about products and services, about business policies, processes, and practices, or about the elements of their customer relationships such as accounts, bills, orders, and contracts.

Directlink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/pr05-10-13cc

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Virtual Assisted-Service Virtual assisted-service products and services use software to:

Solicit and receive customers questions, typically within a box on a web page, similar to the box for a chat session. Within the box are a text box into which customers enter their questions and an image of a person, a virtual agent.

Analyze customers questions to determine the meaning and the intent. Analyses are typically natural language processing (NLP) and linguistic analytics.

Match a customers question to the answer within a collection of predefined answers that best matches it. Matching also uses linguistic analytics. The collection of predefined answers is a knowledgebase.

Deliver the best answers to customers within the box on the web page.

Virtual assisted-service is virtual because it uses software to determine and to deliver answers to customers questions. Its assisted-service because it solicits questions and delivers answers in the style that live agents/customer service reps deliver answers on assisted-service channels. Customers escalate to virtual assisted-service from self-service activities when they have difficulty getting an-swers to their questions. Virtual agents are the faces of virtual assisted-service technology.

Virtual Assisted-Service Can Be a Low(er)-Cost Customer Service Channel Virtual assisted can be a low(er)-cost customer service channel. Its customer service software,

not customer service staff. It can lower cost-to-serve by avoiding or deflecting assisted-service chat sessions and/or contact center calls. It can also prevent or delay abandonment and improve customer satisfaction, delivering answers to customers who might otherwise leave rather than call.

The Best Virtual Assisted-ServiceFast and Accurate As it is for all customer service, the best virtual assisted-service is fast and accurate. Customers

wont wait very long. They access your sites on fast devices using fast connections on fast networks. Your processing of their questions should never be the bottleneck to their completing their activities in doing business with you.

Accuracy is the key. Customers want the right answer. Theyd prefer not to read a list of FAQs to match their questions with yours. (Thats what they expect a virtual agent to do for them.) They dont want to wade through pages of possible answers like theyre forced to do when they use Inter-net search.

INTELLIRESPONSE VIRTUAL AGENT

IntelliResponse Virtual Agent is the virtual assisted-service/virtual agent offering from IntelliRe-sponse Systems, Inc. IntelliResponse VA deploys on web pages, agent desktops, social networks, and mobile devices. Its virtual agents invite customers to ask them questions in text or, on mobile devices, in speech. Then, using IntelliResponse VAs patented analysis and matching technology, virtual agents find and deliver the Single Right Answer from their knowledgebases in text with images, links, and, optionally, data from external applications, or in speech.

IntelliResponse branded its virtual assisted-service offering as IntelliResponse Virtual Agent in 2012, but the offerings foundation technologies and the product that leverages them were introduced

IntelliResponse Virtual Agent 3

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in 2001. To date, IntelliResponse claims that 155 customer accounts have licensed IntelliResponse VA (and its predecessor offerings) for more than 450 product line, organization, application, and language deploymentsby far the largest customer base in the virtual agent market segment.

IntelliResponse VA deploys in the cloud. IntelliResponse offers subscription licenses for its de-ployment. The firm also offers professional services to help ensure successful deployments and to help in their ongoing refinement and management.

IntelliResponse Systems, Inc. IntelliResponse Systems, Inc. is a privately owned software supplier based in Toronto, ON. The

firm was founded in 2000 and currently has a staff of approximately 65 employees. IntelliResponse VA is IntelliResponses only product line, and IntelliResponse VA has always

been a customer service application, delivering the One Right Answer to customers questions, the core of customer service. Very recently, however, IntelliResponse has introduced analytic and rec-ommendation capabilities that enhance IntelliResponse VA and extend its usefulness to marketing. The new analytic capabilities examine customers questions to help organizations identify the themes in customers conversations. The new recommendation capabilities deliver offers within the context of virtual agents answers.

Whats New in IntelliResponse VA? Weve been evaluating IntelliResponse VA and its predecessor products since 2007. Our most

recent evaluation was of the predecessor IntelliResponse Answer Suite 6.0 (IntelliResponse AS) which we published in October 2010.

While the offerings core technology to match customers question with the one right answer in a knowledgebase has remained essentially the same, IntelliResponse has continued to make very significant improvements that leverage capabilities of the core technology. These include:

Offerings for small and mid-sized businesses and higher education institutes: irSMB and irSC

Mobile device support

IntelliResponse Virtual Agent branding

Language support, including support for languages with double byte encoding

i.Suggestvirtual agents suggest answers as customers type their questions

IntelliVoicespeech-enabled virtual agents on mobile devices

New branding

New applications

Late in 2011, IntelliResponse announced irSmallCampus Version 1.1 and irSmartBusiness Ver-sion 1.1. irSC/irSMB are strategic offerings for two reasons. First, they address scope, scale, and pricing requirements for virtual assisted-service in the small and mid-sized markets for educational institutions and commercial enterprises, extending IntelliResponses reach in the market. Second, and perhaps more significantly, they demonstrate that deployment of virtual agents can be a self-service process rather than a consulting project. Future product versions, including IntelliResponse VA 6.2, the subject of this product evaluation, include the technology, the tools, and the processes that enable the self-service deployment of irSC and irSMB.

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On July 11 2011, IntelliResponse announced native support for the Android platform for its products. IntelliResponse had supported native Apple iPhone and RIM Blackberry through WAP. Android is an important addition.

IntelliResponse rebranded its offering as IntelliResponse Virtual Agent during 2Q2012. Virtual agent branding takes advantage of a hot customer service trend, and it more accurately describes the capabilities, features, and benefits of the product. The product had been called IntelliResponse An-swer Suite and, before that, simply IntelliResponse.

IntelliResponse announced IntelliResponse VA 6.2 on June 7, 2012. IntelliResponse 6.2 has two major new features: IntelliResponse for Global Markets and i.Suggest (i.Suggest was called In-telliSuggest at announcement).

IntelliResponse for Global Markets adds internationalization capabilities and support for double byte languages including Japanese, Korean, and the Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min languages of Chinese. It makes the offering more attractive to global organizations and expands IntelliResponses market reach from North America and Europe to Asia.

i.Suggest is a major enhancement to the products question analysis and matching capabilities. It mimics the style of predictive search, delivering suggested answers as customers type their questions. However, where conventional search approaches look for exact matches on question content, i.Suggest uses IntelliResponses patented matching technology to determine the intent of customers questions to suggest the most appropriate match. Results from beta customers demonstrated a 21 percent improvement in the accuracy of answers, and a 22 percent reduction in customer effort (the number of questions customers ask in a single session to complete a task).

IntelliResponse announced IntelliVoice on November 9, 2012. IntelliVoice is a new feature of IntelliResponse VA, that supports voice on mobile devices, letting customers using iPhones and An-droid devices speak their questions and lets IntelliResponse VAs virtual agents speak answers in re-sponse. IntelliVoice uses industry standard voice recognition technology to convert spoken customers questions to text and uses IntelliResponse VAs knowledge management technology to analyze the questions and match them to a single right answer. Then it uses text to speech technol-ogy to convert the answer to speech and have virtual agents deliver it to the customer. It also delivers the response in text.

IntelliVoice is the first virtual assisted-service offering to let customers and virtual agents speak with each other. Its a mode of mobile communications that many customers already want to use. Siri on Apple iPhones has demonstrated the usefulness and has proven effectiveness of virtual agents and spoken questions and answers. However, whether they communicate by speaking or by typing, mobile devices are becoming customers preferred self-service channel. Virtual agents must be able to answer both spoken and typed questions on the mobile channel.

As we write this product evaluation report, IntelliResponse introduced new applications and new packaging for IntelliResponse VA. The new applications leverage IntelliResponse VAs core ques-tion analysis and matching technology and apply it to CRM and marketing applications. In addition to delivering the One Right Answer to a customers question, IntelliResponse VA now determines and records a code that represents the intent of the question. Intents are critical to understanding cus-tomer interests, preference, and behavior, critical factors within satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability. IntelliResponse VA integration with CRM systems transfers intent codes to the customer profile re-cords of CRM systems. Understanding intent is also key to making effective marketing offers. De-livering marketing offers within the answers to customers questions is another new IntelliResponse



VA application. Think of it as one right answer coupled with one right offer. Its anther virtual agent first for IntelliResponse.

The new packaging organizes IntelliResponse VA into application-specific and channel-specific components. Applications components are customer service (IntelliResponse ANSWERS), report-ing/analytics and Voice of the Customer themes (IntelliResponse VOICES), and marketing offers (IntelliResponse OFFERS). Channels components are mobile, which includes IntelliVoice, and the combination of web, social, and agent. Well get into a bit more detail on packaging in the Customer Service Best Fit section of this report.

Now, lets evaluate IntelliResponse VA.

FRAMEWORK FOR EVALUATING VIRTUAL ASSISTED-SERVICE PRODUCTS

This report presents our evaluation of IntelliResponse VA ActiveAgent against our framework for evaluating virtual assisted-service products and services. The framework has these top-level evaluation criteria. Each has sets of sub-criteria that we evaluate in detail for each customer social-service product.

Customer service best fit Virtual agent technology Analytic functionality Viability

In the next sections of this report, well present our evaluation of IntelliResponse VA against each of these criteria. Well also describe the criteria and their sub-criteria in a little more detail prior to the evaluations. Finally, well summarize our evaluations in our Virtual Assisted-Service Report Card.

CUSTOMER SERVICE BEST FIT

Key Characteristics for Fast Evaluation of Customer Service Products and Services The Customer Service Best Fit evaluation criterion presents information and analysis that classi-

fies and describes customer service products and services. Customer Service Best Fit speeds evalua-tion and selection by presenting easy-to-evaluate characteristics. For example, if yours is an international organization in the financial services business, then a quick glance at the Positioning and Target Markets sub criterion row of the Customer Service Best Fit table will let you see whether financial services is within the industries that the customer service supplier targets and whether the supplier targets and support international organizations. If so, then continue to our detailed analysis and evaluation. If not, move on to the next customer service product or service.

For virtual assisted-service, Customer Service Best Fit comprises these evaluation criteria:

Virtual agent approach Deployment Environments Positioning and target markets Pricing and packaging Customer base Alternatives

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Customer Service Best Fit for IntelliResponse Virtual Agent In Table 1, we present our evaluation of Customer Service Best Fit for IntelliResponse Virtual

Agent. Our analysis follows the table.

Customer Service Best Fit for IntelliResponse Virtual Agent

Criterion Description

Virtual agent approach

IntelliResponse VA virtual agents deploy on web sites, agent desktops, mobile devices, and social networks.

Customers ask questions by entering text in a search box, in a chat box, or, on Android and IOS devices, by speaking. Virtual agents deliver a single right answer within the text or speech context of customers questions.

Customers ask questions as text strings of words and phrases. IntelliResponse VA virtual agents deliver answers as text with images, links, and/or URLs or as spoken words, phrases, or sentences. IntelliResponse offers integration services for including data from external applications within answers.

IntelliResponse VA uses the translation facilities of Google for language support. As a result, customers may ask questions and receive answers in most Western and Asian languages.

IntelliResponse VA uses rules-based machine learning technology to match customers questions with answers. IntelliResponse VA stores and manages answers, prototypical questions, which are called Representative Questions, and matching rules, which are called Criteria, in a knowledgebase. Analysts specify answers and Representative Questions to deploy instances of IntelliResponse VA. IntelliResponse VA automatically generates matching rules.

IntelliResponse VA packages integration with chat, email, contact center, web self-service, community, and social network applications. See Customer Service Integration for details.

Deployment IntelliResponse Virtual Agent deploys in the cloud. IntelliResponse uses SSAE16/SOC3 certified third-party cloud computing services which have sites in Toronto, ON and Boston, MA

Environments IntelliResponse VA supports these browsers: Apple Safari

Google Chrome

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Mozilla Firefox.

IntelliResponse VA supports Apple IOS and Google Android devices via native apps. IntelliResponse VA also supports all mobile devices via WAP.



Customer Service Best Fit for IntelliResponse Virtual Agent (continued)


Packaging Components

ANSWERS is the virtual agent application for customer service on web, mobile, and social channels.

CRM CONNECT delivers summaries and question intent codes of customer/virtual agent sessions to CRM systems.

Integration provides integration of external applications through Web Service.

VOICES is a Voice of the Customer application that identifies the themes in customers questions and presents them visually and interactively.

OFFERS is a marketing/recommendation application that leverages VOICES to include offers within answers to customers question.

Enabling technologies

o i.Match question analysis and matching

o i.Connect automatic generation of matching rules

o i.Suggest predictive analysis and matching

Suites

The base IntelliResponse VA suite includes ANSWERS, CRM CONNECT, multi-channel access through web, mobile, agent and social channels, and the enabling technologies.

OFFERS and VOICES are optional modules that can be bundled at initial licensing or added-on anytime after deployment into the base IntelliResponse VA suite.

Pricing IntelliResponse offers IntelliResponse Virtual Agent suites on an annual subscription basis for deployment in the cloud.

Subscription fees are based on a forecasted volume of customer questions that virtual agents will answer during a 12 month period. The fees are fixed to provide budget predictability.

Typical year one price of the vaService suite for enterprise clients is $100,000. Subscriptions are typically two years or more. Pricing includes turnkey implementation services called QuikStart and monthly knowledge management and analytics services called SmartSource for a single knowledgebase, but an unlimited number of deployments.

IntelliResponse guarantees that a deployment can be live with QuikStart within 60-90 days and claims that all of its customer contracts since 2007 included QuikStart.

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Customer Service Best Fit for IntelliResponse Virtual Agent (continued)


Positioning IntelliResponses positioning for IntelliResponse VA has these elements: Engagement. Useful, enjoyable, and actionable customer experience.

Answers. Relevant and accurate answers to customers questions.

Access. Broad support for channels and languages.

Insight. Collection and analysis of customers question to identify actionable insights and for continuous refinement and improvement of customer experience.

Target markets Industry

Consumer electronics

Financial services

Government

Higher education

Telecommunications

Travel and entertainment

Utilities

Organization size

Enterprise-class

Geography

Asia

Europe

Middle East

North America

South America

Customer base IntelliResponse claims that 155 customer organizations have licensed IntelliResponse VA for 450 deployments.

Alternatives IntelliResponse Virtual Agent competes most closely against: Creative Virtual V-Person

Next IT ActiveAgent

Nuance Nina Web

Oracle RightNow Cloud Service

2013 Patricia Seybold Group, Inc.

Table A. We present the Customer Service Best Fit for IntelliResponse VA in this table.

Based on the details of Customer Service Best Fit that are presented in Table 1, the drivers for

selecting IntelliResponse VA are:

One Right Answer.

Fast and easy deployment. Specification and management of answers and the questions that typically match them are the key tasks that client organizations perform to deploy



virtual agents. Deployments can be completed with little or no consulting services from IntelliResponse.

Virtual agents that support many channels and that understand questions and deliver One Right Answer in many languages and in speech.

VoC analytics that deliver useful, high-value insights to customer service, product, and marketing staff.

Attractive to B2C organizations of any size, especially for those organizations in financial services, higher education, and utilities and for account management and billing, and staff support (HR, benefits, payroll) applications.

One Right Answer IntelliResponse VA deployments really do deliver One Right Answer to customers questions

typically 80 to 85 percent of the time at initial deployment and 90 percent of the time or better after a virtual agent gets some experience. Its analysis and matching algorithms are built on machine learn-ing technology, and IntelliResponse provides learning facilities that improve answer accuracy with usage. Weve seen this level of accuracy within the deployments of IntelliResponses clients and within the environments that IntelliResponse gave us to evaluate IntelliResponse VA.

Fast and Easy Deployment IntelliResponse VAs fast and easy deployment comes from using machine learning technology

for analyzing and matching customers questions and from the facilities and tools that IntelliRe-sponse has built specifically to automate the generation of matching rules and to improve accuracy through their refinement with virtual agent usage. IntelliResponse VA automates most deployment tasks. IntelliResponse VAs clients have only to specify a small number of representative or proto-typical questions (IntelliResponse calls them RQs for Representative Questions) and the knowledge items that answer them. The technologies do the restgenerating rules (IntelliResponse calls them Criteria) that match the possible variations of RQs to knowledgebase answers at design time and us-ing those rules to analyze and match customers questions at run time. IntelliResponse VA also pro-vides facilities to extend and refine RQs and matching rules to improve effectiveness and expand scope. The approach is simple, elegant, and, over the years, proven to be effective and increasingly efficient. Virtual agents typically deliver the One Right Answer 85 to 90 percent of the time. And virtual agent deployment can approach a self-service process.

Channels, Languages, and Speech IntelliResponse VA supports web, mobile and social channels, the self-service channels that cus-

tomers most commonly use to get answers to their questions. IntelliResponse VA also supports as-sisted-service channels. So agents and customer supports reps can get answers from virtual agents, too. Thats important when an agent doesnt speak a customers language.

English is IntelliResponse VAs native language, and English is the language for its tools and fa-cilities for deploying and managing virtual agents. However, virtual agents can understand custom-ers questions and deliver answers a wide array of Western and Asian languages whether theyre entered in text or, on mobile devices, in speech. In Table B, we outline how IntelliResponse VA sup-ports languages and speech.

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Language and Speech Support

Tasks Language Support Speech Support

Design time Specify Representative Questions in the target languages

Use the Google translation engine to translate RQs in the target language to RQs in English

Use RQs in English to generate matching rules in English

Specify answers (knowledgebase Responses) in the target languages and save them in the IntelliResponse VA knowledgebase

Specify Representative Questions in English

Use RQs in English to generate matching rules in English

Specify answers in English

Use Google Nuance to transform English answers to answers in speech

Run time Customer asks a question in one of the target language

IntelliResponse VA uses Google translation engine to translate the question to English

IntelliResponse VA matches English question to answer in English

IntelliResponse VA finds the corresponding answer in the target language

Virtual agent delivers the answer in target language to the customer

Customer on a mobile device speaks a question

IntelliResponse VA uses Google Voice or Nuance technology to translate and transform the question into text

IntelliResponse VA matches textual question to a textural answer in its knowledgebase

IntelliResponse VA finds the corresponding answer in speech

Virtual agent speaks the answer in target language to the customer and also provides the text answer


Table B. We describe support for languages and speech IntelliResponse VA in this table.

IntelliResponses developers have taken a clever and practical approach for language and speech

support. The approach uses industry-leading translation and text-to-speech technologies and lever-ages, without modification, IntelliResponses matching and automatic matching rule generation tech-nologies. For language support, the additional work required of knowledge management staff is the specification and management of Representative Questions and answers in target languages. In-telliResponse feels that automated translation technologies do not do a good job with culture, style, and idiom. Dynamically translated answers do not seem natural. Their accent is typically very strong. For speech support, the only additional work is to ensure that updates to spoken answers are synchronized with updates to their textual counterparts.



VoC Analytics VOICES is IntelliResponses new Voice of the Customer (VoC) offering. It applies NLP and

statistics analytics to customers questions on web, agent, mobile, and social channels to identify their themes or topics. VOICES then presents the results of this analysis within visual and interactive word cloud-style charts, each theme is shown in a cloud or a bubble that make it easy to understand the themes that it identifies. See Illustration 1.

VOICES Theme Bubbles

2013 IntelliResponse Systems, Inc.

1. This illustration shows the credit card themes over the last month largest bubbles show the most important themes.

VOICES analyzes all questions of all customers across all channels. It extends the application of

IntelliResponse VA from virtual-assisted customer service to VoC, from delivering answers to cus-tomers questions, to providing customer service, product, and even marketing staff with information critical to developing, implementing, measuring, analyzing, and refining their strategies, plans, and programs. VOICES is a powerful analytic application for IntelliResponse VA, a significant strength and differentiator.

B2C Businesses While IntelliResponse targets large enterprises, IntelliResponse VAs fast and easy deployment

makes it attractive to B2C business of any size in the industry segments targeted by IntelliResponse. Here are a few examples of IntelliResponse VA virtual agents for RBC Bank (Royal Bank of Can-ada); Avista, an electric and natural gas utility in Spokane, WA; and Copa Airlines, an airline based in Panama that serves Latin America.

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RBC Banks Virtual Agent

2013 Royal Bank of Canada

2. This illustration shows the IntelliResponse VA deployment for the RBC Advice Centre.



Avistas Virtual Agent

2013 Avista Corporation

3. This illustration shows the IntelliResponse VA deployment for Avista, an electric and natural gas provider based in Spokane, WA with 680,000 customers in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

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Ana, Copa Airlines Virtual Agent

2013 Copa Airlines, Inc.

4. This illustration shows Ana, the IntelliResponse VA virtual agent for Copa Airlines.



Alternatives Creative Virtual V-Person, Next IT ActiveAgent, and Nuance Nina Web are the closest alterna-

tives to IntelliResponse VA. At a high level, all of these offerings are quite similar. They provide cross-channel customer service and deliver a single answer to customers questions. Deeper analysis differentiates the alternatives. Technology for analyzing and matching questions is the most funda-mental difference between IntelliResponse VA and its competition.

Competitors use natural language processing (NLP) technology for question analysis and match-ing. Their key deployment task is building an NLP model that represents a business, that businesss vocabulary, its products and product vocabulary, and its customers questions and vocabulary. Its a large and complex task that requires the consulting services of the virtual agent supplier. These ser-vices are also required to manage the deployment as customers questions change, required modifi-cations to the NLP model.

As weve mentioned, question analysis and matching in IntelliResponse VA is based on machine learning technology. Answers are as accurate as NLP implementations. Virtual agent deployment and management is faster and easier, approaching a self-service task.

VIRTUAL ASSISTED-SERVICE TECHNOLOGY

Technology is what powers virtual assisted-service. So, technology is a key factor in compari-son, evaluation, and selection. Weve defined three criteria for technology evaluation. We examine the virtual assisted-service technologies that:

Create and manage the collection of predefined answersthe knowledge management of virtual assisted-service.

Analyzes customers questions and matches customers questions to the best answer from within a collection of predefined answers.

Integrates a virtual assisted-service offering into a customer service applications portfoliocase management, account management, contact center, knowledge management, social-service.

ANSWERSKNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN VIRTUAL ASSISTED-SERVICE

Knowledge management is, in most respects, content management. Knowledge items are spe-cial-purpose content, content that answers customers questions and/or solves their problems. Au-thoring, editing, and management of knowledge items are the critical tasks for implementing and maintaining the knowledgebase(s) of virtual assisted-service products, and these products must in-clude (knowledge management) services and tools for performing these tasks.

We evaluate answers similarly to the way that we evaluate the more general knowledge man-agement of other customer service applications. Evaluation criteria are:

Knowledgebase. Within this evaluation criterion, we describe the organization and implementation of the knowledgebase(s) that are used in a virtual assisted-service product.

Knowledge model. The knowledge model specifies the types of the knowledge items that are stored and managed within a virtual assisted-service product. We also examine

16 Product Review


the properties or attributes of knowledge items. Properties/attributes facilitate managing knowledge items.

Knowledge management services. Knowledge management services are the facilities included within a virtual assisted-service product for creating, editing, and managing knowledge items.

Samples and examples simplify and speed the deployment and management of a virtual assisted-service product through predefined and packaged knowledge items. Samples and examples may be general purpose, domain specific, and/or language specific.

Answers for IntelliResponse Virtual Agent We describe Answers for IntelliResponse Virtual Agent in Table C. Our analysis follows the ta-

ble. Note that most of the capabilities that IntelliResponse VA provides for the Answers section of our evaluation is provided by its ANSWERS component.

IntelliResponse VA Answers


Knowledgebase IntelliResponse VA uses either a single knowledgebase that supports all channels and all languages or multiple, language-specific, channel-specific, or application-specific knowledgebases.

The knowledgebase contains knowledge items, which are Responses, and findability/matching items, which are Representative Questions, Canned Expressions, and Criteria.

The knowledgebase may be partitioned into Interfaces to support multiple languages and to support separate product lines and/or applications. Each Interface contains knowledge items and findability items, although Canned Expressions are shared across Interfaces.

IntelliResponse VA supports the languages supported by Google translation.

For reuse and management, IntelliResponse VA organizes Responses within a hierarchy of Categories and Canned Expressions within a hierarchy of Canned Expression Categories.

Administrators and analysts create, edit, publish, and remove RQs, Responses, Criteria, and Canned Expressions to deploy and manage an IntelliResponse VA virtual agent. IntelliResponse VA provides services for these tasks and tools that administrators and analysts use to perform them.

Knowledge Model Responses are the answers to customers questions. Each Response has a Title and a Body. The Title, a text string, is the primary question that the Response answers. The Body is the answer. A Response Body may include text, hyperlinks, media, Titles of and links to other Responses (related Responses), and/or the Body of other Responses (appended Responses). A Responses Body may be implemented within an HTML table.



IntelliResponse VA Answers (continued)


Knowledge Model (continued)

Responses have Last Modified Date, Last Modified By, Locked Date, and Locked By properties to facilitate their management and reuse. Administrators use Responses Titles to find them and work with them. IntelliResponse VAs reports also identify Responses by their Titles.

Responses have three types of relationships: Related Responses, Appended Responses, and Suggested Responses. Administrators specify related and appended Responses. IntelliResponse VA automatically generates Suggested Responses.

o Related Responses are a list of selected Responses that will always be displayed in addition to the primary answer. These are Responses that are directly related or Responses that the company wishes to promote.

o Appended Responses are the textual content of other Responses appended to the end of a given Response.

o Suggested Responses are Responses generated by IntelliResponse VA when the matching algorithm cannot find a One Correct Response. IntelliResponse VA presents them in a You may be interested in or a May I suggest list.

Representative Questions, Criteria, and Canned Expressions are IntelliResponse VAs findability and matching items.

o Representative Questions are the set of prototypical questions that customers most commonly ask within the form and syntax that customers most typically ask them.

o Criteria are matching rules. They are expressions of terms, Canned Expressions, and wildcards connected by AND, OR, NOT, and GROUP operators.

o Canned Expressions are words and phrases that customers commonly use within their questions. CEs also include the most common synonyms, stems, and misspellings.

A hierarchy of Categories and Subcategories classifies knowledge items and facilitates knowledge management. Each Interface has its own Category hierarchy for Responses. Note that the matching algorithm does not use Categories to help find answers.

Canned Expressions can be classified across Interfaces within a hierarchy of Canned Expression Categories and Canned Expression Subcategories to facilitate their reuse and management.

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IntelliResponse VA Answers (continued)


Knowledge management services

Create, edit, delete Interfaces, Representative Questions, Responses, Criteria, Canned Expressions.

Suggest substitute terms in RQs (ACES Automated Canned Expression Substitutionautomated recommendations for modifying the terms in RQs).

Assign Representative Questions to a Response, generate Criteria for RQs automatically.

Lock/unlock (check-out/check-in), preview, test, enable/disable (publish/retire) Responses.

Create, edit, delete Response Categories and Canned Expression Categories.

Create, assign, update, view, and remove Tasks. Tasks have due dates, assigned to, status, and comment properties. IntelliResponse VA can link Tasks to customer questions, customer sessions, or Responses.

Samples and examples

IntelliResponse packages ACG templates that contain industry-specific and application-specific Responses, CEs, Criteria, and RQs. These have been developed from IntelliResponses experience in more than 450 implementations within financial services, higher education, and utilities industries and account management, billing, and staff support applications.


Table C. We describe Answers for IntelliResponse VA in this table.

IntelliResponse VA answer technology is very good. Capabilities approach those found in gen-

eral-purpose knowledge management systems, and, in fact, thats how we last evaluated IntelliRe-sponse VA. Strengths are a knowledge model that is well suited for virtual agent applications, a large set of powerful knowledge management services with high levels of automation, and reusable sam-ples, which further speed and simplify deployment.

Offering few properties for managing answers remains a limitation, although a minor one. Au-thors and editors find Responses by their Titles through the Categories hierarchy. Responses have identifiers but no names or other identifiers. Properties for change management have been improved significantly since our last evaluation, and IntelliResponse VA now implements version control through its Locked properties and Lock service. Name, ID, author, created date, created by, and, per-haps, assigned date and assigned to properties would help answer management, especially for large deployments.

Virtual Agent Knowledge Model Customers ask questions; in response, virtual agents deliver answers. IntelliResponse VAs

knowledge model supports exactly these interactions. Responses contain the question, the answer, and some, but not too much, related information. Responses three types of relationships provide ad-ditional, related information, or alternative information when virtual agents dont have the answers.



(Note that Body of Responses can be extended to include data from external applications through Web Service programming. Well discuss that topic in Customer Service Integration, below.)

Powerful and Automated Knowledge Management Services Knowledge management services are excellent. IntelliResponse VA packages services required

to support a knowledge lifecyclecreating, editing, and deleting knowledge resources and for pub-lishing, archiving, and managing changes to knowledge items. IntelliResponse VA also has innova-tive servicesAutomatic Criteria Generation (ACG) and Automatic Canned Expression Substitution (ACES)that generate matching rules and the terms and phrases that the rules containautomatically. Triage helps authors and editors manage and refine Responses to reflect the actual questions that customers ask. Test services give authors and editors feedback about how effective RQs and Criteria will be in matching customers questions to Responses.

Specification of matching rules is the most difficult and time consuming design time task for ini-tial virtual agent deployment. Its a task that usually requires the assistance of the virtual agent sup-pliers consultants. Not the case with IntelliResponse VA. ACG generates the rules completely for every Response from a set of RQs. Illustration 5 shows an example.

Automatic Criteria Generation


5. This illustration shows an example of ACG from the RQs for an RQ about ordering policies.

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Criteria generated by ACG use the words and phrases contained within the RQs specified by knowledge authors and editors or reused from IntelliResponse VAs ACG templates. Automatic Canned Expression Substitution suggests additional or alternative words and phrases based on In-telliResponses industry and application experience and expertise. Illustration 6 shows an example of ACES suggestions.

Canned Expressions


6. This illustration shows the suggested substitutions for the terms in the ordering policy example in Illustration 5.

Testing facilities are very good. IntelliResponse VA provides three levels of testing services. The

Interactive Test service presents the Responses that match a specified test question. Results are color coded, yellow for Responses that fully match the most words in the question, green for Responses that fully match but with fewer words than yellow, and red for Responses with partial matches. See Illustration 7.



Test Output


7. This illustration shows the output of Test.

The Individual Response Test tests a Responses Criteria against a specified question. Results

are a number from 0 to 1.0. A result of 1.0 indicates that the Criteria satisfy the question. A result less than 1.0 indicates that the Criteria do not satisfy the question and should be reevaluated. The Validate All test produces a report that, for each Response, presents Titles of other Responses that match the Responses Criteria equally well or better than the Responses own Title.

Triage helps authors and editors refine and improve matching by assigning actual, unanswered customers questions to existing or to new Responses, ensuring that those questions will be answered the next time that customers ask them. The Triage process starts with a list of unanswered questions. Authors and editors drag an unanswered question to a Response to add it to the RQs for that Re-sponse and Test it to ensure that the Criteria for the newly refined set of RQs really does match the Response. (See Illustration 8.) Then they use ACG to regenerate the Responses Criteria, ACES to refine the Criterias terms and phrases.

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Triage


8. This illustration shows the Triage step of adding a new RQ to a Response.

Reusable Samples ACG templates give authors and editors a boost in specifying RQs and Responses, the only

knowledge management tasks that they must perform to deploy an IntelliResponse VA virtual agent. Each industry or application ACG template contains Responses (Titles and Bodies), RQs, and CEsthe knowledge resources required for an initial IntelliResponse VA virtual agent deployment and those (CEs) to help the ongoing knowledge improvement process. These reusable samples come from IntelliResponses long and experience and deep expertise developed from helping 155 clients deploy IntelliResponse VA since 2001. IntelliResponse will release an ACG template for telecom-munications soon. It will cover Internet, telephone, television and mobile, and billing/accounts.

ANALYZING AND MATCHING QUESTIONS

The technologies that analyze customers questions and match them to the best answers are core mechanisms of virtual assisted-service products and services. These are the technologies that deliver fast and accurate answers. Evaluation of their implementation and application is critical to compari-son, differentiation, and selection.

We evaluate analyzing and matching question using these criteria:

Approach, which provides a high-level description of analysis and matching.



Question syntax supported, which describes and analyzes the supported types and supported languages of customers questions. Most basically, an offering might support keywords queries in English, for example.

Question analysis and matching provides the details of analysis and matching technologies and processing.

Analyzing and Matching Questions in IntelliResponse VA In Table D, we present the approach, question syntax supported, details, and answer presentation

for Analyzing and Matching Questions for IntelliResponse VA. Our analysis follows the table.

Analyzing and Matching Questions in IntelliResponse VA


Approach The goal for analyzing and matching customers questions is to find the best match, the One Right Answer. In fact, IntelliResponse VA may return one, multiple, or no right answers.

IntelliResponse VA uses machine learning technology for analysis and matching.

IntelliResponse VA matches the important words within customers questions against the words in the Criteria of the Responses in its knowledgebase.

The new i.Suggest feature helps find answers more quickly by matching the important words from partial questions as customers type them.

If IntelliResponse VA does not find a matching Response, then the virtual agent delivers an I dont know answer that offers actions for customers to take to get answersescalate to email, chat, or telephone, for example.

Question syntax Customers enter questions as text stringskeywords, phrases, or sentencesin their preferred language or, on mobile devices, in speech.

Question analysis and matching

IntelliResponse VAs question analysis and matching process follows these steps:

1. Normalize the question by removing spaces, punctuation, special characters, and by converting all capitals to lower case.

2. Compare the normalized question against the Criteria of all Responses in the appropriate knowledgebase Interface.

3. Build a matched list of Responses with Criteria that match the words in the normalized question.

4. Count the number of matching relevant words and matching total words for each Response in the matched list.

5. Present the Response that is a full match with the highest matching relevant word counts and total word counts as the One Right Answer.


Table D. We describe how IntelliResponse VA Analyzes and Matches Questions in this table.

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IntelliResponse is very good at analyzing and matching customers questions with knowledge-base answers. At initial deployment, IntelliResponse delivers One Right Answer 80 to 85 percent of the time. Matching accuracy improves to 90 percent and higher with experience as knowledge au-thors and editors refine RQs through the Triage and testing process that we described in the Answers section of this report, giving the matching algorithm better information to use.

The new i.Suggest feature can speed the matching process by matching partial questions as cus-tomers type them and presenting them in a list below the text box. As more words are typed, i.Suggest refines the matches by eliminating low probability options and moving and highlighting the highest probability matches to the top of the suggested list of matching questions. If a user selects one of the suggestions (most likely the first option), then i.Suggest considers the selection to be the correct answer. i.Suggests processing differs significantly from search suggestion. Search sugges-tions match keywords in customers question. i.Suggest matches question intents. For example, as we show in Illustration 9, if a customer types close to close a credit card account, i.Suggest match will present possible answers that also include cancel by recognizing in its Criteria that the intent is the same.

i.Suggest has demonstrated its usefulness and value where customers, especially customers in Japan, typically search by keyword, or for internal agents who want to type the minimum number of characters/words to find a correct match.

i.Suggest


9. This illustration shows how i.Suggest speeds the matching process by suggesting questions as customers enter their questions.



Note that the matching algorithm does not include some features found in search engines such as spelling correction. Rather, knowledge authors and editors accommodate typos, misspellings, slang, and idioms within Criteria, although ACG automatically generates stems.

CUSTOMER SERVICE INTEGRATION

Through integration with external customer service applications, virtual agents can escalate to assisted-service chat or contact center telephone channels, deliver virtual assisted-service on social networks, and/or can answer a wider range of questions, such as questions that involve the data in cases and accounts. Integration makes virtual agents more powerful, creating a richer, broader, and deeper virtual assisted-service experience. Integration lowers cost to serve, deflecting/avoiding high-cost integrations with real agents.

We evaluate customer service integration by examining the packaged integrations and the inte-gration mechanisms between virtual assisted-service products and these types of external customer service applications:

Case management Contact center Knowledge management Account management Social networks

Customer Service Integration for IntelliResponse Virtual Agent We describe the customer service integration for IntelliResponse Virtual Agent in Table E. Our

analysis follows the table.

Customer Service Integration for IntelliResponse VA

Application Integration

Case management Packaged integration with Salesforce Service Cloud, planned for general availability in the spring of 2013, allows IntelliResponse VA to create cases and send e-mails. Transcripts of virtual agent sessions are transferred to Salesforce Service Cloud along with case information.

Assisted-service Contact center

Through integration chat and email response management applications, customers can escalate to live assisted-service when the virtual assisted-service of IntelliResponse VA virtual agents cannot answer their questions.

IntelliResponse VA packages integration with these chat applications:

ICE Chat Liveperson Oracle Live Help on Demand

IntelliResponse VA packages integration with this email management application:

Emailtopia

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Customer Service Integration for IntelliResponse VA (continued)

Application Integration

Assisted-service Contact center (continued)

Integration with the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service and Salesforce Service Cloud contact center applications enables the deployment of IntelliResponse VA on agents desktops to help agents answer customers questions.

Knowledge management

IntelliResponse VA does not package integration with knowledge management systems.

Account management IntelliResponse VA does not package integration with applications such as CRM systems that provide account management capabilities.

Social-service Through integration with online community applications, community members can escalate to the virtual assisted-service of IntelliResponse VA virtual agents when their peer community members cannot answer their questions.

IntelliResponse VA virtual agents can be deployed on these online community applications:

Jive

Lithium

IntelliResponse provides documentation for deploying IntelliResponse VA virtual agents on clients corporate Facebook pages.


Table E. We describe the customer service integration of IntelliResponse VA in this table.

Customer service integration for IntelliResponse VA is good and improving. The tightest are the

planned and soon to be available integration with Salesforce Service Cloud for case management and the integrations with chat and email management applications and online communities. While there is no packaged direct integration for account management, IntelliResponse VA provides two ap-proaches for this integration. First, the integrations can be accomplished indirectly through chat. For example, customers might ask a virtual agent about the charges on a bill. The virtual agent, having no answers for those questions would provide a link to escalate to chat. Then the chat agent would answer the question by accessing the billing system. Second, and more directly, IntelliResponse of-fers custom but reusable integration through Web Services interfaces available to all customers, or programming performed by its professional services staff. This integration approach creates interac-tion templates containing tokens that represent data to be accessed by (any) external application that was a by-product of the customer interaction. Their access passes parameters extracted from custom-ers questions that identify the external application and the data. This is a clean and elegant integra-tion approach. IntelliResponse might consider packaging this integration for the leading CRM suites. Illustration 10 shows an example of Web Service integration between IntelliResponse VA and Ora-cle RightNow Cloud Service.



Customer Service Integration


10. This illustration shows an example of Web Services integration between IntelliResponse VA and Oracle Live Help.

Note that, while customer service integration in IntelliResponse VA does not package facilities

to pull account data from CRM and other external applications, CRM CONNECT pushes valuable account management information to themthe question/session interaction data and the intent codes, which are identified by its matching engine. This is information that can help in the understanding of customer preferences and in the targeting of customer service and marketing campaigns. Currently CRM CONNECT provides packaged integration to Oracle RightNow Cloud Service and Salesforce CRM.

ANALYTIC FUNCTIONALITY

Its critical to measure, monitor, and analyze the tasks and activities that virtual agents perform in answering customers questions. Analysts use the results of this analysis to understand customer behavior and virtual agent effectiveness and to refine/tune the knowledge and search facilities of vir-tual assisted-service systems. Virtual assisted-service products must support this operations-analysis-refinement loop.

The factors that we evaluate for analytic functionality are:

Instrumentation, the collection of data about customer actions and virtual agent responses.

Reports, which present information derived from instrumented data about customer behavior, virtual agent behavior, virtual agent performance, search performance, and

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knowledge performance. We look for a large packaged set of useful reports, tools for customizing packaged reports, and tools for creating new reports.

Analytics that apply algorithms to instrumented data to uncover deeper insights than is possible with reporting.

Analytic Functionality for IntelliResponse VA In Table F, we evaluate the analytic functionality for IntelliResponse Virtual Agent. Our analysis

follows the table.

IntelliResponse Virtual Agent Analytic Functionality

Factor Description

Instrumentation IntelliResponse VA is comprehensively instrumented. The product logs all activities by all usersquestions and emails from customers; knowledgebase actions by authors, editors, and administrators; and email/case management activities by agents. The product also logs information about the Responses that it delivers to customers. In addition, the product logs Web Services-based requests. The instrumented data is organized within a datamart that is implemented within an RDBMS. Reporting tools access the datamart. IntelliResponse Systems does not publish the schema of the datamart.

Reports and Analytics

IntelliResponse Answer Suite includes five levels of reports and analytics.

Dashboard presents the highest level view of question activity for an IntelliResponse VA deployment through three displays that present customers questions by channel and source, top answers, and number of customers questions over time.

Reports. IntelliResponse VA packages three sets of predefined reports: Common Reports, Advanced Reports, and System Usage Reports.

o Common Reports are organized into General Reports, Knowledgebase Reports, Admin Reports, User Reports, Response Hit Frequency Reports, Question Reports, and Task reports.

o Advanced Reports let analysts define a query on instrumented data to collect and present information on customers questions and emails, Responses, Canned Expressions, Users, and IntelliResponse VAs sent emails.

o System Usage Reports present Questions and Special Inquiries (customers emails) by hour of day and day of week in a bar chart.

IntelliResponse Analytics perform deep analyses on system performance, Response Categories, question analysis, and Response sequence.

VOICES, a new and separately packaged and priced IntelliResponse VA feature, uses NLP and statistics technologies to identify the themes/topics in customers questions. Its presents the results within visual and interactive, word cloud-style charts.


Table F. We describe IntelliResponse VAs analytic functionality in this table.



Analytic functionality in IntelliResponse is excellent, a key strength and differentiator of the product. Instrumentation is comprehensive. Large sets of predefined reports present information about virtual agent resources, usage, and performance. Powerful and configurable analytics provide deep insights that help analysts understand the effectiveness and efficiency of virtual agents and themes and trends in customers questions. Limitations that we found in previous versions, missing reports on ACG and RQs, for example, have been addressed, and attractive and useful capabilities have been added. The best of analytic functionality in IntelliResponse VA are the large and very use-ful set of Common Reports and the new VOICES feature.

Common Reports Common Reports provide insight on every dimension of an IntelliResponse VA deployment

customers, knowledge staff and their work on the knowledgebase, customers questions, virtual agent answers, and deployment usage and performance. This is a set of 24 predefined and, for the most part, preconfigured reports that are organized by the resources or functions for which they pre-sent information. Their names define the data that they present. We list them in Table G.

Common Reports

Type Reports

General Summary (Total figures for the number of: Inquiries, Special Inquiriesemail escalations, Responses, and Distinct Users to date)

Special Inquiry

Knowledgebase Response Listing

Response Listing by Category

Response Link Validation

Response Interrelationships

Response Interrelationships by Category

Admin Email Activity by Admin

Content Modification by Admin

Representative Question Modification

Response History

User Registered User Special Inquiry (email) Activity

Response Hit Frequency

Response Hit Frequency Overall

Response Hit Frequency Timeframe

Response Hit Frequency by Category Overall

Response Hit Frequency by Category Timeframe

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Common Reports (continued)

Type Reports

Question Question Listing

Unanswered Question Listing

Question Listing by Category

Question Listing by all Responses

Question Distribution by Country

Question Distribution by Region

Questions Emailed to Friends

Addresses from Questions Emailed to Friends

Task Task Summary


Table G. We list IntelliResponse VAs Common Reports in this table.

You can see by the list in the table that all of the Common Reports can be useful and important

to the management of an IntelliResponse VA deployment. The Response Interrelationships Know-ledgebase Report, the Representative Question Modification Admin Report, and the Unanswered Question Report can be especially useful. We show examples of each in Illustrations 11, 12, and 13.



Response Interrelationships Report


11. This illustration shows an example of a Response Interrelationships Report.

Representative Question Modification Report


12. This illustration shows an example of a Representative Question Modification Report.

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Unanswered Question Listing Report


13. This illustration shows an example of an Unanswered Question Listing Report.

IntelliResponse Analytics IntelliResponse Analytics reports do more and deeper analyses than Common, Advanced, and

System Usage reports in four areas: performance, Response Categories, Question Analysis, and Re-sponse Sequence. For example, its Unanswered Question Analysis (see Illustration 14) summarizes unanswered customers questions for a specified Interface during a specified timeframe. Compare its analysis to the straightforward list of the Unanswered Question Listing common report.



Unanswered Question Analysis Report


14. This illustration shows an example of an Unanswered Question Analysis Report.

VOICES As we mentioned in Customer Service Best Fit, VOICES is IntelliResponses new Voice of the

Customer (VoC) offering. It applies NLP and statistics analytics to customers questions on web, agent, mobile, and social channels to identify their themes or topics. VOICES then presents the re-sults of this analysis within visual and interactive word cloud-style charts.

Analysts specify the number of themes they want VOICES to identify and a date range of the customers questions that they want VOICES to analyze. VOICES output is a set of themes, which are presented as text, within visual theme bubbles. (See Illustration 1, above.) The size of the set is the specified number of themes. The size of a theme bubble is proportional to the number of custom-ers questions that contain the theme; more questions produce larger theme bubbles. Analysts can hover over a theme bubble to display the number/amount of questions that contained its theme. Ana-

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lysts can click on a theme bubble to display question detail, the actual Voice(s) of the Customer(s). (See Illustration 15.)

Question Details


15. This illustration shows how users can drill down to the underlying originating questions.

In addition, within the Compare view, analysts can identify the themes that are increasing or de-

creasing in customers questions over a specified time period, either month-over-month or day-over-day. Month-over-month comparisons help analysts understand theme trends in web site or product usage, for example. Day-over-day comparisons can help identify and understand customer service is-sues. Illustration 16 shows an example of VOICES Compare view.



Compare View


16. This illustration compares how themes are trending over selected periods. Blue shows increasing themes, yellow decreasing themes.

VOICES is an attractive, useful, and high-value application. Customer service, product, and

marketing will use VOICES to develop, implement, measure, analyze, and refine their strategies, programs. Significantly, it leverages IntelliResponse VA resources; it stands on IntelliResponse VAs shoulders. The data that IntelliResponse VA instruments for its reports is exactly the data that is the input for VOICES. VOICES is a powerful analytic application for IntelliResponse VA, a sig-nificant strength and differentiator.

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PRODUCT VIABILITY

A viable product is widely used and well proven. It has a regular release cycle with significant improvements in each new release. Its development approach combines in-house expertise for build-ing components that add value and differentiate it, and uses third-party commodity and open source components that shorten and simplify the development effort. A viable products supplier can articu-late a product strategy and provide details of short and medium term product plans.

For product viability, we consider four evaluation criteria:

Version history Release cycle Development approach Product strategy and plans

IntelliResponse Virtual Agent Product Viability We present our evaluation of product viability for IntelliResponse Virtual Agent against these

criteria in Table H. Our analysis follows the table.

IntelliResponse Virtual Agent Product Viability


Current version IntelliResponse Virtual Agent 6.2 November 2012

Previous versions IntelliResponse Answer Suite 6.1 January 2012

IntelliResponse Answer Suite 6.0 June 2010

IntelliResponse Answer Suite 5.6 October 2007

Product introduction IntelliResponse 1.0 February 2001

Development approach

IntelliResponse does the development of all the components of IntelliResponse VA in-house.

IntelliResponse has a research organization in addition to its development organization. Its research organization considers and prototypes advanced technologies and has responsibility for patent application and management.

IntelliResponse VA is on a cycle of one major release and two to three minor releases or patches per year.

IntelliResponse holds or has applied for patents on its core analysis and matching technology i.Match, on i.Connect its Automatic Criteria Generation, and on Automatic Canned Expression Substitution (ACES). The firm is currently writing a patent application for i.Suggest.



IntelliResponse Virtual Agent Product Viability (continued)


Plans In the short and medium term, IntelliResponse plans these improvements for IntelliResponse VA:

Version 6.3, planned for May 2013, addresses numerous feature requests by clients

VOICES V2, planned for summer of 2013

OFFERS V2, planned for summer 2013

General availability of IntelliResponse Virtual Agent for Salesforce CRM planned for spring 2013

ACG Template for Communications

Version 7.0, planned for winter 2014. Will be the next major version

Product strategy For the long term, IntelliResponses product strategy has these elements: User experience. Improve the relevance and accuracy of answers and the

richness of the virtual agent experience.

VoC. Deepen the analysis, expand the scope of questions analyzed, and make it easier for more users to extract insights and value.

Customer self-sufficiency. Continue to make IntelliResponse VA faster and easier to deploy and manage.


Table H. Product viability factors for IntelliResponse Virtual Agent are presented in this table.

IntelliResponse Virtual Agent is a viable product. IntelliResponses development organization

has taken it and its predecessor products through many new releases and has continually added many significant improvements in the 12 years since the 2001 introduction. IntelliResponses research organization (yes, a research organization) has lead the exploration of advanced technologies that have become IntelliResponses key IP, IntelliResponses core functionality, and its key differentiators.

IntelliResponse has attractive plans to extend the value of IntelliResponse VA beyond customer service to CRM and to marketing and for making its offering ever easier and faster to deploy. IntelliResponse is a viable offering today and will continue to be so into the future.

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COMPANY VIABILITY

You want to license a viable customer service product from a viable company. A viable company is a going concern with increasing revenue, profits, numbers of customers, and numbers of products.

Company viability is a little more difficult to examine than product viability because its more subjective and its more difficult to obtain source information. For example, what is the effect of a companys age on its viability? Also, because private companies are not required to disclose their financials, its quite difficult to assess financial performance and health.

The criteria for evaluating supplier viability are:

Company background Customer and staff growth Financial performance

IntelliResponse Company Viability

In Table I, we summarize company viability factors for IntelliResponse, Inc. Our analysis follows the table.

IntelliResponse Company Viability


Founding 2000

Ownership Private

Number of employees 65

Open positions 2

Product lines IntelliResponse VA

Customer base 450 virtual agent deployments in 155 accounts 2013 Patricia Seybold Group, Inc.

Table I. Company viability factors for IntelliResponse are presented in this table.

IntelliResponse is a small, privately held, 13 year old company. Based on its 155 account customer base with 450 deployments, which, by the way, is the largest in the virtual agent market, and on IntelliResponse VA and licensing, we estimate that IntelliResponse had revenue of more than $10 million in its fiscal year 2013, which ended on January 31, 2013.

While small is commonly a company viability issue, IntelliResponse is a viable company. Its business has been growing rapidly over the past few years. 2013 was its best year ever for customer growth and revenue. It has positioned itself in a hot market segment. IntelliResponse VA is a leader in that segment with clear and significant competitive advantages. Product plans will make IntelliResponse VA more attractive for more applications in its target market.



THE BOTTOM LINE

In Table J, we summarize our evaluation and analysis in the Virtual Assisted-Service Report Card on IntelliResponse Virtual Agent.

Virtual Assisted-Service Report Card for IntelliResponse VA

Criterion Evaluation Key strengths Key limitations

Customer service best fit

Drivers:

One Right Answer

Fast and easy deployment. Specification and management of answers and the questions that typically match them are the key tasks that client organizations perform to deploy virtual agents. Deployments can be completed with little or no consulting services from IntelliResponse.

Virtual agents that support many channels and that understand questions and deliver One Right Answer in many languages and in speech.

VoC analytics that deliver useful, high-value insights to customer service, product, and marketing staff.

Attractive to B2C organizations of any size, especially for those organizations in financial services, higher education, and utilities and for account management and billing, and staff support (HR, benefits, payroll) applications.

Answers Exceeds requirements Knowledge model well-suited for virtual agents

Powerful services with high levels of automation

Question analysis and matching

Exceeds requirements High accuracy, low complexity

i.Suggest makes it easier for customers to ask question.

Customer service integration

Meets requirements

Analytic functionality Exceeds Requirements Comprehensive instrumentation

Large sets of predefined, useful reports

Useful, high-value analytic applications

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Virtual Assisted-Service Report Card for IntelliResponse VA (continued)

Criterion Evaluation Key strengths Key limitations

Product viability Exceeds requirements Development and real research

Patents on core and key technologies

Attractive plans

Company viability Meets requirements


Table J. The Virtual Assisted-Service Report Card on IntelliResponse Virtual Agent summarizes our analysis and evaluation along the major criteria of our framework for customer service.

IntelliResponse VA earns an excellent report card. Answers, Question Analysis and Matching,

and Analytic Functionality are the key strengths of the offering. Product viability is very good, too.

About Mitchell Kramer and Patricia Seybold Group


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MITCHELL I. KRAMER is a Senior Vice President and Senior Consultant at the Patricia Seybold Group. Kramer currently focuses on customer relationship management technology, architecture, and analytic applications as well as the computing infrastructure and information technologies that support this customer-centric domain. Kramer applies his experience and expertise to help customers evaluate, compare, and select CRM products and develop approaches toward successful implementation. Product vendors continue to leverage Kramers skills and insights to develop product requirements, to better understand the competitive environment, and to assist in planning and delivering marketing programs.

Kramer draws on his extensive primary and secondary market research in the architecture, design, evaluation, and selection of enterprise-wide distributed computing infrastructures. In consulting engagements, Kramer often uses the technology frameworks hes developed with corporate IT organizations to help them with architecture and product selection decisions. He frequently works with companies to help them determine product requirements, market and product positioning, competitive analysis, and customer satisfaction. Kramer has successfully managed company launches, product introductions, and business and product repositioning. He has also developed and documented business plans for raising capital and for mergers and acquisitions.

Patricia Seybold Group Trusted Advisors to Customer-Centric Executives

If you're a visionary customer-focused executive, the Patricia Seybold Group should be your first choice for ongoing strategic advice, business and technology guidance, customer experience best practices, and help with customer-centric initiatives.

Founded in 1978 and based in Boston, we provide consulting, research and advisory services, peer groups, and interactive workshops. We help clients to design and continuously improve their customer-focused business strategies and processes using our proven consulting methodology, Customer Scenario Design.

The CEO and founder, Patricia Seybold, is the New York Times best-selling author of Customers.com and The Customer Revolution. Patty's latest book, Outside Innovation, is now available.

Patricia Seybold Group P.O. Box 783 Needham, MA 02494 Phone: (617) 742-5200 Fax: (617) 742-1028 Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.customers.com/

http://customers.com/http://customers.com/mailto:[email protected]://www.customers.com/sign-up/http://www.customers.com/training/http://www.customers.com/books/http://www.customers.com/about/our-people/mitchell-kramer/

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