Entries Tagged 'Newsworthy' ↓

If you were one of the thousands who descended on San Francisco for Oracle Open World, you probably heard that Oracle has selected InQuira to integrate its knowledge management capabilities with Oracle’s eSupport applications. The addition of the InQuira solution has a profound impact on key strategic areas such as “Customer Experience” and “Web 2.0 Social Collaboration”.

How is InQuira working with Oracle?

For end users, InQuira provides “answers”. Unlike a Google-approach to self-service, InQuira truly understands customer intent with online search accuracy often exceeding 65%. Additional benefits include reducing online escalations by 40%, improving shopping cart conversions by 20%, and having a dramatic increase in overall customer satisfaction.

For customer service agents, InQuira provides knowledge. Integrated into the Siebel desktop, InQuira’s intent-driven resolution approach guides agents to best possible answers in the shortest amount of time. By improving Oracle’s knowledge delivery on the agent desktop, organizations can expect to increase agent proficiency, reduce call research time by as much at 44%, and provide a collaborative knowledge network to exchange valuable service information.

For service executives, InQuira provides operational insight. Most organizations do not have the analytical intelligence to really know how to optimize the online customer experience. InQuira couples deep analytic understanding with an agile knowledge platform to intentionally optimize every customer experience. Knowing what customers want is half the battle. Intentionally acting on this is a unique experience the InQuira & Oracle partnership provides.

To learn more visit: http://solutions.oracle.com/partners/inquira

Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Powerset has a lot of people talking about search.  Will natural language search take over the Web?  How will this acquisition affect the enterprise search market?  Edwin Cooper, InQuira’s co-founder and chief scientist, weighs in on the debate:

The enormous potential of natural language search on the web is matched by the enormous difficulty of pulling it off successfully. The sheer scope of information on the web, the wide variety of contexts and concepts and different intentions of use, all combine to make this extremely complex. Humans have an extraordinary facility with learning, inference and language. Just watching a toddler acquire and use words to great effect is proof. In fact, language is so easy for humans that we sometimes assume that it can’t be terribly hard for computers to master, either.  If nothing else, the long history of natural language processing has demonstrated just how hard this problem is.  Natural language search across the entire web implies that a system will have a human-like language ability corresponding to every available subject, and that’s an extremely tall order. Will it happen someday? Probably. But HAL-like capabilities (“I’m sorry Dave, I cannot do that?) certainly didn’t happen by 2001, and if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say they probably won’t happen by 2101 either. 

With enterprise search, on the other hand, we have several unfair advantages in incorporating natural language processing in our product. 

 

• Unfair advantage #1.  In the context of an enterprise website or intranet, there is a much smaller set of intended actions than you get on google.com.  For example, visitors to a banking website generally want to complete one of about 20 different transactions.  If we can understand very thoroughly how those users ask to complete those transactions, then we’ve carved out a large and useful chunk of natural language understanding, which can make a real difference in how easy the banking site is to use.
• Unfair advantage #2.  On an enterprise site, there is a specific industry vocabulary used.  We don’t have to recognize names of US presidents or hybrid minivans for a typical banking site.  If we invest in understanding the specific vocabulary that is used in the context of an enterprise-specific search, we have taken another step forward in making natural language processing genuinely applicable across that particular industry vertical.
• Unfair advantage #3.  For a search engine that works across the entire web, the relationship between search and content is more or less antagonistic.  People make web pages which try to bully their way to the top of the search results, by employing a whole grab-bag of tricks.  With enterprise search, on the other hand, the people who make the content are on our side.  They want the right content to be shown in the right context, to the right user.  They understand what the content is trying to say, and they are willing to revise content or write more if that turns out to be useful.  A virtuous cycle that includes automated analysis of content needs as expressed through search queries, which in turn triggers a workflow process for content changes, is a big advance, and one whose effects we will be witnessing in the next several years.

Well it’s not an academy award, but to us it might as well be.  This week the SSPA honored InQuira as a “Recognized Innovator” in 2 out of the 3 categories they were judging at this year’s SSPA Best Practices 2008 Conference. 

The Spring 2008 SSPA Recognized Innovators are:

• Innovation in Root Cause Analysis
  • Winner:  InQuira
  • Finalist:  NextNine
•   Innovation in Voice of the Customer
  • Winner:  IBM
  • Finalist:  Clarabridge
•   Innovation in Usability
  • Winner:  Microsoft
  • Finalist:  InQuira

Even though we didn’t win all the categories - at least not this year, we have our sights set on a sweep in 2009 - we have to say, it was just an honor to be nominated. 

Learn more about the SSPA Innovation awards.

The April issue of CRM Magazine just landed on my desk, its cover promoting “the 2007 Service Awards.” As I leafed through the issue, I was excited to find that InQuira customer Juniper Networks was awarded the 2007 Service Elite Award for Web-Support Services. The Service Elite Awards recognize five “companies whose contact center technology and service deployments reeled in strikingly strong results.” Juniper Networks won the Web-Support Services category in recognition of the exceptional results from the company’s ongoing eSupport initiative.
InQuira won some recognition as well, named a Rising Star whose “cool-kid-of-Web-support status is helping its star not only rise, but rocket.”
CRM Magazine makes its print issues available in digital format. View the full 2007 Service Awards feature in the April issue.