Multichannel Customer

Interaction Strategy
Identify customer patterns to
drive world class customer experiences

Autonomy White Paper

 Index
Introduction 1

Customer Experience is the Sum of All Interactions 2

Leveraging Unstructured Data 2
Multichannel Customer Interaction Strategy 3
Monitoring all Customer Interactions 3
Process Any File Type or Language, From Any System 3
Analyze and Organize Data 3
Identify Patterns and Sentiment 4
Rapidly Develop Content to Address New Opportunities 4
Create a Compelling and Dynamic Customer Experience 4
Optimize Current Customer Experiences 5
Autonomy Multichannel Customer Interaction Solution 5
About Autonomy 7

b Multichannel Customer Interaction Strategy

Introduction
The complexity of managing the customer experience has grown exponentially since the
Netscape browser became available to all users in 1994, making the internet accessible
to the masses. Gone are the days of agent green screens, tape drive recordings and
punch button cash registers. Today, customers don’t have to drive to your store or
wait for the catalog to be delivered to buy your branded products. With the internet,
everything is connected and interacting with your brand and is simply a browser click
away. Today, your customers are interacting with you through a web browser, retail
store, contact center and even the social web. As a result, capturing and sharing
customer interaction data has never been easier. Like a kid in a candy store, the
challenge is figuring out where to start.

Multichannel Customer Interaction Strategy 1

 Customer Experience is the
Sum of All Interactions
Industry experts agree that even the most laggard of customers jump between customer interaction channels; from
comparing products or reviewing a bill on your website, to logging a complaint with the contact center to actually touching
the product in a store. And everyday more customers are making their feelings known indirectly via word of mouth
technologies on the web. With the widespread adoption of these interactive social media applications, customer sentiment
is becoming more and more transparent to both impressionable prospects as well as the business itself.

While more than 90% of consumers engage in some sort of multichannel behavior, organizations have been unable to
collectively understand those interactions nor compile them in a way that can be shared with decision-making groups
throughout the business. So, while consumers use different channels and different touch points throughout their
relationship with your brand, today’s businesses tend to be slow or simply unable to capitalize on the data.

Leveraging Unstructured Data

It’s all Data. Computers Can Process it. Organizations have been able to collect,
consolidate and analyze transactional data for years. What’s been missing is
the ability to understand the essence of the interactions and conversations
surrounding the data. What influenced her to buy that new perfume? Why did
that customer cancel their account? How did the sentiment on our product turn
from great to ghastly in less than a quarter?

Customer surveys in the store, recordings of contact center calls and focus groups
are traditional methods for capturing customer patterns and sentiment. Although
a great deal of information can be captured, it’s often incomplete, time consuming
to process or biased towards the communication channel being used. For example, a contact center recording requires a
vast amount of time to listen to and manually classify each recording. A complete understanding of customer intent and
sentiment cannot be realized until interactions from all direct and indirect channels have been included in the analysis.

Customers can now interact with your brand using a myriad of touch points through a handful of channels. Until now,
organizations had no other option than to leave the volumes of data produced by these interactions in the systems with
which they were captured. Fortunately, advances in computing have changed the game, making it possible to harness
interactions into collective patterns of understanding. Leading organizations are now able to view interactions collectively,
independent of channel, for a comprehensive picture of their customer interactions and relationships. Moving beyond
disparate customer interaction data is the first step in becoming channel-agnostic and identifying the true insights that will
impact your business. This white paper will outline a strategy for leveraging the collective data from customer interactions
for your organization.

2 Multichannel Customer Interaction Strategy

Multichannel Customer Interaction Strategy
Regardless of how individuals engage with your brand, you will need to determine how to capture and process the data
from all those interactions before you can analyze them for patterns and sentiments. Ideally, business users will be able to
view and report on the data from a common interface while leaving all data in its original repository.

Once your organization understands key patterns and sentiments, it can determine actionable strategies for improving the
customer experience to increase sales or lower costs. Changes may need to be made across your channels to deliver a
more targeted and relevant experience to your customers. Finally, once you’ve rolled out the changes, it’s time to test them
in a real world environment to optimize that customer experience.

The right people, processes and technology must be in place to realize your objectives from implementing this
multichannel customer interaction strategy. The following sections discuss the technology path needed to make your
implementation of this strategy successful.

Monitoring all Customer Interactions

Data from interactions across the contact center, websites, storefronts and social media is growing exponentially. In fact,
we’ve had enterprise customers report that they’re involved in more than 160 million direct customer interactions a year
in the form of email, chat, voice recordings and website visits, with more than a billion instances where their brand was
mentioned in social media websites or blogs. How do organizations expect to keep up with this staggering growth?

Process Any File Type or Language, From Any System

Businesses need a system where all interaction data, across all touchpoints and media types, can be analyzed. This
system must be able to ingest the data from the systems where the interaction occurred. Data shouldn’t have to be moved
or reproduced as the systems that create the data are optimized for managing those interactions. As a result, this system
must be open and flexible enough to connect to any repository, and scalable enough to manage the enormous volume of
transactions and data.

Processing any type of media presents its own challenges and your multichannel analytics application must be able to
handle all types. For instance, audio is traditionally difficult to process, govern and make available for review, especially
when it exists in multiple repositories, formats and languages. Your speech recognition engine will need to account for
the variability in speech such as language, dialect, accent or tone by using a combination of acoustic models, a language
model, pronunciation dictionary and advanced marketing platforms that leverage a conceptual understanding of the
interactions to form a hypothesis of what is being said.

Analyze and Organize Data

It’s no simple task to take data from across various channels, media and languages, normalize it and then organize it, by
meaning, so that patterns and sentiment can ultimately be identified. Traditional keyword search technology falls short
because it simply allows users to find and retrieve data. These keyword search engines cannot comprehend the meaning

Multichannel Customer Interaction Strategy 3

 of information, which limits them to finding those interactions in which a specific word occurs. This inability to understand
information means that other relevant interactions that discuss the same idea but use different words are often overlooked.
Similarly, interactions with a meaning entirely different to the search terms are frequently returned, resulting in many false
positive results that will skew your findings and force inappropriate actions to be taken.

Only Meaning Based Computing which takes all processed data and evaluate its meaning within the context of the entire
corpus of data, can handle this intensive task. A Meaning Based Computing engine derives context and meaning from all
electronic data - including the critical unstructured data that makes up more than 80% of all business data.

Identify Patterns and Sentiment

Organizations collect and analyze data to uncover insight that is actionable. The ideal multichannel analytics solution
empowers organizations to deliver the right experience to the right person at the right time. Based on an understanding of
customer interactions, patterns, behaviors, histories and interests in real-time and across multiple channels, this solution
provides a competitive arsenal for enhancing customer engagement and driving revenue.

Successful organizations will adopt an approach that leverages proven mathematical techniques and algorithms of inference
and statistical analysis to extract meaning from unstructured content and make it available for processes throughout the
marketing lifecycle, from profiling and segmentation to dynamic, real-time web content delivery and call center support.

Rapidly Develop Content to Address New Opportunities

With the analysis done, it’s time to make changes or add new experiences for the
organization’s most profitable segments of users. Best practices involve leveraging a
system where content, along with associated metadata and business logic, is created
in a format that is easily re-useable on the web, print or wireless devices.

Organizations need to rapidly enhance the customer experience or roll out new
experiences such as a new campaign page, agent contact center scripts or enhanced
in-store signage. A flexible system that enables business users to be directly involved
in making those changes is critical to the success of optimizing business processes to
react to new opportunities or changes in market dynamics.

Create a Compelling and Dynamic Customer Experience

The goal is to foster relationships with active members by integrating social media content with corporate content across
all channels. Now that you have a thorough understanding of your customers and their preferences, business users are
empowered to create comprehensive customer profiles and segments that can be used to take action on your site or in
the contact center. These profiles and segments are leveraged to deliver relevant offers and content to customers and
prospects, helping keep customers engaged with your organization.

Profiles can be generated automatically based on explicit data entered by the customer or implicit data can be
automatically gathered from interactions across all touch points, both internal (contact center or emails) or external sources
(social networking activity or blog posts). Generating implicit profiles allows organizations to capture rich, insightful profiles
for every customer - not just the few who like to fill out registration forms.

“Consumers are focused on their needs, not on your channels.”

—Forrester

4 Multichannel Customer Interaction Strategy

Building customer segments often involve drawing heavily on intuition and generalizations. For example, people in warm
weather climates buy more sunscreen than people in Canada. It doesn’t have to be this way. Meaning Based Marketing
(MBM) systems can extract the meaning of each customer interaction to dynamically generate segments based on the
demonstrated “closeness” of concepts. Unexpected groupings and trends emerge; for example, farm customers in Nebraska
and Mongolia tend to buy similar kinds of tractors. Different segments emerge for different contexts and all can be updated
dynamically for continued relevance.

Once profiles and segments are determined, businesses can focus on the experience delivery. Companies are turning to
directed navigation to help customers find what they’re looking for based on their intentions and preferences, and to deliver
more targeted content and recommendations to improve the customer experience and increase conversions. Further along the
lifecycle, the aggregated meaning of all the customers’ interactions with the company informs better, more responsive customer
service across all channels, from live contact centers to self-serve support pages. And, it all happens without direct human
intervention – so marketers can focus on higher-level strategy rather than brute-force, manual nuts-and-bolts execution.

Optimize Current Customer Experiences

Even successful websites, email offers and contact center scripts have room for
improvement. With a multivariable testing solution integrated into an ongoing
content creation and launch planning process, organizations can be confident
that they have the optimal customer experience to increase conversion rates and
customer satisfaction.

A multivariable testing solution allows marketers to automatically test multiple

variations of the same ecommerce page, email invitation or advertisement
and conduct real-world tests for the optimal combination. For instance, a web
mortgage company’s web page is designed to get visitors to check interest rates using its online application. A simple
change to the “Get Rate” button and a new image can improve the click rate 5% or more, which typically leads to
increased conversions.

By implementing a comprehensive multichannel customer interaction solution, organizations will have a better
understanding of the factors that drive customers to be loyal to its brand or switch to a competitor. With the ability to
rapidly create, target and optimize the customer experience, organizations can become closer to their customers to drive
loyalty, reduce churn and increase profits.

Autonomy Multichannel Customer Interaction Solution

Autonomy combines Multichannel Customer Interaction Analytics and Meaning Based Marketing to provide the industry’s
most functionality-rich and powerful solutions for multichannel interaction analysis, content creation and site management,
multivariable testing, recommendation and targeted delivery of the most relevant and engaging content possible during
each visitor interaction. By combining powerful web and contact center solution suites with advanced interaction analytics,
Autonomy is uniquely positioned to help marketers maximize their online business performance.

“An enterprise’s reputation — its brand — is never built solely via advertising and
promotional activities. It is mainly built through individual interactions at customer
touch points.”
—Gartner

Multichannel Customer Interaction Strategy 5

 Autonomy’s Multichannel Customer Interaction Analytics is uniquely positioned because it is built on Autonomy’s
Meaning Based Computing which leverages advanced mathematical and statistical algorithms and powerful, meaning-
based technologies to automatically:

• “Ingest” and understand all content and information, whether structured or unstructured from more than 400
repositories including voice recording, video, web, social media, chat, email and surveys
• Identify and extract relevant concepts, categories and keywords
• Classify and tag each discrete piece of content in relation to all available information
• Perform real time cluster analysis and pattern-matching

Autonomy’s Meaning Based Marketing approach unlocks the value of content and data, allowing companies to create,
deliver, optimize and analyze web content to deliver an exceptional visitor experience. Delivered through Autonomy
Interwoven’s Web Solutions and the power of IDOL, Meaning Based Marketing helps marketers derive rich insights from
customer interactions to maximize online business performance with offerings such as social media analysis, profiling and
personalization, adaptive targeting, advanced search marketing, rich media management, video analysis, cross-channel
optimization and merchandising. With Meaning Based Marketing, marketers can automatically:

• Analyze and discover new trends, opportunities and rich segments of customers
• Create compelling online experiences that capture and engage audiences
• Deliver the best-performing, most accurate and relevant experience to each individual
• Optimize the customer experience across every touch point of communication

For more information about Autonomy’s Multichannel Customer Interaction solution please visit our website at:
www.etalk.com/multichannel.

6 Multichannel Customer Interaction Strategy

About Autonomy
Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, spearheads
the Meaning Based Computing movement. IDC recently recognized Autonomy as having the largest market share and
fastest growth in the worldwide search and discovery market. Autonomy’s technology allows computers to harness the
full richness of human information, forming a conceptual and contextual understanding of any piece of electronic data,
including unstructured information, such as text, email, web pages, voice, or video. Autonomy’s software powers the
full spectrum of mission-critical enterprise applications including pan-enterprise search, customer interaction solutions,
information governance, end-to-end eDiscovery, records management, archiving, business process management, web
content management, web optimization, rich media management and video and audio analysis.

Autonomy’s customer base is comprised of more than 20,000 global companies, law firms and federal agencies including:
AOL, BAE Systems, BBC, Bloomberg, Boeing, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Daimler AG, Deutsche Bank, DLA Piper, Ericsson,
FedEx, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyds Banking Group, NASA, Nestlé, the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters, Shell,
Tesco, T-Mobile, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission. More than 400 companies OEM Autonomy technology, including Symantec, Citrix, HP, Novell,
Oracle, Sybase and TIBCO. The company has offices worldwide.

Please visit www.autonomy.com to find out more.

Multichannel Customer Interaction Strategy 7

The information contained in this document represents the current opinion as of the date of publication of Autonomy Systems Ltd.
regarding the issues discussed. Autonomy's opinion is based upon our review of competitor product information publicly available
as of the date of this document.

Because Autonomy must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be commitment on the
part of Autonomy, and Autonomy cannot attest to the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.

This document is for informational purposes only; Autonomy is not making warranties, express or implied, in this document.

Autonomy Inc. and Autonomy Systems Limited are

both subsidiaries of Autonomy Corporation plc.

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