The Challenge

Great customer service increases customer loyalty, drives revenue and reduces operating expenses. However, traditional customer service applications often encompass only a fraction of the information agents need to provide great service. Why? Because relevant data about customers, products and services sits in a multitude of systems both inside and outside the corporate firewall, and in multiple forms such as database records, SaaS applications, text (letters, forms, email and chat messages, IVR scripts, blogs) and even voice recordings (call records). Providing comprehensive, unified data access has to date simply been too costly and too complex. In addition, conventional customer service applications are too often difficult to use, and operate with unacceptable data latency rates and response processing times.

A 360-Degree Customer View

Discover how Search-Based Support can enrich the customer view. Download the Ventana Research Whitepaper, or view our video interview with Ventana's Richard Snow

Exalead's Solution

Exalead CloudView™ eliminates these barriers by unifying information access for your customer service operations. Used as a standalone search-based application (SBA) or embedded within your existing customer service platform, CloudView:

• Radically increases the value and range of information available to agents (and customers)
• Dramatically boosts system performance and reduces costs via database offloading, workforce decentralization and customer self-service
• Significantly increases agility with a highly scalable SOA architecture and support for standard Web technologies (see our whitepaper Achieving Business Agility with Search-Based Technologies)
• Greatly simplifies usage with Web-style speed and simplicity (see CloudView Platform Highlights)

Explore these CloudView-powered customer service and support solutions:

• IT Help Desk
• Customer Self-Service
• Contact Centers

CloudView for IT Help Desks

Deployed as an embedded search engine in an existing Help Desk application or as a standalone search-based application (SBA), CloudView can speed issue resolution, reduce costs and enhance customer satisfaction.

Speed Issue Resolution

Unified Information Access

To help agents find the right answers quickly, CloudView provides a single point of access for all relevant customer, product and service information, including:

• Structured database content (FAQs, product databases, performance logs, etc.)
• Incident tracking data
• The content of prior communications (phone, chat, email, website, etc.), whether they took place inside or outside of the Help Desk application
• Customer information from external systems like CRM or billing
• Public Web information from forums and discussion groups

Value of a Good Knowledgebase

"A knowledge base with a good search engine helps agents find the right answer quickly, reduces call transfers, and supports high first-call resolution rates."

– Forrester Research, Inc.
"Ten Steps For Reducing Contact Center Expenses," March 13, 2009

Comprehensive Knowledgebases

CloudView's natural language and semantic processors can independently classify and categorize this heterogeneous information and transform it into a fully automated, living knowledgebase. CloudView can also maintain your knowledgebase in real-time without affecting data source systems. (See the Knowledgebase Solutions page on this site.)

Easy Expert Access

CloudView can also facilitate access to experts who can help resolve complex or escalated issues. CloudView can canvas the full spectrum of your enterprise information assets to generate a continually updated list of experts across a body of topics that is in itself in constant flux. This means an agent could query virtually any subject and be presented with an up-to-date menu of the people most closely associated with that topic.

And as CloudView is adept at processing structured data as well, it is a simple matter to integrate email, chat and phone data for these experts, and, if desired, to prioritize them according to 'accessibility' ratings. All of this data can be structured as a live feed into a contact center dashboard, integrated with an existing 'Ask-the-Expert' feature if available, or presented within a standalone knowledgebase application.

Reduce Costs

Customer Self-Service

CloudView provides an ideal platform for low-cost customer self-service, whether your 'customers' are external users of your products or services or internal staff. CloudView offers:

• Fast, database-independent information access
• An SOA architecture and support for standard Web data formatting and exchange protocols
• Simple Web-style, single text box search and faceted navigation of results
• User aids like phonetic and approximate spelling search and auto-spelling correction

Decentralized Workforce

This same Web-based, user-friendly infrastructure also supports the use of outsourced services, decentralized centers, and "at-home" workers. It is an agile, infrastructure-independent information access platform designed from the outset for anytime, anywhere work and "zero-training" usage. Additional social networking features encourage knowledge sharing and collaboration among peers, even if they are scattered across the globe.

Increase Customer Satisfaction

The combination of effective, multi-channel customer self-service and faster issue resolution leads to more satisfied customers, directly enhancing the bottom-line value of your Help Desk to your organization.

Customer Self-Service That Works

Self-service costs a fraction of assisted support, and studies make it clear customers like the speed and convenience of self-service tools, and are more loyal to organizations that offer it. The challenge is to develop a service that is truly fast, convenient, and simple to use (so it does not result in more calls!), while controlling development timelines and costs. CloudView-powered customer self-service can help you achieve this.

Simple Yet Comprehensive Information Access

Generate in a flash a genuinely comprehensive knowledgebase that's as simple and natural to use as a Web search engine. Use CloudView to "mash-up" any volume of helpful information: existing FAQ files and support systems, enterprise product and service databases, even text and multimedia files extracted in real time from the Web (forums, blogs, Wikipedia™, content sharing sites, etc.). What's more, a CloudView knowledgebase:

Better Service, Lower Costs

GEFCO dramatically improved the usability of its customer self-service application for automotive manufacturers while cutting costs 50% and reducing data latency to 15 minutes from 24 hours.

– Gefco Case Study, "Gefco Wins CIO Innovation Prize", GEFCO Video

• Can be up and running in just days
• Runs on minimal low-cost servers
• Operates non-intrusively to underlying systems
• Can be modified or scaled on-the-fly, with no service interruption
• Offers Web-style usability, with a single text box replacing complex forms and user aids like query suggestions and spelling correction

Support for Multi-Channel Interaction

While customers turn to corporate websites as a first-stop resource for self-service, they also want to interact via email, chat, SMS, fixed and mobile phones, and kiosks. CloudView's agile technology supports this need by 'decoupling' customer, product, and service data from underlying data production systems (including your telco infrastructure), giving you an agile, "virtual" view of your data that can be accessed and manipulated across an expanded range of channels and devices.

Easy Backend Process Integration

This data layer independence together with CloudView's service-oriented architecture (SOA) and support for standard Web technologies (SOAP, REST, XML, RSS, RDF, and OWL, etc.) also facilitates Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) and integration of front-end customer interactions with back-office processes.

Powering Tomorrow's Contact Center

Exalead CloudView™ is a unique technology which transports the agility, performance and usability of the Web into the heart of enterprise contact centers. Whether deployed as a standalone search-based application (SBA) or embedded to extend an existing solution, CloudView can spell the difference for contact centers between a stagnate existence as a cost center and a pivotal role as a value-generating operation. Use CloudView to:

• Improve service with:

• Comprehensive, Automated Knowledgebases
• Multimedia Analytics
• Multi-Channel Interaction
• Dramatically Improved Performance



• Reduce costs with:

• Customer Self-Service
• Pro-Active Outbound Communications
• A Decentralized Workforce
• Database Offloading



• Increase revenue with:

• Upselling and Cross-Selling
• Relationship-Building Communications



• Gain agility with:

• Operational Business Intelligence (OBI)
• CTI/Backend Process Integration
• "Front-Door" Coordination
• Rapid Deployment & Modification
• Pain-Free Scaling

Improve Service

• Comprehensive, Automated Knowledgebases

  Rapidly generate a comprehensive knowledgebase that's as simple and natural to use as a Web search engine. A CloudView knowledgebase:

  • Can incorporate any volume of internal or external data (structured or unstructured)
  • Can be up and running in just days
  • Runs on minimal low-cost servers
  • Operates non-intrusively to underlying systems
  • Can be modified or scaled on-the-fly, with no service interruption
  • Offers Web-style usability, with a single text box replacing complex forms and user aids like query suggestions and spelling correction



• Multimedia Analytics

  New speech analytic technologies are enabling companies to mine phone recordings to gain new customer insights—and new competitive advantages. CloudView goes beyond traditional speech analytics to help you 'listen' to your customers across all communications channels: phone, certainly, but also chat, video, forums, email, and self-service sessions. CloudView can cost-effectively mine huge multimedia archives and even apply 'sentiment analysis' to this data, helping you answer qualitative questions like "Are customers happy with our support?" or "Is our product upgrade being favorably received?"

• Multi-Channel Interaction

  CloudView facilitates multi-channel interaction by decoupling customer, product, and service data from underlying data production systems (including your telco infrastructure), giving you an agile, "virtual" view of your data that can be accessed and manipulated across an expanded range of channels and devices.

• Dramatically Improved Performance

  CloudView provides information access that is far more comprehensive and 100s of times faster than conventional relational database technologies. Switching from a database-centered solution to a CloudView index-based model enables a dramatic improvement in data freshness (cutting latency to seconds or minutes from a day or more), and in query processing times (with sub-second rates being the norm).

Reduce Costs

• Customer Self-Service

  CloudView's semantic engine can sort through and organize any volume of information—including content extracted from public websites like user forums—to automatically structure and feed your online knowledgebases and other customer self-service tools.

• Pro-Active Outbound Communications

  Outbound communications programs can proactively address high-volume inquiries triggered by events like product releases, recalls and promotions. CloudView facilitates such programs by:

  • Providing unified access to the full spectrum of data required to identify and understand contact triggering events (center activity reports, agent text notes, phone transcripts, chat logs, email, etc.)
  • Helping identify customers likely to be affected by a particular change (e.g., identifying all users of a particular product no matter where the records live)
  • Providing a 'one-stop shop' for gathering the information you need to respond to customer needs




• A Decentralized Workforce

  To reduce costs, companies continue to outsource operations, relocate centers to lower cost national and international regions, and/or employ "at-home" agents. CloudView supports these initiatives with "zero training" Web-style usage and complete infrastructure independence. It is ideal for delivering information access to users of any skill level via any standard Web browser.

• Database Offloading

  CloudView separates routine information access from transaction processing and data production, enabling database offloading to significantly reduce licensing, infrastructure and administrative costs.

Increase Revenue

• Upselling, Cross-Selling

  Contact center solutions are increasingly incorporating upselling and cross-selling prompts for service agents. CloudView can automate this process, and uncover opportunities a scripted, database-centric approach misses. CloudView can continually canvas available products and services, and automatically discern the links between these offers and a client's profile and transaction history. For further flexibility, you can even prioritize these organic results to push particular products or services using user-controlled relevancy ranking while still avoiding the manual labor, high costs and inflexibility of the prevailing approach.

• Relationship-Building Communications

  In a similar way, this automated capacity for discerning links between customers and their transaction histories can be used to support 'positive-touch' communications like sending 'thank you' messages, 'welcome' messages or renewal reminders.

Gain Agility

• Operational Business Intelligence (OBI)

  OBI provides contact centers with broad access to real-time reporting and monitoring for better day-to-day decision making. CloudView can index contact center metrics alongside any other data (applications, datawarehouses, even hardware like switches and servers) to produce true wide-scope intelligence, with built-in statistical processors enabling rich out-of-the box reporting. Users simply click on statistics of interest to generate visual reporting tools like bar charts, pie charts, maps, and reports. It is the fastest, most affordable way to introduce OBI into an organization. (See Extended Business Intelligence.)

• CTI/Backend Process Integration

  CloudView provides an ideal supporting platform for Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) and integration with back-office processes: first, by creating a unified, independent data layer drawn from all information resources, and then facilitating manipulation of that data layer with a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and support for Web-derived data formatting and exchange protocols like SOAP, REST, XML, RSS, RDF, and OWL.

• "Front-Door" Coordination

  This same architecture also makes it easier to build and maintain a 'front door' for managing today's multi-channel customer interactions.

• Rapid Deployment & Modification

  CloudView SBAs are also tailor made for Agile Software Development. CloudView's rich out-of-the-box functionality together with its SOA architecture and support for standard Web technologies makes it possible to deploy an SBA in 2 to 8 weeks on average. And, CloudView SBAs can be rapidly modified on-the-fly without affecting underlying information systems.

• Pain-Free Scaling

  Engineered for Web-scale processing, CloudView is the only enterprise search engine designed from inception for multi-billion document scalability. More importantly, CloudView scales effortlessly and cost effectively. The system is extremely resource efficient, supporting real-time indexing of 100 million documents and processing up to 20 queries per second on a single dual-processor server. And, thanks to its distributed architecture, you can scale CloudView on demand by simply adding inexpensive commodity hardware. There is no painful migration required, and there is no need to scale your underlying information infrastructure in order to scale information access.

New Agility for a National Postal Service Contact Center

To meet aggressive new customer service objectives, a national postal service needed a solution for rapidly analyzing and responding to all customer requests, whether received by mail, Internet or telephone, accompanied by analysis and reporting tools. The Agency chose a CloudView SBA to accomplish this goal. Operational in only three months, the new CloudView-powered solution is an agile, robust, and cost-effective system that offers unified access to all databases, provides sub-second performance for a vast user base against a high volume of data, and offers a single platform for use by the Front Office (350 operators in 7 contact centers), Back Office (25,000 agents in 3300 facilities) and Management. Access is now being extended to the general public for customer self-service via the Agency's website.