Coveo Customer Information Access Solutions (CIAS) Moves to Version 2.0

Coveo now has a three-part product strategy. First, there is the core search platform, Coveo Enterprise Search 6.2, the company’s enterprise-grade information access solution, used by the likes of Lockheed Martin, GEICO and YUM! Brands; next there is Coveo Expresso (see my post: Coveo Provides Free Entry Level Enterprise Search With Coveo Expresso) for small and mid-sized businesses, and third there is its Customer Information Access Solutions, used by organizations with knowledge-intensive customer support needs, like CA Technologies and Quantum. The latter was first launched in October 2009 and version 2.0 came out this summer.  I recently spoke with Louis Tetu, Rich Tessier, and Diane Berry, of Coveo about this comprehensive offering.

The Customer Information Access Solutions (CIAS) are a set of individual, but related, extensions of the core platform that address specific business issues.  They are built with concept of “stop moving data” in mind. Companies spend large sums of money and too much time trying to take data from multiple sources and attempting to put it in one place for easier access. With Coveo’s unified index approach you do not need to move this data since it can be accessed from its original location.  This can include emails, documents, CRM apps, databases, knowledge bases, social media, Web content, and more. 

There are three interrelated concepts here that I like: focused business apps built on search, single point of information access, and the dynamic mashup of information to fit specific user needs. These are part of the foundation for an effective enterprise 2.0.

We first discussed CIAS for Customer 360 that provides analytics dashboards. It provides comprehensive account information in a single view, bringing in relevant data from multiple sources. Coveo comes with many out-of-the-box connecters to sources such as Sharepoint, Salesforce.com, Jive, and Atlassian. Others can be quickly created if necessary.  These content sources are combined into a single index for unified access. This allows the user to easily refine your searches and narrow the target data set rather than having to operate within the constraints of the data architecture. In addition you can consolidate and correlate content through mashups and monitor content to get up with essential information. Below is a screen shot of customer account metrics.

In addition, there is Coveo CIAS for Contact Centers that provides agent support through the same core capabilities in Customer 360 including unified access. Often contact center agents have to sort through multiple systems with different search capabilities and interfaces. I remember being told by an agent that one of the core skills was engaging in entertaining chat with the customer while they waded through the many sources to find answers. Below is a sample CSR screen.

Coveo CIAS also includes Customer Self-Service with a similar robust set of capabilities. The interface and content is a subset of the contact center application to achieve consistency, another move I like. There is contextually relevant guided navigation to reduce drop-offs and increase self-service.

To further support monitoring and continuous improvement there is Coveo Usage Analytics that compiles and presents all user interactions with the CIAS solution. You can see top queries, documents, users, and various user behaviors. Managers can see trends content gaps, and other useful insights. You can see a sample screen from the Usage Analytics below.

Louis mentioned the customer example of Computer Associates that has rolled out the Coveo platform to its 1600 agents. Since then CA has achieved a 10% increase in customer self-service satisfaction, a 50% reduction in case resolution time, and they have deflected 10% more calls to self-service, hitting about 50,000 queries a day with a response time of 0.2 seconds. I can believe these results as I have seen similar effects when contact center support tools are enhanced.

Companies first implemented knowledge base solutions to assist contact center agents. These offered some help and I was involved in a number of them. However, it required the creation of yet again another information source for agents to content with and it significantly increased the development time and cost.  Now this effort can be bypassed with a unified access solution such as Coveo CIAS.  This is truly a break through in information access. I think that Coveo was right to target contact center support since the ROI here is huge as the CA results demonstrate. At the same time there are many other applications that can benefit from this approach. It is at the core of enterprise 2.0.