INQUIRA 8
Five Customer Service Applications Distinguished by Strong Content, Search, and Analytics
By Mitchell I. Kramer, July 14, 2007 

NETTING IT OUT

Customer self-service products let you deliver a customer experience that can help your customers use the World Wide Web to find answers to questions about your products and services and to help customers diagnose, isolate, and resolve problems that they’re having with your products and services.

InQuira 8.0, introduced in February 2007, is a platform of five customer service applications: Intelligent Search; Information Manager, which is a content management system; Information Center, which is a Web self-service application built on Information Manager and integrating Intelligent Search; Discussion Forums; and Analytics. Intelligent Search, the first InQuira application, was introduced in within InQuira 5 in 2002. Since the introduction approximately 50 organizations have implemented one or more of its applications.

On the PSGroup Report Card for Customer Self-Service, InQuira 8.0 exceeds requirements for customer self-service in content management, search and analytic functionality. It meets requirements in all other evaluation areas.

InQuira 8.0 is a strong customer service offering. Content management, search, and analytic functionality are the core criteria for customer service and the three factors key to your consideration of InQuira 8.0. We recommend InQuira 8.0 for organizations that are serious about delivering excellent customer service and are serious about allocating the resources to ensure that excellence.

CUSTOMER SELF-SERVICE

Customers Want to Help Themselves

Customers like to and want to help themselves. Patty Seybold first pointed this out in 1998 in her landmark book, Customers.com, where she stated,

“Your customers want more than a good Web site. They want a seamless web of interactive applications that will let them help themselves to information, perform transactions, check on the status of things, make inquiries, and get information that’s relevant to their particular situation. And, when appropriate, they want a person integrated into the process.”

Eight years later, Patty remains on point. Her concept for customer self-service is still today exactly what your customers want to do. For customer self-service, we focus on activities that enable customers to help themselves to answer the questions that they have about your products and services, and to help them diagnose, isolate, and resolve problems that they’re having with your products and services in their installation/deployment and use of your products and services.

A Subset Cross-Channel, Cross-Lifecycle Customer Service

Customer self-service is a subset of what we call cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service. What we mean is that:

• Customers want your help on every channel through which they interact with you - the Web and email for self-service, your contact center, stores, and your field service force for assisted service.
   
• Customers want and need your help at every phase of their lifecycles, through every interaction and iteration within the lifecycle phases of plan, explore, select, buy, use, maintain, and renew.

Cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service is an absolute essential for strong and profitable customer relationships. However, in practice, we’ve found that delivering a customer service experience with the breadth and depth to support every channel and the entire lifecycle of your customer relationships is quite difficult because your organization and budgets are business function oriented and/or product oriented, not customer experience oriented. It’s also difficult because no single product or product suite is designed to address the spectrum of cross-channel, cross-lifecycle requirements.

The most practical approach to creating and delivering cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service is to do so incrementally by individual channels or related groups of channels and for individual or related lifecycle phases. A key ingredient to success is customer self-service - helping your customers use the World Wide Web to find answers to questions about your products and services and to help customers diagnose, isolate, and resolve problems that they’re having with your products and services.

Evaluating Customer Self-Service Products and Services

Through our work with you, our work understanding software solutions, and our ongoing customer-centric analyses, we’ve identified the requirements for customer self-service products and created a framework that will help you evaluate how well products address those requirements[3]. Like all of our product evaluation frameworks, this one delivers the following significant benefits:

• It shortens your time-to-market.
  
• It saves time and reduces your costs in product evaluation, comparison, and selection.
  
• It reduces your risks in product evaluation, comparison, and selection.

The framework enables you to make apples-to-apples comparisons on the most important product evaluation factors. Then our product evaluations against the framework speed and simplify your work even more.

The framework for customer self-service has five top-level evaluation criteria and sets of sub-criteria for each top-level criterion. We show the criteria and their factors in Illustration 1.

Customer Self-Service Evaluation Framework
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Illustration 1. This illustration shows the evaluation criteria of the customer self-service evaluation framework.

These are the top-level evaluation criteria:

• Operational functionality for customer self-service
• Analytic functionality for customer self-service
• Architecture
• Product viability
• Company viability

In this report, we evaluate InQuira 8.0 against that framework.

INQUIRA 8

Product Background

InQuira 8.0 is InQuira’s cross-channel cross-lifecycle customer service offering. It’s a suite of these five separately-priced application modules:

• InQuira Intelligent Search is InQuira’s search engine. It’s packaged with tools for configuration and deployment as well as with a UI.
  
• InQuira Information Manager (IM) is a full-featured content management system that services as the knowledgebase for InQuira 8. Information Manager is packaged with tools for creating, editing, approving, publishing, and retiring content and a UI for presenting it.
  
• InQuira Information Center is a customer self-service application generated from Information Manager metadata about users and content. Information Center presents a portal-like interface through which customers can search for and navigate to answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. The application also includes a HTML UI designed for mobile devices.
  
• InQuira Discussion Forums is new in InQuira 8. Implemented within Information Manager, Discussion Forums supports community activities and lets you deliver peer-to-peer customer service.
  
• InQuira Analytics is a comprehensive data warehousing and business intelligence system for analyzing Intelligent Search and Information Manager. InQuira offers Intelligent Search Analytics and Information manager Analytics. Each has ETL facilities to move data from logs to an operational data store, facilities to create and manage a multi-dimensional, star-schema data mart, and a wealth of relevant, parameter-driven, filterable reports on user behavior and on the usage of application resources.

By way of product background, InQuira Intelligent Search is InQuira’s original offering. It was introduced in June 2002 as the key component of InQuira 5.0 and has been improved across the subsequent versions of the InQuira platform: InQuira 6, InQuira 7, and, now, InQuira 8. Information Manager is built of technology that InQuira acquired from Conviveon Corporation in April 2005. Information Manager was introduced within InQuira 6.5 when InQuira had an OEM relationship with Conviveon. InQuira 7.0 was the first release following the acquisition. Information Center and Discussion Forums were developed by InQuira and, as we mentioned, are both new in this version. Analytics was introduced for Intelligent Search in InQuira 6.0 and for Information Manager in InQuira 7.0.

InQuira has an installed base of approximately 50 customer accounts. The applications are offered through perpetual licenses. InQuira offers hosting services for their implementation.

What’s New in InQuira 8?

InQuira 8.0 was introduced on February 20, 2007. By application module, its key, new and improved capabilities are:

• Information Manager 8.0, which includes the following new and enhanced capabilities:

- Content Subscriptions. Users can subscribe to content changes at any or all of three levels. Notification of changes is delivered by email.

- Bulk Operations let administrators perform operations against multiple content items in one request.

- Repository Merge Automation updates a target repository with only changed information.

• Information Center 8.0 is a new application.
  
• Discussion Forums 8.0 is a new application.
  
• Intelligent Search 8.0, which includes the following new and enhanced capabilities:

- System Manager is the administrative toolset for Intelligent Search. It’s implemented in a thin Web client.

- Log Event Viewer lets analysts view events in the InQuira log directly to help diagnose and resolve problems.

- Intent Discovery Script helps analysts identify frequently occurring terms and phrase in search queries to be encoded into Intents, an innovative approach in Intelligent Search to recognizing the questions that users are trying to answer.

- Process Wizards guide users through a dialog to help them answer questions and solve problems. The Process Wizard Test Drive lets process developers test those dialogs.

- Ontology Viewer lets each analyst view graphically the terms and relationships in ontologies.

• Analytics 8.0, which includes the following new and enhanced capabilities:

- New reports in 8.0 including Dashboards, Sessions, User Experience, Performance, and reports to support Discussion Forums.

- Content Usage, Feedback, and Survey reports have been improved.

*Endnote*
[3] See “Framework for Evaluating Customer Self-Service Products and Services: How to Evaluate Service Solutions That Deliver a Great End-to-End Customer Experience,” June 8, 2006, http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=722.
*Endnote*

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