Communications Australia harnesses intelligence from social networks to help contact centres

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 13 April 2011 16:48

Business IT - Technology

Communications Australia - a systems integrator specialising in unified communications and contact centres - has become a channel partner of hosted contact centre systems provider, Interactive Intelligence, and has developed technology designed to gather and analyse information from a variety of social networks to provide meaningful information to contact centre operatives.

Communications Australia CEO, Mario Vecchio, explained "Interactive Intelligence has the ability to bring streams of information from Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.

"That is fantastic, but being able to contextualise all that information in time and space and location is really, really hard. Somebody has to make an assessment about what to do with that information: Is this person bad-mouthing our company or our product? Or saying the right things? Or are they buying someone else's product when they should be buying ours?"

Vecchio claimed that the technology developed by Communications Australia is able to do this, and said: "From our understanding there is nothing else out there that can do this."

If this is the case Communications Australia could be in the van of a major new technology. In its 2011 forecasts Gartner identified social analytics that "measure, analyse and interpret the results of interactions among people and associations," as a key development, saying: "Social analytics is an umbrella term that includes a number of specialised analysis techniques such as social filtering, social-network analysis, sentiment analysis and social-media analytics." It predicted: "If you don't already have it, you will within three years!"

The technology underpinning the Communications Australia offering is Cogility Studio, from US company Cogility Software. According to Vecchio, "Cogility is a platform that can take the streams that Interactive Intelligence can capture and put the information into a time and space continuum and contextualise it'¦Interactive Intelligence give us the APIs to connect our software platforms together so we can flow the information through the contact centre solution to the users."

He said that Cogility's technology had been "developed with the US military for the last seven years to understand pieces of information from military field operations, to 'join the dots' to try and come to some conclusions. We are taking a component of that and using it with social networks and back ending it into call centres."

Vecchio said that Communications Australia had "worked hand in hand with Cogility developers for the last seven years on a whole number of different fronts'¦we use it in-house." He declined to say how much it had invested in this development.

He said that the company would be taking the product to selected customers over the next few months.