Most businesses need is to manage effectively every piece of customer correspondence - including phone calls, letters, e-mails, web enquiries, and faxes - through to a successful conclusion.

Many solutions attempt to do this by providing the business with a new centralised computer system that handles and manages every aspect of the business, with a strong focus on a single customer view. Expensive to buy and expensive to implement, these solutions provide the theoretically optimal business environment for dealing with customers. In practise, however, customer care becomes an expensive luxury.
numero interactive makes no attempt to replace or replicate the functionality of the business' existing line-of-business applications; rather, numero interactive provides contact centres with a single, simple, solution to the problem of how to manage customer correspondence.

numero interactive provides contact centres with productivity, manageability and traceability benefits as a simple stand-alone application that can be implemented in less than two months. A simple, consistent and highly productive user interface minimises operator training, while flexible configuration and reporting options ensure that the system can easily be tailored to your required workflow, operational and management reporting requirements.

numero interactive started life as a specialised email response management solution for large contact centres swamped by the huge and increasing volumes of emails and web enquiries. Through a combination of advanced text processing techniques (for email categorisation, form recognition and data elicitation) and category-based routing (to automated response, automated actioning and manual agent queues) SmartAgént now delivers a powerful correspondence response management solution that is also simple to implement, use and manage.

numero interactive stores and manages customer correspondence in electronic form; letters, forms and others. The 'white' mail must be scanned to convert the document into an electronic image before it can be loaded into SmartAgént. Typically, this will be performed as part of the mail room function using a proprietary document imaging solution. In many cases, mail room operators will also enter some level of information about each document scanned into the document imaging system.

Where OCR (optical character recognition) software is provided as part of the document imaging solution, the document can also be converted into electronic text or forms, which allows full advantage to be taken of numero interactive's advanced text processing and category-based routing.
numero interactive's 'Inbound Gateway' reads the available document information from the document imaging system and with it creates a new electronic message to be handled by numero interactive in much the same way as any other form of customer enquiry; note that the actual document image is passed through numero interactive as a separately viewable 'attachment' linked to the electronic message.

Once read from the document imaging system and loaded into SmartAgént by white mail inbound gateway, the new enquiry is first passed through numero interactive advanced text processing engine (for document categorisation, form recognition and data elicitation) before entering the Workflow module.

Irrespective of the customer contact channel used, the message is handled the same way within SmartAgént. Based on the information held by numero interactive about the message, the message is assigned to the appropriate company or business area - each of which may have its own brand identity, contact centre resources and routing rules.

If back-office integration has been configured, key data elements from the message (such as customer name, address, unique identifier, order number, etc.) may be validated against back-office systems; additional data elements (possibly including such information as customer or order status, renewal dates, etc) may also be created for the message.

The information held by numero interactive about the message may now be quite considerable. As well as (at the very least) a company or business area and a category, the results of validation checks and the presence / value of any data elements identified may now be available. Based on this information, workflow rules within numero interactive control whether the message is handled by automatic response processes, or whether the message is passed to an operator for manual actioning.