TMC™ Labs Innovation Awards 2001 Customer Interactive Solutions We are pleased to present the second-annual TMC™ Labs Innovation Awards, which were launched to honor products that demonstrate raw innovation, unique features and significant contributions to improving customer interactions. Innovation can be best defined as "new and original or taking a new and original approach." It can also be classified as "forward-thinking and progressive or the introduction of a new idea, method or device." While innovation is often a concept of "firsts," looking at things from a different perspective and molding an existing idea into a new shape is also considered innovative. Challenging the established standards to help achieve competitive alternatives with distinctive results helps define innovation within our industry. With these twelve awards, we attempted to cover a wide spectrum of the industry, from LED panels to customer interaction software suites. While some of the functionality of the products may overlap, the innovations within these products are unique. Once again, our hats are off to the developers and engineers of the products who have earned a TMC™ Labs Innovation Award. EchoMail EchoMail, Inc. Ph: 617-354-8585 Toll free: 888-354-8585 Remember the promise of artificial intelligence from MIT? EchoMail Version 6 is an offshoot of that technological wonder and is touted as an "E-mail Relationship Management" solution. This is a suite of nine products that covers business intelligence, customer care, data warehousing and direct marketing. The suite classifies e-mail according to attitude, issue, product, request and customer. Depending on the classification, it then selects a reply from a number of prewritten responses. If an e-mail message has a negative attitude, it is forwarded to an assigned agent for a personal response. This is done through various means such as thesauri, dictionaries and morphological analyzers. In the call center, this makes life considerably easier by combining electronic customer relationship marketing solutions and application service provider (ASP) models in the e-business arena. (EchoMail, Inc. refers to itself as an ASP.) This suite analyzes, routes and monitors all incoming e-mail messages rapidly and cost-effectively. It warehouses, mines and queries incoming e-mail messages to compile real-time business/customer intelligence. It also generates focused mailing lists and executes effective outbound e-marketing campaigns, as well as captures and manages leads based on the e-mail demographic input. Techno-geeks might ask how this is accomplished, so we will attempt to respond. There are actually three core technologies for e-mail categorization, processing classification and database modeling. These are known as XIVA, based on research and experience in the field of pattern recognition (this is where the detection of "attitude" comes from), Trinity, a scalable server technology, and INO (In & Out), a database modeler. It is also available in nine noncomputer languages and has been going strong since 1995. This product deserves an Innovation Award because it promises to simplify a way of life that did not exist a decade ago and has now become ubiquitous. It combines three areas of time-consuming drudgery into a simple solution (on the surface). It might even mean we need no longer dread returning to work after taking time off to have a life by auto-answering, cataloging, indexing, processing and responding to our accumulated e-mail for us.