HP Releases Explore 5.0

HP Software yesterday released Version 5.0 of its HP Explore voice-of-the-customer analytics platform to help companies uncover the hidden value in their multichannel customer interactions.

HP Explore is part of HP's Workforce Optimization (WFO) solution.

The enhancements to the HP Explore platform are designed to help contact centers understand customer behavior more completely and improve customer satisfaction.

Key to that is the improved speech analytics that are a central part of the new release. In Explore 5.0, the speech analytics benefits from advances in neural networking and acoustic modeling to improve recognition accuracy, according to Sukumar Ramaraj, director of product management for HP WFO Software.

This is especially important, Ramaraj says, considering the fact that the audio quality of most call center recordings is usually pretty low. "We've used a larger and richer set of call recordings to build the acoustic models," he states.

Also new in Version 5.0 is seamless integration to indirect content from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

"More and more customers are engaging with their customers on social media," Ramaraj says. "We aggregate all the content from social media to seamlessly deliver the content that companies are interested in. Explore makes social media more accessible to companies so they can better understand their customers."

In Explore 5.0, HP also expanded the number of available dynamic reports and widgets from 10 to 25. The new widgets, which reveal live analysis of interaction content, include new Topic Map and Conversation Map.

Also included in the upgrades are a number of user experience enhancements. HP Explore 5.0 provides much greater flexibility for users to customize the presentation layer, including how they set up views and dashboards. Projects and dashboards can be created and shared for improved team collaboration. Graphical themes for widgets are highly configurable, enabling adherence to enterprise brand design standards.

"We made it easier to slice and dice the data," Ramaraj says, "and we made it easier to share the data through our Command Center."

HP Explore 5.0 uses the HP Haven predictive analytics platform to identify and understand the concepts being discussed, according to Ramaraj.

"Whenever customers are talking to companies, HP Explore can absorb all the interactions and treat them as a unified data source rather than putting them into their own silos," Ramaraj says.

HP last updated the Explore product in October when it released Version 4.6.

"HP Explore 5.0 moves us much closer to the promise of true customer understanding by illuminating concepts from all channels of interaction captured in the contact center," said Jeff Westover, vice president and general manager of HP WFO Software, in a statement. "These enhancements build upon HP Explore's unique ability to conceptually understand all customer interactions, regardless of channel or touchpoint."

Henry Eakland, director of product marketing for HP's Qfiniti and Explorer product lines, says HP Explore 5.0 is best suited to midsized or large contact centers with 200 agents or more. Those types of facilities, he says, have typically been HP's "sweet spot."

The solution is also suited to contact centers in just about any industry vertical, Eakland states.

"We are targeting companies that use multiple channels to communicate with their customers," Ramaraj adds.

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