EchoMail, Inc.

EchoMail

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 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.