Products Metaphor

Overview

Metaphor is software that lets companies engage with their customers however, whenever, and wherever they choose. Metaphor provides an adaptive environment for users of all types to envision new business ideas, to reuse existing processes and capabilities, and to recombine business offerings across communication channels and market segments easily and intelligently – opening the door to business optimization and transformation.

Metaphor's award-winning features enable companies to design, launch, assess and optimize customer engagement processes and campaigns – including customer acquisition, service, and retention; complex multi-system integration processes; social media initiatives, and more. These features include plug and play integration capabilities, easy business process definition and deployment, a highly scalable and reliable hosting environment, and comprehensive analytics that produce accurate and actionable business intelligence.

Metaphor provides everything business users need to build, manage, and maintain human-facing engagement processes and campaigns to help acquire, service, and retain loyal customers. Out-of-the-box, Metaphor provides project communities, visual design tools, portals, and reporting and analytics for easy deployment and real-time feedback on how processes are working.

Project Communities

Metaphor is a social community for business users enabling interactive and collaborative project delivery. Metaphor’s human-facing capabilities allow easy transition of virtually any business process into existing and next generation communication channels.

Easily collaborate amongst business teams and with IT resources to envision, design, and build human-facing processes and campaigns
Use social tools like blogs and tagging to keep team members up to date and engaged with processes
Make changes to existing processes, and deploy them in real-time

Visual Design Tools

Metaphor provides easy-to-use visual tools that allow business users to depict business processes exactly like they think of them. Coupled with Metaphor’s human-facing capabilities, this means all aspects of a process – system-to-system and person-to-system – are handled just as easily as one another, and once the process is depicted, it becomes real.

Design all aspects of processes in an intuitive and straightforward way
Use a single tool for all process components, whether it involves getting data from a legacy back-end system, sending an SMS message to a customer, or anything in between
Take advantage of integrated publication wizards that make it easy to see the results of the modeling without reliance on IT

Multi-Channel Engagement

Unlike many other customer engagement solutions that offer “web portals,” Metaphor’s dynamic interface generation capabilities automatically create interaction portals across any communication channel – web, voice/IVR, mobile, social media, etc.

Enjoy the absolutely lowest possible cost of publication because a single process seamlessly drives and creates user interfaces in all channels
Shorten design and development cycles with Metaphor automatically managing the nuances from one point of human interaction and another
Save on development costs and lower the requirements for unique specializations amongst the development staff
Make a change to an existing process in one place, and see it immediately realized across every single communication channel

Reporting and Analytics

Metaphor keeps track of every detail of how, where, and why business processes are being used, and exposes all of that data in real-time. With immediate feedback about all aspects of every process, business users can take proactive measures to provide users with precisely the kinds of interactions they demand at that moment.

Make real-time optimizations to all aspects of any process
Allow Metaphor to manage A/B testing of process and interface variations, and provide immediate feedback on user response
Receive real-time feedback on how processes are being consumed by end-users across any and all communication channels
Be immediately informed of any system performance issues

Metaphor provides technologists tools and frameworks that simplify the task of providing reusable core components that can be recombined easily by business users. Because Metaphor has a wide range of built-in functionality, uses a standards-based approach, and easily incorporates existing technology intellectual property, technologists can spend more time focusing on providing core functions.

Frameworks

Metaphor provides out-of-the box answers to common headaches for technology teams: security/encryption, logging/auditing, session and state management, scalability and failover, etc. And, Metaphor easily incorporates custom frameworks leveraging existing intellectual property and best practices.

Save time on every implementation by utilizing core, reusable foundations
Allow developers to focus on business functionality not architectural concerns
Make collaboration and knowledge transfer more efficient because there is a high level of similarity across projects

Easy Recombination

Metaphor offers technologists multiple ways to provide easy reuse and recombination of business functionality components: custom process steps, processes calling other processes as sub-components, web services exposed to processes like any other process step, etc. This means that as development teams provide functions to business users, those business users become more and more self-sufficient, allowing developers to move onto more and more functionality.

Create custom and reusable business process steps that are exposed to business users as graphical steps in the palette of components
Easily design even the most complex and recursive processes through the use of Metaphor’s unique “sub-flow” functionality
Use Metaphor’s built-in web service templates to build functional components, including modernizing previously built functionality quickly

Standards-based Approach

Metaphor builds on the best of service-oriented and event-driven architectures, and puts that power in the hands of developers in an open and standard model. All appropriate standards – WSDL/SOAP, W3C, etc. – are supported so that Metaphor-built and hosted services easily interoperate with other platforms and eases the learning curve for developers.

Leverage existing development patterns
Shorten ramp-up time for new developers and ease transition from other technologies
Interoperate with virtually any technology platform – Unix/Linux, AS/400, mainframe, etc. – and promote evolutionary development

Because Metaphor automatically exposes processes into any and all communications and portal channels, operations are vastly simplified thanks to centralization of core functionality and single-point deployments. And, Metaphor’s built-in hosting environment is easy to operate and provides real-time visibility into service levels, multi-system performance, and simplifies the deployment lifecycle.

Single-Point Multi-channel Deployment

Metaphor’s human-facing user interface generation capabilities mean that operations personnel do not have to manage cumbersome build routines that may be unique to each possible communication channel. This drastically reduces the amount of time and effort associated with maintaining processes in production, and reduces the cost of publication for changes.

Work with more efficient and straightforward build and rollback routines
Manage deployments at a single point instead of one – or more – for each communication channel
Add new communication channels more easily

Easy-to-Operate Environment

Metaphor is its own massively scalable, enterprise-grade application and web-services hosting environment. There is no dependency on third-party software to implement, support, and scale the enterprise. This lowers the complexity of the environment and makes it easier for operations personnel to monitor and diagnose issues when they arise. Scalability, fail-over, and tuning are also much easier than competitive offerings making the total cost of ownership much lower for Metaphor.

Manage a single technology platform instead of multiple
Rapidly diagnose issues and take corrective action without the traditional finger-pointing of multi-vendor/multi-platform environments
True 24x7x365 performance with built-in scalability and fail-over
Easily publish new processes and changes to existing processes in real-time with no need for “scheduled maintenance” downtime

Real-time Visibility

Metaphor provides core logging and monitoring features as well as advanced service level management – through its unique SLAP™ technology. This allows operations personnel to know every detail of how the environment is operating at any given moment.

Work with a self-aware, self-healing environment that reduces operations overhead
Access detailed information about process and service performance in an open and standard way
Integrate with any existing organizational standards for logging, reporting, and monitoring to better leverage existing investments

Metaphor's award-winning components enable your company to design, launch, assess and optimize prospect, customer, and partner engagement initiatives. Metaphor is an all-inclusive suite that provides a wide range of capabilities for users of all types.

Multi-Channel Portals

Multi-Channel Portals present workflow processes and standardized content from across enterprise and partner systems. Metaphor synchronizes key information and then reaches out to customers via voice, web, IVR, chat, social media and whatever comes next.
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Analytics and Monitoring

Analytics and Monitoring (ba/bam) provide real-time visibility into data synchronized across disparate systems and departmental silos. Metaphor keeps decision makers informed, enabling a quick response to issues and opportunities.
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Business Processes and Rules

Business Processes and Rules (bpm/bre) empowers business users to quickly define and deploy customer programs – from very simple to highly complex – with minimal support from IT. Metaphor-driven business processes synchronize data across the enterprise and overlay reusable rules to drive standardized, repeatable processes of any kind.
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Dynamic Content Management

Dynamic Content Management is becoming a key challenge as the volume of data increases and communication channels multiply. Metaphor standardizes and publishes content as customer interactions evolve, thus reducing the effort and costs associated with managing content on a separate system.
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Social Media and Collaboration

Social Media and Collaboration leverages social concepts through a collaborative and role driven project community where business users and IT can envision, create and evolve ideas as well as manage how customers interact with their systems, including a flexible communication engine for engaging over existing and next-generation social media networks.
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Visual Process Modeling

Visual Process Modeling (workflow) promotes effective business practices by providing tools to design and implement workflow models. Metaphor’s graphical user interface generates executable services from these models, enabling the rapid deployment of new processes and campaigns.
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Voice / ACD Unification

Voice / ACD Unification (switch) functionality brings robust processes to the most common means of customer interaction: voice. Whether using Metaphor’s built-in voice capabilities or integrating with other industry solutions for call management, customers can engage in rich interactions that provide high levels of satisfaction.
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Integration Server

Integration (eai/esb) leverages SOA principles to standardize the communications between systems, enabling users to experience multiple functions as a single interactive solution. Metaphor overlays systems, incorporating new sources of information and functionality with previously established systems.
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Products

Key Resources

A New Model for Customer EngagementLearn about the 6 steps every company needs to take for effective customer engagement.
Customer Success StatisticsHow effective engagement helps you get and keep more customers.
Special Technology Initiative?Tell us more about your project.