Autonomy Corp has come out with a new way for businesses to check that the way they handle sensitive personal identifiable data in email, chat or audio interactions between customers and agents complies with their security policies and with industry regulations.

Launching the Autonomy Interaction Control Element or ICE product line, Andrew Joiner CEO of the eTalk customer interaction analytics arm of the Cambridge-based search company said the system can be trained to take an appropriate policy action automatically and in real-time. 

This could be the masking of a customer’s credit card details on a screen, or the muting of a customer data sequence that is held in a voice recording.

Compliance has been a key driver behind development of the product, Joiner told us. 

He explained that the system can be used to capture all types of multi-channel customer interactions from web, to email and chat, and telephony. But not every interaction would automatically be recorded, as the system monitors for sensitive content using key word triggers to determine if it needs to be masked. 

Interactions are captured and then indexed so that they can be mined. Policy decisions are taken according to rules managed by the core Autonomy IDOL (intelligent data operating layer) analytics engine. 

“By intelligently monitoring the end user’s desktop activity and forming a conceptual understanding of the meaning of interactions, Autonomy ICE can automatically apply compliance and governance policies to enforce Payment Card Industry data security needs, retention and disposition policies, and legal holds” the company said in a statement.

Joiner said the system is not to be confused with redaction systems used for e-discovery that simply edit exempt details from a document. “ICE is much broader than that, much more powerful and works in real time.” A scalable policy server intelligently classifies and manages interactions, irrespective of their format or language.