Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Interactive Intelligence -the Year in Review and a Look Ahead

December 19, 2011

Contact center solutions industry leader Interactive Intelligence is coming off quite an eventful and successful year.   The short list alone includes:  


·         Forbes Magazine ranking the company No. 8 on its list of the 100-best-performing small (Under $1 billion in revenue) businesses, and putting it on its list of the top 15 small company stocks you should own

·         Software Magazine placing the company at number 219 in its list of the world’s top software company’s (Interactive made the list for the 11th year in a row)

·         Winning research firm Frost & Sullivan’s coveted Contact Center Systems North America Company of the Year Award.   

And, the end of the year has coincided with the November formal release of CIC 4.0 for its flagship Customer Interaction Center (CIC) all-in-one IP communications software suite which has set the competitive bar at a very high new level as we head into 2012.

To understand the secrets of their success and gaze into the future and get some perspective on the year ahead, I talked with Joe Staples, chief marketing officer at Interactive Intelligence.

ContactCenterSolutions: Interactive Intelligence got a lot of well-deserved recognition this year to what do you attribute all of the accolades?

Staples:  As a percentage of revenue we invest more in R&D than anyone we compete with. Our CEO, Dr. Donald E. Brown is technologist.   He drives a strong product agenda to create newer, faster and better offerings. We probably do less waiting for customers to ask us for a specific feature and concentrate more on what they are trying to accomplish.   

Interaction Analyzer is good example. Customers did not say we want to listen to keywords and have real-time visualization and analytics.  What they did say is that their supervisors needed tools that could help them decide what deserved attention and when, and how they could spot and attend to problems and train their people to better mitigate risks and provide better customer and agent experiences.   Our breakthrough in providing real-time speech analytics based on keyword spotting enabled us to provide them with a unique solution to their problems, and investing in the foundational technologies that could provide that solution based on those needs is what we believe sets us apart.

Finally, on this one, as to our success, we have credibility with our customers and our partners. We deliver on our promises, we invest in our future based on our understanding of theirs, we strive to exceed expectations. 

ContactCenterSolutions:  With CIC 4.0 you set the contact center solutions space competitive bar at a greater than mere incremental level higher.  What stands out as new and really differentiates your solutions?

Staples: How much space do you have? It is a long list.

 

ContactCenterSolutions: What about just a few highlights?

 

Staples: At a high level, I come back to my previous answer. It is providing new or greatly enhanced functionality that really solves customers problems. 

We already talked about how speech analytics let supervisors know what to pay attention to. Other examples include: our Web which portal is extremely significant to outsourcers who want to give customers visibility; the Web desktop client that allows people to leverage the things they are used to using like Windows and also makes mobility a concern/ We are giving our customers (and I should add our partners) the tools to change the game in contact centers and transform them from what they have been viewed as, i.e., siloed cost centers to significant contributors to a company’s mission and profitability. 

Being able to do things like share with other departments capabilities like presence, and having the ability to have a unified look at company resources via integrated directories, are very valuable. It allows the tapping into resources quickly to answer customers’ questions which is vital to improving customer experiences. Plus, this year contact centers have emerged as important parts of mainstream IT. They are being given rightful consideration in discussions concerning overall strategy, leveraging the power of CRM solutions and a variety of backend data bases.

ContactCenterSolutions:   This includes being able to share with sales and marketing insights about product defects, possible design enhancements (the upgrade to the Kindle Fire just weeks after its introduction being a case in point), competitive pricing information, ways to improve customer loyalty programs, etc. 

 

Staples: Exactly! And, the interesting thing is this will become even more true in terms of our application of what we have learned how to do in terms of aligning technology against what customers want to accomplish in contact centers to improve work flows as we push into helping them with business process automation and examine workflows on a bigger playing field.

ContactCenterSolutions: So what is in your crystal ball for 2012?

Staples: Two biggest trends are:

·         Improving customer service. Things changed in 2008 and 2009 when focus was on saving money instead of saving customers. People are now willing to spend money on improving customer experience. They now fully appreciate they are buying a contact center solution to better service their customers.  This will be amplified in 2012. It is coming from CEOs on down who are looking at every part of their business. 

·         The move from premise to the cloud is unprecedented and accelerating. In 2009, cloud-based orders were five percent. In 2012 they 10 percent in 2011 they are roughly 24 percent. I think everyone in our space can say a thank you to Salesforce.com. CIOs have strategic directive to not buy software or servers. They will consume technology as services. We are extremely well-positioned to ride that trend.

ContactCenterSolutions:   Anything else that jumps out?

 

Staples: Yes! I should also note two other things.

 First, agent retention, and as part of that agent training since it is critical to assuring quality customer experiences, is important. Consumer Reports ranked electronics vendors Crutchfield and B&H the two best companies this past year for supplying superior customer service, they also by the way listed common problems and who ranked worst.   If you call either of the two, you will experience agents who are incredibly knowledgeable and eager to resolve your issue. They both happen to be customers of ours. They invest heavily in their agents. 

There is a great video on this at YouTube, entitled “Customer Service: Word on the Street,” I think it captures the challenges extremely well and speaks to this issues in ways we can all understand.

Second, obviously the incorporation of social media and mobility are going to be differentiators and areas we are investing in. Things like intuitive apps and one-button recording will be important for improving contact center effectiveness and provide user friendliness. Our objective will be to enable the delivery of customer service experiences smartphone and other handhelds that in many ways is better than just using the phone.   In this case it will be both different and better. 

ContactCenterSolutions:  So 2012 sounds very exciting.

Staples: We believe that given our focus and commitments that it should be a very good year not just for Interactive Intelligence, but for our partners and most importantly for customers who interact with contact centers employing our solutions.

ContactCenterSolutions: An impressive list of things to contemplate: 

·         Transformation of the contact center as critical part of the enterprise

·         New tools for improving the quality of customer experiences

·         Extending the reach and ease-of-use internally with integrations and externally with social media and mobility

·         Exploring the explosive value of new capabilities like real-time speech analytics

 

Thank you Joe! “Very exciting” is not a bad way to say Happy New Year!

 

 


Peter Bernstein is a technology industry veteran, having worked in multiple capacities with several of the industry's biggest brands, including Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, Telcordia, HP, Siemens, Nortel, France Telecom, and others, and having served on the Advisory Boards of 15 technology startups. To read more of Peter's work, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Carrie Schmelkin



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