Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Interview with Varolii's New President/CEO David McCann

April 21, 2011


Varolii Corporation, which develops and cloud hosts automated outbound communications, has brought on board David McCann as its new president and CEO. McCann succeeds Nicholas Tiliacos, who has stepped down after 10 years of service.

McCann is a veteran software industry executive with more than 25 years of experience in marketing, sales, product management and engineering. His most recent position was as general manager of the Windows Server Product Management team at Microsoft in the Server & Cloud Division of the Server & Tools Business, making it a perfect segue to Varolii.

Prior to Microsoft, McCann served as the CEO for two privately-funded companies: Electronic Evidence and CarParts Technologies. He had also been senior vice president of Products and Strategy at FileNet Software and was instrumental in driving the company to $450 million in revenues prior to its acquisition by IBM in 2006. McCann was also senior vice president for Worldwide Marketing and Strategy for Open Servers and Software with Unisys Corporation, where he spent almost 10 years of his early career.

Varolii is at a strategic intersection of cloud computing services and personalized consumer communications, reaching more than 75 million U.S. consumers each year for some of the world's largest corporations,” said McCann. “We are in a market where IT spending is on the rise globally and a society where billions of consumers have increasing expectations about the intelligence of communication they receive from companies. I'm looking forward to working with our expert team and customers to continue to create compelling business value and find better and faster ways to deliver our solutions to large enterprise organizations.”

To get a handle on where Varolii is going ContactCenterSolutions recently interviewed Dave McCann. Here is the exchange:

ContactCenterSolutions:          Outline what is happening in the demand for automated outbound messaging and what are the drivers?

McCann:         Varolii was one of the early cloud services vendors, and cloud services are growing at a CAGR [combined annual growth rate] of 21 percent, according to Gartner. In addition to a strong market in North America, we believe there is substantial untapped market internationally. We also see strong growth within our installed base customers. We serve some of the largest companies in banking, healthcare, retail, telecommunications, transportation and utilities. Many of our largest and long-time customers are showing double-digit increases in the money they spend on us.

There are several things driving that demand. Mobility is changing the customer service landscape. Consumers now expect a faster and, in some cases, instant response, that can be delivered via multiple channels (mobile phone, text, e-mail). Automated communications makes it easier and cheaper to deliver fast, relevant messages to customers via multiple channels.

Customers also want self-service options.  Because of these instant communications channels, the new expectation from consumers includes more robust self-service options and adhering to customers’ implicit and explicit preferences for how, when and why they are being contacted.  Self-service options not only provide more convenience to customers, but they also reduce costs for companies.  For example, automated payments cost less and are faster to process than manual payments over the phone with an agent.  And some systems can reduce hold times by allowing customers to choose a call back at a later time. 

Companies also want to streamline and improve their business processes. Varolii gives companies a powerful tool to incorporate costumer communications into an existing process or workflow, and therefore strengthen that workflow while simultaneously improving customer service, which we see as another driver of demand.

ContactCenterSolutions:          How much of this demand is being driven by new uses/needs versus live agent calls that have been diverted to it?

McCann: It’s a fairly equal demand between optimizing the contact center and improving the customer experience. Automated communications helps lessen the burden on the contact center by providing self-service options to customers, in addition to off-loading outbound communications from agents so that contact centers can better use those costly agent resources. These have traditionally been the central value proposition for proactive customer communications. But we’re finding more and more that companies want to communicate with customers in high-value business processes but haven’t had a cost-effective way to do so.

There are a wide range of these processes—from on-boarding new customers to surveying customer satisfaction to improving patient care in wellness programs—that can benefit immensely by adding proactive customer communications. So I see demand as being driven by a mix of adding value in the contact center and improving high transaction, high value business processes.

ContactCenterSolutions:          What mode split, voice versus e-mail versus chat/e-mail and down the road in video in automated messaging, do you see now and what do you forecast in the future and why?

McCann:         Today, we see the majority of our customers using voice and email as the key channels. However, mobile phones are becoming more and more important in customer communications, so things like SMS text messaging, mobile applications and the ability to combine voice with text will be become more and more important.

Also, we are talking as a company about our strategy for social media – another growing channel that companies will need to be able to communicate with consumers on. In fact, Gartner said that 20 percent of business users will use social networks as a key means of business communications by 2014: and customer communications will be a big part of that.

ContactCenterSolutions:          Many OEM platform vendors, cloud/hosting suppliers, carriers and BPO firms offer automated outbound messaging that are or can be integrated with their live agent contact center solutions. Where is Varolii in this marketplace? Why should a firm select Varolii rather than go to their existing solution provider?

McCann:         Varolii can be fully integrated with the contact center as well. In fact, our contact center features and data integration are some of our strongest differentiators. In addition to our feature set and data model, what makes Varolii different is our knowledge and understand of what drives customer behavior and causes customers to take action. Personalization and analytics are important elements in that regard. For example, our platform, Varolii Interact, has a feature set called Varolii ID, which tracks individual customer interactions and continually learns, so strategies can be modified for individual consumers, which in turn drives better communications effectiveness.

Another difference between Varolii and other vendors is our expertise in business processes that impact customer retention and revenue. Varolii has sent over five billion proactive, personalized voice, SMS and e-mail notifications for companies across industries such as healthcare, utilities, financial services, airlines and others. That historical data gives us deeper insights into consumer preferences, both implicit and explicit, so that companies can get a better return. That’s very different than vendors who have technology and deliver messages, but don’t have the intellectual property to create conversations and dialogue that drive results.

ContactCenterSolutions:          When your appointment was announced you mentioned that Varolii will be introducing a number of important new capabilities on the Varolii Interact platform over the next 12 months. Can you provide some details and their benefits?

McCann:         We’ll be announcing a number of innovative new applications and enhancements that impact both our communications capabilities as well as the tools and insight that administrators have when using the Varolii Interact platform. These innovations will add to our best practices across our key verticals. I’d be happy to share more details when we’re ready to make those announcements.


Brendan B. Read is ContactCenterSolutions’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Carrie Schmelkin



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