2015 Latin American Contact Center Systems Company of the Year Award

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Background and Company Performance

Industry Challenges

With the rise of mobile and social technologies, customers are now more knowledgeable, empowered, and demanding than ever. Their ability to access and share information anytime, anywhere puts them in control of their own experience. These always-on connected customers expect to do business with companies on their terms, including how, when, and where they choose to interact for customer service and support.

A changing consumer landscape serves up challenges that can confound the most well-intentioned enterprises and providers. Consumers are expecting service on their preferred channels, which are increasingly outside of voice, interactive voice response (IVR), and email.

Contact centers need the capabilities to cover all aspects of multi-channel communication across all industries. The challenge is determining how to invest in the processes and technologies needed across multiple channels. Agents must have the single view needed to give customers direct access to the experience they desire, all at the right cost for the organization.

To that end, Frost & Sullivan is witnessing a significant shift from traditional channels such as voice and email to newer, digital channels such as mobile, social, Web, chat, and video. Therefore, it is critical for vendors to help customer service organizations develop new and expanded capabilities to support a growing array of digital channels.

Market dynamics and recent technical innovations have brought new advances, functionality, complexity, and challenges to daily contact center operations.

Visionary Innovation and Performance and Customer Impact

Addressing Unmet Needs

While Interactive Intelligence’s (Interactive) recent success in Latin America is deeply linked with its scalable and reliable product portfolio and its comprehensive solution offering alternative (on-premises, cloud, and private cloud delivery options), other elements have contributed as well.

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Another interesting business alternative Interactive pursued in Latin America was to prospect within the existent legacy client base of its major competitors through an attractive licensing offering bundle with competitive pricing for maintenance and support services.

The company conceived the above mentioned offering because it realized several Latin American businesses were forced to invest heavily on maintenance and support services to expand the life cycle of their previously acquired contact center infrastructure.

Implementation Best Practices

Interactive Intelligence has developed a global verticalization approach, leveraging product and staff expertise on several industries. Major strategies have been specifically designed for collections, financial services, government, healthcare, insurance, outsourcing, and utilities industries.

The company has successfully implemented global best practices and solutions within the insurance segment in Latin America. The Interaction Process Automation™ (IPA) solution allows organizations to capture, prioritize, route, escalate, and track each step in a work process, including progress, people, user skills and qualifications, availability, and resources.

By tracking work (progress, people, skills, qualifications, availability, and resources), IPA optimizes processes by automatically prioritizing and routing work to the best qualified and available worker for timely completion, regardless of the worker’s location. Because it was built on top of the Customer Interaction Center™ (CIC), IPA leverages proven communications technology that has been in use for years in contact centers worldwide. As it automates, IPA increases efficiencies and reduces the time involved in a given process. It cuts costs by requiring fewer employees, eliminating process latency, and reducing human error.

Financial Performance

Interactive Intelligence’s sales performance in Latin America was remarkable during calendar year 2014. Overall business revenue grew 80% year-over-year; however, on-premises shipments sales had an exponential growth as the company almost tripled its revenues when compared with 2013.

Major verticals served during 2014 include service providers (telecom companies), outsourcers, finance, collections, utilities, insurance, and healthcare.

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Performance Value

Interactive Intelligence’s flagship contact center product, CIC, is based on more than 20 years of constant development and innovation, which conceived a consolidated software platform and integrated applications built on widely adopted standards to provide a feature-rich solution that makes efficient use of IT resources.

As a true all-in-one contact center solution, CIC offers a broad and deep application set, along with a single point of management and administration that allows applications to work together. Interactive’s all-in-one suite of products, including unified communications, mobile, and business process automation capabilities, resonates well with customers looking to use a broad set of communication and contact center features without the breakpoints typically found in legacy vendors’ systems products.

The company claims that through CIC, it brings efficiency and effectiveness to contact centers of all sizes, allowing its clients to do everything from setting up speech-enabled IVR menus to configuring routing for incoming calls, emails, chats, SMS messages, and integrated social media notifications. In most cases, this architecture allows customers to add functionality without additional servers, which helps reduce cost and complexity. Moreover, with the release of CIC 4.0, Interactive Intelligence further cut down on system costs by delivering scalability enhancements 2 to 8 times greater than before, resulting in the support of 10,000 agents on a single server.

CIC’s broad functionality includes real-time speech analytics and quality monitoring tools that allow supervisors to monitor customer sentiment more closely and make better decisions about everything.

In Latin America, Interactive’s broad range of solutions are available through several deployment alternatives (on-premises, cloud, and private cloud delivery options). Clients can ask for a premise-based solution and a single-tenant cloud

solution—Communications-as-a-ServiceSM_{(CaaS)—at a manageable monthly cost, or they can even migrate their}

cloud contact centers to their own sites without incurring downtime or losing applications (private cloud).

Every company and deployment is different, which is why Interactive Intelligence created a contact center solutions consulting team in Latin America that possesses the breadth and depth of knowledge to help clients maximize the value from their investments.

Customer Purchase Experience

Loyal and pleased clients represent another crucial fact behind Interactive’s current success in Latin America. The company claims to have a product renovation ratio within existing clients of over 90%.

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product (20 years of existence and 9 versions, from the 1.0 version to 2015) that easily extends the useful life of technology investments. Upgrading or migrating CIC is a simple process, and customers usually choose to receive upgrades as part of their support services package. Second, Interactive’s best-of-breed services team is based in Latin America. Third, the latest development of Interactive’s products and solutions have met industry expectations and managed to help its customers solve daily business problems. Finally, the company has evolved its technology model to the latest market needs, thus positioning the Interactive Intelligence brand as the first vendor to build a real cloud offering for Latin American customers.

Customer Service Experience

Interactive Intelligence is willing to obtain from every sell a consultative transaction and enhanced experience for its clients in Latin America as it looks forward to combining the client’s specific business knowledge, the platform’s benefits with their own experience, and best practices in specific industries to obtain the best possible results. This allows the company to complete implementation and installation projects in a third of the time it usually takes for its competitors.

The Latin American services team comprises 35 people spread geographically along the entire region (80% are trilingual—Spanish, English, and Portuguese—assuring they can meet the needs of the entire region). This squad is the most senior companywide as the average tenure is 12 or more years working with the Interactive Intelligence software. This selected team not only serves the needs of the Latin American region but officiates as a concrete bridge to the global support services group, which grants access to over 500 people of different profiles (e.g., consultants, developers, QA engineers, field engineers, and engineers specialists) to escalate the demands of local clients if needed.

Finally, Interactive Intelligence has created the client success management (CSM) area, with the motto, “We are here to ensure our client’s success.” As such, the CSM area is dedicated to working with Interactive’s customers to improve the customer experience while they work with the company’s solutions, create and pave the way for customers to see the value of Interactive Intelligence solutions, and promote continuous improvement in the relationship between the customer and the company by better understanding the customer experience with Interactive Intelligence solutions to ensure that business partners are providing the equipment and the experience customers expect.

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process with the client. Additionally, the CSM team often participates in the client´s strategic planning sessions and acts as a facilitator to implement best practices. All these interactions are important for clients and represent significant business opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling Interactive products.

Conclusion

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Significance of Company of the Year

To win the Company of the Year award (i.e., to be recognized as a leader not only in your industry, but among your non-industry peers as well) requires a company to demonstrate excellence in growth, innovation, and leadership. This kind of excellence typically translates into superior performance in three key areas: demand generation, brand development, and competitive positioning. These areas serve as the foundation of a company’s future success and prepare it to deliver on the two criteria that define the Company of the Year Award (Visionary Innovation & Performance and Customer Impact).

Understanding Company of the Year

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Key Benchmarking Criteria

For the Company of the Year Award, Frost & Sullivan analysts independently evaluated two key factors—Visionary Innovation & Performance and Customer Impact—according to the criteria identified below.

Visionary Innovation & Performance

Criterion 1: Addressing Unmet Needs

Criterion 2: Visionary Scenarios Through Mega Trends Criterion 3: Implementation Best Practices

Criterion 4: Blue Ocean Strategy Criterion 5: Financial Performance

Customer Impact

Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience Criterion 5: Brand Equity

Best Practice Award Analysis for Interactive Intelligence

Decision Support Scorecard

To support its evaluation of best practices across multiple business performance

categories, Frost & Sullivan employs a customized Decision Support Scorecard. This tool allows our research and consulting teams to objectively analyze performance, according to the key benchmarking criteria listed in the previous section, and to assign ratings on that basis. The tool follows a 10-point scale that allows for nuances in performance evaluation; ratings guidelines are illustrated below.

RATINGS GUIDELINES

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The results of this analysis are shown below. To remain unbiased and to protect the interests of all organizations reviewed, we have chosen to refer to the other key players as Competitor 2 and Competitor 3.

DECISION SUPPORT SCORECARD FOR COMPANY OF THE YEAR AWARD Measurement of 1–10 (1 = poor; 10 = excellent)

Company of the Year

Visionary Innovation &

Performance Customer Impact Average Rating

Interactive Intelligence 9 8 8.5 Competitor 2 8 8 8 Competitor 3 8 7.5 7.75

Visionary Innovation & Performance

Criterion 1: Addressing Unmet Needs

Requirement: Implementing a robust process to continuously unearth customers’ unmet or under-served needs, and creating the products or solutions to address them effectively

Criterion 2: Visionary Scenarios Through Mega Trends

Requirement: Incorporating long-range, macro-level scenarios into the innovation strategy, thereby enabling “first to market” growth opportunities solutions

Criterion 4: Implementation of Best Practices

Requirement: Best-in-class strategy implementation characterized by processes, tools, or activities that generate a consistent and repeatable level of success.

Criterion 3: Blue Ocean Strategy

Requirement: Strategic focus in creating a leadership position in a potentially “uncontested” market space, manifested by stiff barriers to entry for competitors

Criterion 5: Financial Performance

Requirement: Strong overall business performance in terms of revenues, revenue growth, operating margin and other key financial metrics

Customer Impact

Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value

Requirement: Products or services offer the best value for the price, compared to similar offerings in the market

Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience

Requirement: Customers feel like they are buying the most optimal solution that addresses both their unique needs and their unique constraints

Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience

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Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience

Requirement: Customer service is accessible, fast, stress-free, and of high quality

Criterion 5: Brand Equity

Requirement: Customers have a positive view of the brand and exhibit high brand loyalty

Decision Support Matrix

Once all companies have been evaluated according to the Decision Support Scorecard, analysts can then position the candidates on the matrix shown below, enabling them to visualize which companies are truly breakthrough and which ones are not yet operating at best-in-class levels.

DECISION SUPPORT MATRIX FOR COMPANY OF THE YEAR AWARD High Low Low High Custome r Imp a ct

Visionary Innovation & Performance

Interactive Intelligence

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The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best

Practices Awards

Research Methodology

Frost & Sullivan’s 360-degree research methodology represents the analytical rigor of our research process. It offers a 360-degree-view of industry challenges, trends, and issues by integrating all 7 of Frost & Sullivan's research methodologies. Too often, companies make important growth decisions based on a narrow understanding of their environment, leading to errors of both omission and commission. Successful growth strategies are founded on a thorough understanding of market, technical, economic, financial, customer, best practices, and demographic analyses. The integration of these research disciplines into the 360-degree research methodology provides an evaluation

platform for benchmarking industry players and for identifying those performing at best-in-class levels.

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Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching,

Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices

Frost & Sullivan Awards follow a 10-step process to evaluate award candidates and assess their fit with select best practice criteria. The reputation and integrity of the Awards are based on close adherence to this process.

STEP OBJECTIVE KEY ACTIVITIES OUTPUT

1 Monitor, target, and screen

Identify award recipient candidates from around the globe

 Conduct in-depth industry research

 Identify emerging sectors  Scan multiple geographies

Pipeline of candidates who potentially meet all best-practice criteria

2 Perform 360-degree research

Perform comprehensive, 360-degree research on all candidates in the pipeline

 Interview thought leaders and industry practitioners  Assess candidates’ fit with

best-practice criteria  Rank all candidates

Matrix positioning all candidates’ performance relative to one another

3 Invite thought leadership in best practices Perform in-depth

examination of all candidates  Confirm best-practice criteria  Examine eligibility of all candidates

 Identify any information gaps

Detailed profiles of all ranked candidates 4 Initiate research director review Conduct an unbiased evaluation of all candidate profiles

 Brainstorm ranking options  Invite multiple perspectives

on candidates’ performance  Update candidate profiles

Final prioritization of all eligible candidates and companion best-practice positioning paper 5 Assemble panel of industry experts

Present findings to an expert panel of industry thought leaders

 Share findings  Strengthen cases for

candidate eligibility  Prioritize candidates

Refined list of prioritized award candidates 6 Conduct global industry review

Build consensus on award

candidates’ eligibility  Hold global team meeting to review all candidates  Pressure-test fit with criteria  Confirm inclusion of all

eligible candidates

Final list of eligible award candidates, representing success stories worldwide

7 Perform _{quality check}

Develop official award

consideration materials  Perform final performance benchmarking activities  Write nominations  Perform quality review

High-quality, accurate, and creative presentation of nominees’ successes 8 Reconnect with panel of industry experts

Finalize the selection of the

best-practice award recipient  Review analysis with panel  Build consensus  Select winner

Decision on which company performs best against all best-practice criteria

9 Communicate _recognition

Inform award recipient of

award recognition  Present award to the CEO  Inspire the organization for continued success

 Celebrate the recipient’s performance

Announcement of award and plan for how recipient can use the award to enhance the brand

10 Take strategic action

Upon licensing, company may share award news with stakeholders and customers

 Coordinate media outreach  Design a marketing plan  Assess award’s role in future

strategic planning

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About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth and achieve best in class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined research and best practice models to drive the generation, evaluation and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages almost 50 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses and the investment community from 31 offices on six continents. To join our Growth Partnership, please visit