Confirmit Moves to Voice of Customer and Feedback Management

Confirmit is one of the leading vendors of market research services. It has a full range of products that support every step of the market research cycle. Its software lets users create surveys that can be delivered through multiple channels, perform panel management (managing teams of people that contribute to research programs), collect the data from completed surveys, and use a suite of reporting and analysis tools to gain in-depth insights from the data collected. The company has been steadily moving into the enterprise feedback market, using similar products and services that allow companies to focus on customers and employees. These developments have been accelerating, as evidenced by three recent announcements: the release of the company’s latest Horizons 17 software, a new set of services that focuses on the customer, and the acquisition of CustomerSat, an enterprise feedback management software and services provider.

Horizons 17 offers several enhancements to core capabilities, but the most exciting developments take Confirmit into the areas of mobility and big data, two of the technologies that Ventana Research believes have a major impact on how companies develop and consume IT today. Mobility impacts both internal users and the way customers interact with companies. Confirmit now allows internal users to access reports and analysis on their smart devices, and lets companies deliver surveys on consumers’ smart devices. Big data comes into play as the software supports more channels for collecting completed surveys, and thus collects higher volumes of data in more formats, including unstructured data.

The new services take Confirmit into voice of the customer (VoC), but with a twist. At the center of the services, voice of the market systems gather market research data and voice of the customer gathers feedback for customers, and these are combined with voice of the employee, which gathers input from employees, and voice of the business, which brings together key business-related data. The combination of all this data enables companies to derive a near 360-degree of the customer, something my benchmark research into customer relationship maturity shows less than a third (31%) of companies can produce today. This view becomes the foundation of a series of interconnected services that Ventana Research defines as performance management – understand (analyze past and current information), optimize (identify what changes need to be made) and align (put in place programs that bring about the changes needed to achieve the desired improvements). Confirmit refer to these in its own terminology but the result is the same; the services help organizations get the best of market, customer, employee and business feedback to improve business outcomes.

The acquisition of CustomerSat shows further intentions to increase the focus on VoC. Having the services and systems to support VoC is a big step, but my research into customer feedback management shows that as yet companies are largely at what we call the tactical level of maturity. Although the majority (67%) of companies see the importance of collecting customer feedback, they face a series of challenges in how, when and from whom they collect feedback, how they analyze the feedback, and how they respond to customers based on the feedback. The new Confirmit services should help companies in these areas. I recommend those companies that want to improve their focus on the customer look at how Confirmit can help.

Regards,

Richard J. Snow

VP & Research Director

Enghouse Interactive Contact Center Products Offer a Range of Capabilities

Enghouse Systems Ltd. is not one of the best-known brands in the contact center market, but if it keeps acquiring vendors at the rate it has been doing then it might soon be. It was founded in Canada in 1984, and from what I can see it is grown largely by acquisition to revenues of more than $120 million. It has morphed into Enghouse Interactive, which now represents nearly 90 percent of its parent company’s business. A quick look at its website shows that over its lifetime it has acquired six brands that operate in the contact center market: Arc Solutions, Cosmocom, Datapulse, Syntellect, Terex and Trio; and this doesn’t include its latest acquisition, Zeacom. After my first briefing with the company I reported on three of these acquisitions: Cosmocom, Syntellect and Zeacom.

During a more recent briefing I got to see Cosmocom and Syntellect in action, and as I suggested in my earlier report they cover very similar capabilities. The big difference is that Cosmocom is a platform used by third parties, typically telecom service providers such as BT, to build a hosted platform to provide contact center services to other end user companies, while Syntellect is the platform Enghouse uses to provide contact center systems and cloud-based services directly to its end-user clients. Both provide what I call integrated multichannel interaction management – that is, they manage the delivery and outbound capabilities to send and receive telephone calls, email and web-based chat. Both demonstrations showed similar core capabilities for companies that want to tightly integrate management of calls, email and chat. Some nice features allow the software to track users whose interactions switch across channels; which can in both cases can be surfaced through an interface built using tools provided by Enghouse, which in the case of Cosmocom can be used by service providers such as BT to develop their own interface. I wouldn’t describe either interface as overly extensive or especially modern-looking, but they do the job my research and experience show users require. It was good to see that although the development of both platforms is kept separate, there is an obvious sharing of ideas and developments between the two platforms. Both offer good administration capabilities, and a lot of effort has gone into making both easy to operate, and into allowing end user companies to make the most of licenses purchased.

During the same session I learnt more about Telrex and Enghouse’s Integration and Optimization Solutions Telrex is the Enghouse agent performance management (APM) suite that includes call recording, screen capture, quality monitoring and reporting and analysis. It’s aimed at the lower end of the market and therefore lacks core functionality found in some high-end products. However, from what I heard and saw, it does meet a high percentage of the most commonly required capabilities we identified in our APM benchmark research. The call recording works only for VOIP networks but includes core capabilities such as user trigger-driven recording, encryption, tagging calls for future search and analysis, silent monitoring and reporting. A screen recording capability captures full video of screens used by the agent. The screen captures can be linked with call recordings so users can see what agents were doing at different points within a call. Quality monitoring includes the basics, such as creating multiple types of review forms, linking these to call types, scoring, raising alerts for follow-up, and reporting and analysis that include analysis of whether agent performance is improving. The workforce management software, which is also quite basic, allows users to create work schedules based on historic interaction patterns. It provides an intuitive user interface that allows users to optimize staffing levels to expected future interaction patterns, adherence reports, and reporting and analysis. The products interface with most of the common ACD and PBX systems, both software and hardware, and overall allow users to move from using spreadsheets to manage agent performance and step up to systems with core capabilities that are relatively easy to use.

The final product I learned about, the Enghouse Integration and Optimization Solutions, was developed from what was a software-based interactive voice response system. For a non-techie like me, it’s hard to describe. The first thing that came to mind is that it is a giant software Meccano set of integration software that can be used to develop process flows for communication-driven processes, such as the flow through IVR scripts. It has component parts that from what I saw enable integration in every way possible, including with the latest communications hardware and software. These can all be pulled into process charts using a drag-and-drop designer studio that enables users to build data- and communications-driven processes. A simple example would be to recognize an inbound call, extract the customer’s identifier from IVR software, pull data from, say, a CRM system that provides a bigger profile of the customer, then route the call based on customer-related data. To help users get the most benefit, Enghouse is developing a library of common communications-driven processes that customers can either use as-is or modify to their own requirements. In an early step to provide more integrated solutions, Enghouse has integrated the product with the Syntellect product so that, for example, companies can front-end their contact center with smarter interacting routing.

Enghouse Interactive has built a varied portfolio of stand-alone products that support interaction handling. There is evidence that it is beginning some rationalization, which in order to compete successfully in the market I feel is evitable, so that it can maintain the level of investment required to keep each product competitive. In the short term, companies looking to improve interaction-handling should evaluate Enghouse’s products on their own merits and, as I will, keep asking question about the future roadmap.

Regards,

Richard J. Snow

VP & Research Director