The Boardroom Report provides the CRM, customer interaction and call center industry's view from the top, featuring the sector's first in-depth, exclusive CEO-to-CEO interviews with leading executives regarding industry news, analysis, trends and the latest developments at their companies. As the industry's leading publication since 1982, it is our responsibility to recognize leaders with the best minds in the industry and share their vision and wisdom with our valued readers. For this installment of The Boardroom Report, Technology Marketing Corp. founder/chairman/CEO Nadji Tehrani interviewed Paul Jarman, CEO of UCN.

NT: Please tell us about your company and type of business.

PJ: UCN helps customers improve the quality and productivity of their contact centers. We do. this through inContact, an on-demand software-as-a-service (SaaS) model that focuses both on call routing and agent improvement as key components to creating the right customer experience with the right quality and productivity behind it. We are a full solution for contact centers including those with a distributed workforce - either at-home or multi-site. Our purpose is to help the customer be successful with our best practice knowledge and customer service expertise to achieve their contact center goals.

NT: What are the greatest challenges that you and your company are facing?

PJ: The greatest challenge we face is ensuring we understand the entire contact center and customer experience need. Our job is to provide a solution that responds to that need with tools that result in successful contact centers. Our secondary challenge is managing the exciting growth opportunities in front of us.

NT: What do you feel are practical solutions to those challenges?

PJ: We've increased our internal staff in nearly every department. We're also creating powerful new partnerships. With more people and more partners, we feel we can provide the products and services our customers need to excel.

Secondly, we've executed additional processes to handle the growth, while at the same time maintaining the high level of customer satisfaction and service we are known for. With increased prganization and intelligent hiring decisions, we feel poised to manage the growth effectively.

NT: In your opinion, what is the greatest need in our industry?

PJ: The greatest need for a contact center solutions provider is to not over-complicate the solution. The greatest need for a contact center is to understand what levers affect what results. They feel the pains, but they don't necessarily know the remedy. For example, contact centers have a very high level of attrition. What many don't know is the six things that cause it or what to do from an infrastructure standpoint to fix it. There is a lack of awareness about the significant benefits SaaS products can deliver to minimize this pain.

NT: Tell us about new developments in your company.

PJ: The major development is that we've created a product depth to further establish ourselves in the market. Customers are really accepting our solution because of our ability to solve their ' problems from a carrier perspective. With our agent improvement tools such as hiring, eLearning, workforce management and call routing features including ACD, IVR, CTI and speech recognition, customers are seeing the value in what we deliver through a network-based SaaS model. We are also creating leading edge innovations in our resiliency and redundancy.

NT: What would be the impact of those developments on the bottom line?

PJ: The impact is that we are seeing more people take advantage of the SaaS model. That accelerated customer acceptance is creating significant sustainable revenue for us.

Increasing the depth and breadth of our solution gives us a larger target market because we can provide great solutions for the enterprise level down to the small player. With the scope of our offering expanding to a wider range of customers who need it, we are seeing an increase in larger market revenue opportunity.

NT: How would you describe the current status of the customer interaction/CRM (or teleservices) business?

PJ: I think a lot of companies need to integrate their CRM more tightly with their call routing and agent improvement tools. Many people are still not very good at using the data in their CRM to create valuable interactions with their customers.

Integrations are tough. Typically contact centers don't have enough inside expertise, and vendors haven't made the process easy enough. Many products don't have the simple integrations necessary between point solutions - not just between the CRM and the call routing, but also the workforce optimization tools. Workforce optimization tools don't naturally tie in with call routing tools, and call routing tools don't naturally sync well with CRMs. Until now, no one has given the market an option to get all of that in a SaaS model. InContact is the solution that enables CRMs to work closely together with all the other contact center components.

NT: What is your vision for the trend and the future of our industry?

PJ: First, I think the trend is that contact centers will purchase more software via the SaaS model - in an easier format for success and with a faster ROI.

Secondly, they will acquire solutions in a pre-integrated format. Everything from eLearning to speech recognition to ACD/IVR will all be built in a way that works together seamlessly.

Third, contact handling and agent improvement solutions will more closely interact with CRMs to better use the data available and to proactively respond to customers' needs.

And lastly, software providers will become more consultative in how they help customers achieve their goals. We have a strong track record of doing this and see this as the direction the industry continues to go.

NT: What significance do the following in the customer interaction industry (select those which are most appropriate for your business)?

a. VoIP

b. Speech technology

c. Data security

d. Home agents

e. Offshoring

f. Hosted solutions delivery

PJ: I think at-home agents are a sum of a lot of these. InContact is uniquely designed to help companies succeed with at-home agents. This comes from several factors.

First, from our ability to act as a telecommunications provider and offer multiple connectivity options to the customer. These telecommunication connectivity options include: VoIP, TDM,. private lines, point solutions, switched and dedicated TIs. As a carrier and a technology provider, we can give our customers a lot of choices to connect their agents.

Secondly, we have a product that is really omnipresent. Companies can have agents at-home in fifty different locations, without needing additional equipment. Providing efficient call routing is the basis for employing at-home workers, but the agent improvement tools and management pieces enable athome workers to be successful.

The inContact platform allows our customers to hire and train the right agent, manage the agent's schedule and provide customer-based feedback to the agent in near real-time. Add to this the ability to get the right contact to the right person with very minimal infrastructure cost and a very quick ROI. We empower an industry that has suffered for a long time because they either didn't have the breadth of tools, or the prohibitive costs kept them from being able to implement the right solution.

We've also made advancements with how we handle data security and how we use VoIP and TDM at the same time with the same system. Our connection model isn't restrictive.

From my perspective, all of the items you've oudined are important. Some providers can only speak to one of them or a few of them. We are addressing all of them with a complete suite of products and underlying communications technology not found from most providers. InContact is the hosted solutions delivery platform with the call routing tools, agent optimization solutions and network infrastructure needed for a contact center to be successful.

NT: What is your company's greatest core competency?

PJ: Our greatest core competency has to be people. People drive results which drive strategy. Then after people, it's the breadth and depth of our contact handling platform tied seamlessly to a network with all the resiliency, redundancy and connectivity options. I would also say one of our greatest core competencies is empowering distributed workforces; our ability to really solve the entire problem of a company's offshore, home shore and multiple-site challenges while achieving a quick ROI through the SaaS model.

NT: What is your company's positioning statement?

PJ: We deliver what is necessary for our customers to have a competitive advantage over their industry peers. We can change their productivity and quality while at the same time lowering their operational costs.

Our technologies can leverage that possibility while still being low risk. Our customers can pay-as-you-go with a minimal investment and get a three-to-six month ROI versus a one-to-two year investment where they would be risking a million dollars. Contact centers can configure our solution without buying servers or hiring more IT people; this can really shorten the rate of return. With our SaaS model, the width of the products and our framework as the network infrastructure provider, we can change our customers' quality and productivity, to give them a competitive advantage. The risk is much lower than what has traditionally been available in the industry.

NT: How do you differentiate your company?

PJ: A lot of the vendors out there today are selling only limited point solutions. They are addressing one little piece of the problem. We can go in and solve nine or 10 pieces and each solution is preintegrated. A company making a call center technology decision can get a product without all the usually painful integration challenges.

Secondly, our network is a competitive advantage because we can deliver these technologies with all the connectivity options - but without the competitive network costs.

NT: Thank you very much for your time.

© 2008 Technology Marketing Corporation Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.