When someone visits the Adaptive Engineering home page, they can easily get the idea that you may have a slightly different approach to solving business issues. Please explain your approach to solving these issues and how this approach is different from what most of us may be used to.
Adaptive Engineering’s heart and soul is to bridge the gap between the artistic and engineering communities to solve critical business problems. AE evaluates a customer’s software systems environment from the standpoint of the front-end, user experience, for an end result of increased organizational efficiencies all the while leveraging their existing technology investments. AE has adopted a unique approach which puts the user at the center of the software methodology and utilizes professional artists, anthropologists, and visual design experts to simplify the interactions between users and systems. Only after the AE artist has grasped an organization’s business challenge and has designed an intuitive enterprise solution experience tailored to meet those needs, is the process turned over to engineers to construct the software based on and enabled by the design. This delivery model allows AE the creative freedom to generate exceptional visuals and user experiences for any single or set of business processes an organization may need, thus rendering AE’s value, flexibility, and relevance limitless to our customer’s.
Your company was recently named winner of the 2010 Hot Company award by Networks Product Guide. Please explain why you feel your company was honored by this recognition.
Being named a 2010 Hot Company winner is a great achievement for Adaptive Engineering. This award is based exclusively on innovation and how it provides a direct impact on a customer's bottom line. Since that has been our focus all along, we're gratified to have such an esteemed organization validated our belief.
Please discuss your Concourse product and the types of companies that would benefit most from using it.
Adaptive Engineering’s flagship product, Concourse™ 3, is designed for large complex organizations where prioritizing communication and shaving seconds can save millions. Concourse is an excellent fit for companies with customer call centers where thousands upon thousands of disparate customer service requests are made each day and access to subject matter expertise is essential. What sets Concourse apart is that it’s the only enterprise collaboration solution designed from the vantage point of the customer experience. By enabling the customer’s first point of contact to collaboratively leverage additional resources, issues are resolved with increased efficiency, meaning fewer call backs or transfers to supervisors are required. Concourse is designed to serve the communication needs of any organization wishing to optimize collaboration between all of its different stakeholders.
What types of ROI’s are your customers are seeing from using Concourse?
Based on metrics accepted as the industry standard, it has the potential to save individual call centers more than $6 million per month.
Additionally Concourse is a secure, enterprise solution with the flexibility to integrate with other technologies in the enterprise. Our customers have found that using Concourse as their ultimate collaboration solution enables them to realize ROI on increased operational efficiencies and also hard ROI on these other technology investments sooner than planned. These hard ROI results alone typically range in the hundreds of dollars during the initial year of deployment.
How can Concourse simplify a company’s multiple modes of communication?
Adaptive Engineering’s solutions provide the value-add realized as a direct result of communications-enabled business processes (CEBP). CEBP allows for instant, continual communications but does so without the dependency on medium or device the way typical unified communications (UC) solutions do. Whereas UC is a facilitator for human initiated communications, with CEBP, human communication is “event”-driven based on context. Our CEBP systems trigger an event to first notify humans that communication is needed, and then, in many cases, actually facilitate that communication itself.
Let’s say a call center agent for a major cell phone company is helping a customer buy a new phone. This agent must be able to execute a number of tasks in a short period of time: talk on the phone, scan the inventory, look at a date field, and scan a list to find the phones the customer qualifies for. On top of that, if the customer wants to purchase the phone, the call agent has to physically call an expert in a different department to perform a credit check.
Before CEBP, the agent had to make that separate call to a credit department which could add substantial wasted time in the purchasing process. Now, and in the case of Adaptive Engineering’s Concourse, the agent only has to type in a few key details into a query and the CEBP software will automatically: run the search, strip away the unneeded info, and send a time sensitive notification to the credit agent. It may save only a few seconds, but it may also save minutes. In some cases when there are literally thousands of agents, you begin to get a taste for the incredible cost savings we can provide.
What is needs based messaging and how does it work?
Needs based messaging fits into our vision of ultimate collaboration. Now businesses and organizations looking for new productivities can implement an intelligent messaging system that directs communication to the appropriate resource. For example, employees and new hires alike no longer have to spend time searching for the right individuals to get answers. Specialists are just a click away and available for ‘Expert Assist.’
What are some of the biggest errors companies make when implementing unified communications solutions?
One potential pitfall is that a company spends too much time and money in the back office. Why not leverage existing technology investments and simply consolidate the way the data is presented in a meaningful, more efficient way?
Another error is that many products expect that the customer will focus on them as the centerpiece for their organizations operational systems. Our approach is not to displace or overhaul but rather to interoperate with others and have designed the system as a cooperative solution.
How does social media integrate with Enterprise Collaboration?
Enterprise Collaboration and social networking seem to be diverging interests at first. EC tools were initially designed as enterprise-grade applications with a great deal of security. Meanwhile social networking is a consumer development with no enterprise security parameters.
But if the focus is on people than at the end of the day there are several ways in which social software and EC can be used together, including tying in presence capabilities, click to call, click to conference, mobility and other capabilities with public social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook, with blogs and wikis, and with enterprise-grade social networking offerings. This integration will make it much easier to interact with colleagues and find the appropriate resources in an organization, regardless of location.
Our product, Concourse, can be used in the enterprise environment to enable social networking via its ability to allow collaboration through its unique presence and attribute based messaging ability. With its own click to call, click to conference, and eventually its mobile, video and audio abilities, Concourse allows for a robust, ultimate collaboration solution inclusive of the social networking paradigm and in a truly secure environment. Our strategy will continue to evolve in facilitating relationships by addressing the needs of the IT department, the needs of the business, and the younger end of the workforce, to name a few. Also if you involve trusted, key customers and suppliers in the deployment life cycle of products like Concourse, then the result is likely to increase productivity, saving time and money. We’ve found organizations are starting to work this way and positive results are seen quickly, even with moderate steps.