1. There are many companies competing in the multi channel market sector. How does Concerto Software differentiate itself from some of the other "players"?
Concerto Software's chief advantages come in three main areas. First, we are a proven provider of customer interaction management (CIM) solutions with more than 1,200 customers and 21 years of experience, focused solely on the contact center market. The second differentiator, which we believe is substantial in today's market, is that we are a growing, profitable, public company with negligible debt and cash in the bank. Concerto Software is a very safe technology partner for companies making strategic investment decisions. The final differentiator is that our multichannel solution - EnsemblePro? - is architected and built from the ground-up as a single unified platform. This results in a number of benefits for our customers: first, it reduces complexity and hence both installation costs and TCO. They can implement the entire comprehensive range of functionality at once, or implement functionality as needed. They can utilize our unified solution in an incremental fashion by connecting with and adding value to existing contact center point solutions, like their current ACD. Customers using EnsemblePro alongside existing technologies can report on, administer and monitor their entire contact center as if it were a unified whole. They can also tightly integrate EnsemblePro with CRM and other enterprise applications in order to use customer information in making routing and service decisions. Our unified solution delivers rapid ROI by speeding implementation and enabling agents to deliver superior customer service by providing them with immediate access to relevant customer information.
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2. What steps have you taken to integrate the CELLIT product line with your other businesses? How would you evaluate the success of this effort? What pitfalls have you encountered?
Our focus was on two main areas - people and product. EnsemblePro, released in December 2002, is one of the reasons why we created Concerto Software and exemplifies the true union of the best of Davox and CELLIT. We combined the advanced computer telephony integration (CTI) capabilities and predictive dialing expertise of Davox's Unison and Ensemble products with CELLIT's ContactPro unified contact center platform. The result is a powerful superset of the best functionality from all of our products, brought together in a single unified solution. EnsemblePro has been well received by the marketplace, evidenced by the substantial uptake of the product to date. On the people side, we've experienced extremely low turnover and have created a real team feeling in the new Concerto Software which, while we are proud of our heritage, is neither Davox nor CELLIT but rather a bold new company with aggressive plans.
Our progress to date was validated with a "Company of the Year" award from Frost & Sullivan in January. This was quite an honor, especially considering we were the only company in the contact center industry to earn this recognition. While we are very proud of this award, we will continue to strive to provide tangible proof points on our path to success.
3. What are some of the most significant challenges that Concerto Software faces in selling in today's weak economy? How has your selling process changed in order to adjust to the current environment?
While most of our competitors, along with companies in many other sectors of the economy, have been experiencing declining revenue and profitability, we were able to deliver four quarters of sequential top-line and pro-forma bottom-line growth in 2002. Selling in this economy is certainly a challenge, making it even more critical to address the tangible business problems our customer face, and to demonstrate the measurable return on investment our solutions can deliver.
4. Gazing into your "crystal ball," what marketing trends do you anticipate will most likely affect how Concerto Software does business?
More than marketing trends, it is likely the economy will continue to affect the way Concerto Software conducts business. However, there are a number of other things that will impact our strategy and the solutions we deliver to the market. First and foremost are our customers - we take great care to ensure we're in touch with their needs and challenges on an ongoing basis, and that we keep them informed of emerging industry trends and how they can maximize their investment in our technology to help them stay ahead of the curve in a changing business landscape. For example, the emerging telemarketing legislation has been top-of-mind for many of our customers. As such, we've made it priority to ensure our technology helps them comply with new regulations, and that we educate them as to how.
In addition, we've been helping some customers use their dialing technology to implement proactive customer care campaigns. For example, a banking customer of ours used to get barraged with inbound calls right around each time its customers were expecting direct-deposited funds to become available. Not only is answering each and every one of these queries a daunting task, but the branches themselves were not equipped - with the people or technology - to respond properly. Now, that bank uses its dialer to let customers know when funds become available from regularly scheduled deposits such as paychecks or Social Security checks. At the same time - because the bank is running our unified contact center solution - it can offer customers the option to go back into an IVR and obtain their current balance or information on other recent transactions that have posted. This can be beneficial on a number of levels including helping to increase customer satisfaction and decrease inbound contact center traffic by alerting customers of some information before they have to call and ask. As more and more companies look to implement customer service strategies that include programs like this, they will continue to understand the tremendous value that a unified solution can deliver and we believe our business will be positively impacted.
Another trend that has been emerging over the last couple of years that has impacted Concerto Software's business is the move toward offshore outsourcing. We have seen a tremendous demand for our solutions throughout the Asia Pacific region as more and more new contact center service bureaus come into existence. This has prompted us to open an additional support center in India, and to establish operations either directly or through partners in a number of countries throughout the region including Korea, the Philippines and Malaysia. We anticipate that this trend will continue and we will ensure our business plans are developed to maximize the growing opportunities in this area.
5. What future product and service directions do you anticipate Concerto Software moving towards?
VoIP is a technology that some contact centers are researching and experimenting with. We believe it is important to offer customers VoIP capability, although we have yet to see a full-scale shift to this technology. We tell our customers it is important to recognize that VoIP technology is precisely that - a technology - not a business strategy. It must be evaluated and implemented to the extent that the technology leads to addressing defined business goals.
Security is another major concern of our larger customers. The ability of all vendors to fit into a very secure environment and offer disaster recovery capabilities is key. Finally, there is definitely a trend towards outsourcing to offshore call centers. This means that Concerto Software must be able to service mission critical applications 7X24 in many geographies across the globe. We've supplemented our Singapore-based Asia Pacific headquarters operations with a significant presence in India in order to best meet the emerging and evolving demands of this market.
6. Some people believe that the revised telemarketing sales rules will seriously affect the predictive dialer business negatively. Please comment.
We believe there are both pros and cons to this legislation. While Predictive Dialers are only a part of our business today, we have been very active in the area of dialer legislation. One of the most important things to note regarding this legislation is that the rules do not apply to companies who have existing relationships with the people being contacted. This covers a large portion of our predictive dialer customers. In terms of the aggressive cold calling telemarketers, some will not be viable in the future. However, for many outbound shops, we believe that "do-not-call" lists and similar telemarketing legislation can have a positive affect. It serves to eliminate a section of the population that does not want to be contacted by telemarketers, thus making the industry more productive on the whole. Concerto Software helps customers comply with these regulations in a number of ways. We are able to meet the maximum connect time limitations while maintaining the use of answering machine detection capabilities. We can process "do-not-call" lists as a standard part of any dialing campaign and our solutions offer the ability to create the reports necessary to demonstrate compliance. Overall, we feel these regulations give us a competitive advantage over the myriad of less capable companies.
7. When companies implement a multi-contact strategy, what elements in the planning process need to be addressed prior to implementation?
On a corporate level, it is important that a multichannel initiative be a part of a larger strategy dedicated to improving customer service. This means that it must have support within the organization, from the top down. As part of that strategy, a company must establish set business rules to determine how it wants to service customers across voice, email and the Web to ensure both loyalty and strong revenue streams. This includes things like defining expected response times to emails which are asynchronous and have the possibility of being handled as 'second class' compared to the real-time nature of voice or chat. Lastly, companies need to consider agent skill sets and training as a key component of a multichannel strategy. The people on the contact center front lines must be able to use the technology effectively in order to execute on the larger corporate goals. For instance, not all agents who can deal with customers on the phone have equivalent written skills, and vice versa. This is where things like a knowledgebase with auto and suggested responses can be of tremendous help to agents.
8. When companies embrace a multi-contact strategy how do they prioritize the implementation steps? Do they usually implement one phase or channel at a time?
Voice communication is still the preferred channel for customer interaction and it is imperative that be considered in any multichannel implementation strategy. Beyond that, users' individual business needs tend to dictate the implementation processes. For example, a computer company may want to focus on Web chat tools to provide highly technical customer service. Alternatively, a retail organization that repeatedly receives the same questions from its customers should hone in on email management to deliver quick, cost-effective, automated responses.