1. With so many companies in the monitoring market sector, how do you differentiate your solutions from the other solutions?
Our solutions were designed to address the needs of most end users while empowering them to do their own modifications and customization. Our developers’ mission was to design MIQ (Mercom Interaction Quality) to be powerful providing all the tools a contact center needs; multiple scoring options, limitless form design, thousands or report options with delivery choices including on-demand, timed, email, PDF, Excel, RTF, etc. and to design this tool so that a user can be easily trained to tack control of the system. We also made sure that MIQ scales seamlessly from small to large contact centers and our customer base ranges from centers with 20 users to more than a thousand users. Our goal was to reduce total cost of ownership for the purchaser of Mercom’s solutions so that they have a clear and fast ROI.
2. Beside contact centers, Mercom provides solutions to market sectors such as public safety, transportation and utility, and courtrooms. What percentage of your overall revenue is from contact centers?
The line between contact centers and other market segments is blurred. Many of our 2000 public safety customers think of themselves as contact centers and act accordingly evaluating the performance of their call takers. The days of recording calls only for dispute resolution is no more, most of our customers value their customers / callers and proactively use Audiolog and MIQ to assess their interactions. In the purest sense I would estimate that half of our customers are “contact centers” but as I said before the line is not distinct.
3. What do you consider the key criteria for evaluating a quality monitoring system for contact centers?
Ultimately it is the end result that can be derived and the effort and cost associated with this result. Our solutions will pin point the strong points of agents as well as the deficiencies, the skills that require further training. The call center manager can easily modify forms to address call center changes, they can easily produce the reports they need to focus on strengths and weaknesses, they can do this without the requirement for Mercom’s or our VARs’ professional services groups to be involved. The result is agility, reduced cost and focused answers. We have replaced competitors’ systems that were under utilized due to their complexity and the expense associated with making any changes.
4. Recently, there have been several acquisitions. i.e. Witness/Blue Pumpkin, NICE/Dictaphone. In addition, many of the traditional monitoring companies have expanded their offerings by adding such applications as workforce management, eLearning, and analytics. What are Mercom’s plans for the near future?
Our goal is to become the premier provider of quality monitoring/liability recording solutions in the industry. If a merger or acquisition can help us reach that goal, it’s something we’d definitely be interested in. However we continue to see growth from all areas both vertical market as well as geographic and both our sales and profits grow, we continue to add features and functionality as our costumers express their requirements to us. We have added speech recognition recently and are currently evaluating eLearning and workforce management. We would prefer to partner with companies that are focused on these solutions to provide truly effective solutions to our customers rather than provide broad brush solutions.
5. Mercom has a significant dealer network. What are the tradeoffs between a dealer channel and a direct sales organization? Hoe do you handle Fortune 1000 accounts?
We do not find any significant trade offs in distributing our products through a dealer network, the biggest trade off is the fact that our market share is not as easy to quantify as out competitors since our sales numbers reflect wholesale only not end user dollars. We value our partnerships and find that our resellers take extremely good care of their/our customers, the survival of their businesses depend on their reputations in their territory. Our resellers have much less turn over than the average sale and technical staffs of our competitors they are often a provider of many generations of recording solutions and keep their customers happy for many years. We have more than 300 Mercom trained support staff in the field via our VARs. They sell and support the Fortune 1000 and have in many cases for 25 + years. When additional assistance is required Mercom has teams of support staff, professional services and project planners available from our offices in the US, UK and Pacific Rim. We have Fortune 1000 customers with Mercom’s Audiolog recording more than 10,000 of their people in multi-national locations.
6. Are there any overall market trends that you would like to comment on? Do you consider the contact center market “healthy”?
The market gets stronger by the year. I have been involved in this industry for more than 25 years. I am pleased to see the evolution of voice logging from a “dumb tape recorder” that was purchased regrettably by companies to adhere to regulations or for dispute regulation to the current state of the industry wherein our systems are looked at as extremely valuable tools that when used proactively can prevent problems, customer loss and increase revenues.
7. What do you anticipate will be Mercom’s greatest challenges over the next twelve months?
Mercom is aggressively entering new geographic markets, expanding our territory to include India, Eastern Europe and Latin America. We have a working business model that has made us a premiere provider in Korea and Japan where we have had great successes in the past year and we will follow this model in new areas. We have an aggressive feature road map that will challenge us in the coming year. We are confident that our recent and future personnel additions will provide us with continued success and that our new partnerships with some very large resellers will add market penetration in areas where we have not competed so far.