1. Your Cincom Synchrony appears to offer a broad range of functionality. What application/s are of most interest to users? What applications appear to have high growth potential?
Cincom Synchrony is an extremely flexible application that lets contact centers build the application around their business needs, from queuing and routing, to proactive outreach, to workflow, to the intelligent desktop, to analytics and reporting. We see a growing interest in delivering a consistent and intentional customer experience regardless of how the customer contacts you. This requires a sharing of information among agents with a complete view of the customer, across all channels, delivered through a unified desktop.
2. Cincom Synchrony obviously competes with many other companies in the multi-channel and unified agent desktop arena. How do you differentiate Cincom Synchrony from its competitors?
The component of Synchrony that is compelling across all businesses is the unified agent desktop. It is a tremendous productivity tool. While competitors claim to have a desktop, Synchrony’s desktop delivers much deeper functionality. It is a fluid tool, presenting exactly what is relevant to that specific interaction – the business applications, the content and knowledge, the scripts, the workflow, the history, etc. The Synchrony intelligent desktop is critical to delivering responsive and consistent customer experiences.
3. What has been the market acceptance of the hosted approach? What are some of the most significant barrier that you have had to overcome?
The hosted approach continues to gain acceptance and all trends indicate it will continue to grow. One of the biggest barriers – that really isn’t a barrier -- is security. On the surface, companies are concerned that their data and contact center application are off premise, managed by a third party. But in reality, hosting centers typically have more robust security, redundancy, and fail-over than a typical organization with limited IT resources can muster. So in reality, security is not a barrier but rather an opportunity to educate.
4. What will be Cincom’s focus and direction for remainder of 2006 and 2007? What new products and services can we expect from Cincom?
We will continue our focus on customer experience in the contact center. More companies are moving away from the short-sighted cost-based or transaction focused contact center and moving forward to delivering customer experiences in the contact center that build loyalty and advocacy – and ultimately drive profitability. Cincom Synchrony’s full suite of capabilities – responsive inbound, proactive outbound, unified agent desktop, analytics and reporting – enable the perfect customer experience. Over the upcoming months, Cincom will be announcing new capabilities and delivery options to further support the customer experience strategy.
5. Your company also offers on site solutions. How would you compare the number of Cincom’s hosted implementations with the number of on site solutions? What trends can you identify?
Most of our customers begin with the hosted version. Many of the larger enterprises, with in-house IT resources, plan to move to on-premise at a future time. We find that many of these organizations end up staying with the hosted version however, because the hosted approach is simple. It comes down to “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.”
6. What do you consider your greatest challenges to be in the next twelve months?
There is a great deal of noise in the marketplace. The lines between SFA, CRM, and CEM are blurred from a capabilities standpoint and price points are dropping dramatically. The biggest challenge will be to differentiate ourselves, help organizations understand the full value of Cincom Synchrony, and deliver the product in ways that organizations can easily adopt and implement it.
7. Can you please comment on Cincom’s current and near term financial picture?
Cincom Systems is one of the world’s largest private software companies with twenty-one straight years of producing more than $100 million in revenue -- the only private software company in the world to attain this lofty feat. The company has over 800 employees, 39 offices in 18 countries distributed over five continents. In an industry that is populated with start-ups, mergers, and acquisitions, Cincom brings stability, experience, and longevity.