Interactive Intelligence started humbly, but is now taking its place among the big leagues of contact center software and unified communications platforms with its launch of its new Purecloud platform at the company’s upcoming customer conference. Taking a different approach from most enterprise communications platforms, Interactive Intelligence serves both the contact center and enterprise collaboration markets with a flexible product line that can be configured or used in either situation.
Customer Experience Report editor Loren Moss recently had an in depth conversation with Interactive Intelligence chairman and founder Don Brown MD, and chief marketing officer Jeff Platon. The talk was candid, and dove deep into the insights of these two thought leaders regarding the evolution of the industry as a whole, the future of customer experience, and some interesting hints at future offerings from Interactive Intelligence.
CER: So, tell me, what’s new at Interactive Intelligence?
Don Brown: You know, we’ve been at this for 20 years. We’ve spent the first 20 years working on a consolidated communications platform. Initially a client-server platform that provided everything. It was meant to be an All-In-One offering that served as a PBX, ACD, IVR, email routing, all that sort of stuff and has grown over the years to encompass everything from speech enabled IVR to predictive dialing and workforce management, quality monitoring; we’ve come out of nowhere over the course of the last 20 years to challenge the big guys, of course, to be in Gartner’s leadership quadrant. Through the years we really had kind of incidental penetration into unified communications but it was never a focus area for us. Our bread and butter was always the contact center but we had companies as big as Motorola who used us as their IP telephony system.
Don Brown is the Chairman, CEO, and Founder of Interactive Intelligence
One of the big changes for us was about eight years or so ago when we made a move to the cloud and so what came out was a cloud version of our offering. it was really a virtualized instance of our CIC product, the classic client-server product. We started offering that at our data centers. We co-located space around the world—we’re one of the early contact center providers to go that route, and it just took off like gangbusters for us, to the point that last year we did more business in the form of cloud than we did from our premises business.
But we saw about four or five years ago that there was going to be another big technological shift coming in the form of really elastic multi-tenant cloud offerings and so we kind of bit the bullet and went back to the board and told them, at a time when we were making good money and growing rapidly and, you know, I wanted to take 50 million bucks and build the whole thing all over again using some of the new development techniques and technologies, especially the big game changer was to use a public cloud infrastructure, we ended up using Amazon Web Services (AWS).
So, you know, the board fortunately bought into the idea and said, “you know, OK, let’s do it.” We all knew that we would take a hit though our earnings as a result because we were going to take an already high R&D spend and increase it, and so we ended up hiring—we now have a couple hundred engineers in Raleigh, North Carolina where we primarily staffed that effort and that’s this Pure Cloud thing that you’ve heard us talk about, and we decided that, while we’re at it, if we’re going to rewrite this thing then let’s really go hard after, not just the contact center but the whole breadth of collaboration and communications because we felt that if we look far enough out, all that was going to converge, it was inevitable that the same service technologies that were used for the contact center were going to be useful in enterprise collaboration and vice versa. You know, part of the theme here is about millennials and their impact both inside an organization and as customers, and I think one element of this that we hear a lot about is the consumerization of IT. And we really wanted to build something that leveraged consumer oriented design: you know, social media techniques, the sorts of rich visual interfaces, collaborative interfaces that we’re all used to. From the consumer oriented products that we use but typically aren’t reflected in enterprise applications. So we did all that, we went off and worked really hard for a few years and that has culminated this year, we — last month at Enterprise Connect we launched PureCloud Collaborate, so that’s the first of the PureCloud services that is meant to be a competitor to HiPChat and Slack and Lync and some of the other collaboration tools that are out there, and then the next shoe to drop will be the release of our next two services in June, that we’re calling Communicate, which is the IP telephony unified communications service and Engage, which is the contact center service.
Jeff Platon: So the big news for us is this brand new, from scratch, super scalable, elastic, multi-tenant cloud offering that we’re launching in Canada and the US, and also in Australia and New Zealand, and then from there we’ll be rolling out to other Amazon data centers around the world.
If we’re going to rewrite this thing then let’s really go hard after, not just the contact center but the whole breadth of collaboration and communications.
Don Brown: It’s also available in seven native languages and certainly the first of its kind being a multiple use case business communications modern cloud infrastructure that can serve both the customer engagement market and traditional enterprise collaboration and communication.
CER: It makes sense because it seems to me that, the cloud and the cloud deployment in services delivery model has become and is maturing as kind of the new standard. It’s interesting because there’s no longer so much of a question of what kind of operating system on the client side and really, is it relevant? The deployment, the ability to scale up and down as needed for your customers and they can say “well, we need so many seats per month” and that may go up or down based on based on their needs. But even with using something like AWS as a platform, you are able to scale up and down from an infrastructure standpoint because you can scale up as big as you need and it takes a lot of weight off as far as capacity planning. You no longer have to say “OK, do we build a data center or do we lease space in a data center based on future capacity that may or may not be there, and now we’re paying for empty racks that we expect to fill—or do we be more conservative and then we find that we didn’t build enough capacity and we have to go and make more capital expenditures?” So it sounds like that was a pretty obvious strategic move and hopefully it didn’t take a whole lot of convincing for your board to go that way because it’s clearly the move that if you didn’t do it, then you would by now, be far behind your competitors and your colleagues in the marketplace.
Don Brown: That’s exactly right and we were getting our guys to understand that, and even though they weren’t that happy at the moment, you know in this industry it doesn’t last that long—you can find yourself behind the curve way too quickly. So yeah, that’s exactly right and I think Jeff’s addition here has really been timely for us. Jeff comes from Cisco. He’s very familiar with this space and I think some of the innovations that he’s brought to help match the technology innovation that we’ve done is on the marketing side, the pricing side and it we’re being pretty aggressive in how we’re bringing PureCloud to the market. I think this is all going ultimately towards cloud services where you pay for what you use and vendors just have to back up—they’re going to deliver the goods and they’re not going to be able to lock customers into long term contracts.
It’s hard to get people’s behavior to change, to wrap their head around “wait man, what about all this installed base business that I’ve got to disaggregate, you mean I’ve got to really carve out a whole new development route to go build it all over again from scratch?” and the clear answer is “Yes, you do, because if not, you really will get left behind,”
It kind of galls me what we experienced as customers, you know, we used some of the cloud services out there, the popular ones like SalesForce and Workday and for a lot of these services they expect you to, well, first of all, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for customization, which always galls me because I think this is supposed to be a cloud service: just about a big list of features that I get to choose from, I don’t need you to customize them, right? And then they want you to sign a multi-million dollar agreement and then pay cash up front and you think “wait a second, this isn’t what I was thinking cloud meant,” but where we think it’s going and where we’re starting, really, Jeff’s urging with Engage is that we’ve got a flat price, a hundred bucks a month per agent for all the functionality, so that includes outbound multimedia routing, quality monitoring and all the stuff that we provide, full recording of every call, every interaction, a hundred bucks per agent per month and you pay for what you use with no commitment.
CER: I think that that model makes so much more sense and I think that even from a customer stand point, whether it’s an outsourcing customer or whether it’s a corporate end user customer, when a company says that “we’re going to give you this without that big multi-year commitment” it’s not that they don’t expect you to be around for a long time, but what they’re saying is that we think that we can keep you happy and we can keep you satisfied enough that we don’t need to get you to sign onto a five year or three year agreement because you’ll be with us five or three years because you want to, not because you have to.
Jeff Platon: This is embedded in your business process and obviously this is a mission critical service that keeps the ability to deliver business outcomes. Leveraging the same underlying services from the same platform really enables us to be more reliable and increase feature velocity to both of those use cases (contact center and enterprise collaboration), and that’s the unique unfair advantage I think that we’ve got because we had the fortitude to take everything we learned and start from scratch. And, as Don knows, I tried to do this at Cisco with some mixed results. It’s hard to get people’s behavior to change, to wrap their head around “wait man, what about all this installed base business that I’ve got to disaggregate, you mean I’ve got to really carve out a whole new development route to go build it all over again from scratch?” and the clear answer is “Yes, you do, because if not, you really will get left behind,” and I think some of what we saw at Enterprise Connect just last month, a lot of people are just putting lipstick on the server, so to speak, and they’re sort of melding the interfaces but under the covers it’s still a very complex set of client-server applications that have to be integrated together.
CER: You can see when something has been developed or redeveloped for the cloud or when something has been adapted or, kind of, “OK, we’re just going to take our server and the client-server environment and stick it in a data center now and call it a cloud!” Well no, I think that now customers are savvy to that and know the difference; especially the sophisticated and the larger customers can make a qualitative distinction in that. What’s the biggest qualitative difference in your offering from the standpoint of the customer?
Don Brown: Usually you have one shot at something, you do your best and then you move on to whatever comes next, so for us to be able to take everything that we’ve learned, the mistakes that we’ve made, the good decisions that we’ve made and be able to reflect upon that and then use that in this new platform has really been a delightful experience.
A lot of these services they expect you to, well, first of all, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for customization, which always galls me because I think this is supposed to be a cloud service: just about a big list of features that I get to choose from, I don’t need you to customize them, right? And then they want you to sign a multi-million dollar agreement and then pay cash up front and you think “wait a second, this isn’t what I was thinking cloud meant,”
I’d say one of the big things is, we’ve spent 20 years, starting off at the lower end of the market and then trying to redesign the engine as we were rolling down the highway to turn our offer into a true enterprise grade platform, and we did it! We’ve done really, really well, but it was painful, and what we’ve decided to do is make sure we got that architecture right from the beginning with PureCloud, so things like remote survivability—we’ve got the ability to deploy an edge device that is remotely managed from the cloud, that can sit there in the customer’s premises, the customer doesn’t have to worry about it; it’s automatically updated. But if there’s any blip in the cloud, especially in places where the internet connection, the internet connectivity isn’t quite as reliable as in other parts of the world, that you still have dial tone, you still have ACD, IVR, call recording, in essence the organization can keep right on going and then when connectivity is reestablished we automatically synchronize with the cloud. The customer doesn’t do anything; they don’t have to worry about some manual switchover or anything like that. This is baked into the architecture.
I think another big distinguishing characteristic for us is security—one thing we’ve spent a lot of time earning our strikes on at Interactive Intelligence through the years. You know, we’re one of the few companies in the space certified by the Department of Defense. We’re used at the NSA and a number of security agencies around the globe, and so we’ve really tried to reflect all of that knowledge in designing PureCloud. We went to almost insane lengths, sometimes I had to hold back some of my security guys because the stuff never ends but, really taking it to the logical extreme in terms of certificate exchange for pairing of edge components with the cloud, of course encryption of all connections, all of this has allowed us to progress really rapidly, extraordinarily rapidly for a new platform through the gauntlet of certifications.
We’ve already achieved the SSH16 Certification, we have that today. We’ll at launch, have HIPAA Certification, we’ll have PCI Certification, in every respect we really tried to pay attention to that sort of enterprise grade aspect of what’s required for these sorts of platforms. We have a component called the bridge server that also does certificate exchange with the cloud and can be used to integrate with everything from active directory to SalesForce, Exchange, Sharepoint, Workday, all these mission critical IT systems that are an afterthought for a lot of other systems, but we’ve baked that into the architecture with ours.
We’ve got a flat price, a hundred bucks a month per agent for all the functionality, so that includes outbound multimedia routing, quality monitoring and all the stuff that we provide, full recording of every call, every interaction, a hundred bucks per agent per month and you pay for what you use with no commitment.
CER: OK, so I guess, to wrap it up, give me an idea, what’s next, what’s on the horizon, what can we see three years out if we look at the road map or even if we want to speak more broadly as far as where the industry is going? What is going to look different, you know, with the Interactive Intelligence ecosystem from a customer standpoint, from an agent’s standpoint, from the corporate customer standpoint? You know, you continue to evolve; you continue to progress and develop and enhance your offering. If we look out, let’s say 36 months away, what’s next? What do you see next? Where is the industry going or where is Interactive Intelligence going that may be leading the industry or going where no vendor has gone before?
Don Brown: Well, I think the first step is what Jeff refers to as C3, the collaboration of communications and customer engagement. Fortunately that’s not 36 months out, that’s now, because we think that these sorts of collaboration technologies are not just for the enterprise, they’re for the contact centers as well.
Having the same underlying technology in the contact center as well as in the rest of the organization, having the universal presence to be able to see everybody but then to be able to use instant messaging chat rooms and bridging from the contact centers to the rest of the organization, we think it’s a real game changer. So breaking down that wall between vendors selling contact center solutions and others who are doing the communications and collaboration, we think that is going to be a real differentiator and that’s something we’re doing now with the launch of these products.
Some of the stuff that is really fun that we’re looking out at, one thing that’s kind of gotten us all excited, just last week at Amazon’s show, they announced a new service, a new machine language, a machine learning service. And my background is in artificial intelligence so that’s something I’ve always been keen to apply in the contact center and we do, to some degree, already today, we have some really cool speech analytics, speech recognition that has some nice artificial intelligence. Leveraging this machine learning stuff that Amazon has released to be able to do things like, during an outbound campaign, adjust on the fly, based upon the success or failure of the results of the campaign to this point, based upon the factors that you know about customers, their age, gender, location, the time of day, other factors, to be able to dynamically resort the campaign to bring to the top the highest expected values, you know, just something people in the outbound world have been requesting for a long time, we think we can do the same thing on the inbound side.
That you’ve got a way to be able to measure the outcome of current interactions, whether that’s sales that you’re making, money that you’re collecting or whatever it might be that we can start, we can use the machine learning service to make predictions on how the results will be affected based on how we route, let’s say, the next call, which agent we give it to, which calls we give priority, there’s just really amazing things that you can start to do when you apply artificial intelligence, the holy grail that we’re hoping to get to is that; to make it so that when you go to interact with an organization the organization can predict with some reasonable degree of certainty what you want.
Jeff Platon is Interactive Intelligence’s Chief Marketing Officer
Jeff Platon: The thing I could add to that, Loren, is we’re already seeing enterprise collaboration with IT communication and WebRTC, real time video this year, it’s replacing time delayed business processes and it’s beginning to kill old applications, we’ve heard this for years. When is email going to go away? It’s when we get the ability to: I see you, you’re available through a process, I have the ability to touch you, to do a quick chat, add other people, have a brief chat, work chat, in a work group, when they want to grab some content, we’ve added content collaboration into Collaborate, I want to escalate that to a real time video session where I can see you, you can show or I can show you something, I can share my screen, that’s the totality of a real time business interaction that will supersede the need for time delayed traditional methods of “I’ll send you an email, you’ll get to it in a queue over time,” and we’ve already seen some pretty significant use cases in marketing and finance and engineering in our company and in others that are early adopters but that would be the other area that I would continue to have you look at over the next few years, that will fundamentally shift.
Loren: No, it’s impressive, you know, I’m not surprised when you said that Amazon was coming up with machine learning, I mean, already they’re kind of a pioneer of…they’ll say, you know, this may be of interest to you or you may want this, and it’s interesting because that’s the kind of company where I can think that, you rarely have to contact their customer service, they send something to you, if you want to return it there’s even a return label in there to make it easier. You can go online and print one out and it’s really impressive of them thinking about what is this customer likely to do next.
As more and more companies do the same thing, they will do it in even more advanced ways, because that’s kind of like database analytics that’s not really that sci-fi anymore. But as you’re saying, when somebody calls, I know that some of the hotel chains try to keep track of your preferences, little personal preferences so that you may travel to a city you’ve never been to before and they have in their database whether it’s like a Starwood group or an IHG or somebody like that, and they have an idea of some things so they can give you kind of a personal touch that leverages a lot in customer loyalty and customer engagement over the long term. It makes a lot of sense to do things that way, and obviously the provider of the platform, you guys, are the perfect enabler; the perfect part of the value chain to be able to roll that out and to enable and to power your customers to be able to offer that and to be able to increase their customer engagement and improve their customer experience in that respect.
Jeff Platon: Yeah, I think it’s tremendous if you just anticipate what people are looking to do, you know, you can really delight your customers, you can make things easier, you can reduce your own support load. It’s the classic win-win, when you make customers happy and you reduce your costs, it doesn’t get any better than that.
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