It is not very often that a technology solution on the verge of general availability is seen as likely to raise the stakes in a market. That said, when a company takes a big gamble and appears to have already changed the way customers and competitors discuss market evolution, like Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s masterpiece play Death of a Salesman says, “We must pay attention!” Such is the case with Interactive Intelligence PureCloud, which, as the name suggests, is a pure cloud solution since it is multi-tenant and hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In fact, during Interactive Intelligence's Q2 earnings call, company founder and CEO Dr. Donald Brown said that he expects PureCloud subscriptions to exceed the combined quarterly revenue of its on-premises and cloud-based single-tenant offerings by the end of 2015.
And while the company’s business mix over the past several quarters has been shifting heavily toward cloud-based solutions, the optimism surrounding PureCloud reflects both the direction the market is taking and how Interactive Intelligence has laid the groundwork to ensure that its investment in PureCloud will provide it with both market leadership and thought leadership.
So why all the enthusiasm for choosing a pure cloud solution?
I recently had the opportunity to discuss the details of PureCloud with Jason Alley, the Cloud Solutions Marketing Manager at Interactive Intelligence, to explore what sets PureCloud apart and why the solution has already gained such traction. As Alley explained, in many ways the value proposition is straightforward: “PureCloud is a suite of cloud services for communications, collaboration, and customer engagement that takes full advantage of the distributed nature of the cloud, providing rapid deployment, industry-leading reliability, unlimited scalability, and connecting customers and employees in new, more efficient ways.”
He added: “It obviously took a lot of time and effort to achieve this. However, the result is a unique solution that sets us apart from our competitors and should set the pace in the market. ”Furthermore, it rounds out our portfolio of solutions—ranging from on-premises to hosted single-tenant and multi-tenant options—so our customers have reliable choices based on their needs, and our channel partners have expanded opportunities as well. Additionally, we can offer these choices at an attractive price point for organizations of any size.”
Alley cited the benefits of PureCloud as falling into four basic categories:
- Distributed cloud architecture
- New ways to match customers with agents
- Improved agent and business user experience
- Better collaboration
In short, PureCloud is like a Swiss Army knife in terms of its capabilities for addressing the full spectrum of customer experience improvement and internal collaboration. Offered through a single platform, it includes the following: a multichannel contact center, criteria-based matching, social customer service, voice self-service, workforce optimization, automated outbound dialing, CRM integrations, unified communications, mobility, and a content-rich directory. Plus, it supports public interfaces, features sophisticated internal logic, and provides detailed reports and analytics. It equips the right people with the best tools to be efficient and effective, while ensuring they interact with customers and colleagues in the best possible way.
Source: Interactive Intelligence (click to enlarge)
As Alley explained, on the directory side, PureCloud is designed from the ground up to facilitate enterprise collaboration based on a social media-style design for browsers and mobile devices. This means being able to easily search for and connect with the right people based on detailed employee profiles, see their status, and connect with a single click; sync with Active Directory and other HR systems; and be mobile-friendly. The UC capabilities include conferencing, voicemail, video, and an auto-attendant.
One of the interesting things about PureCloud is the way it has approached reinventing the customer experience.
New capabilities have been added that enable inbound interactions to be routed in entirely new ways. In traditional linear queuing and routing, the focus is on lining up customers and agents—first-in/first-out, next available, or simple skills-based routing. As Alley says, “The result is too often a run-of-the-mill experience.” PureCloud’s criteria and user-driven matching offer two new ways to connect customers and agents, as follows:
- The Interactive Intelligence PureMatch application analyzes a customer's actual needs to match them with the best possible agent—every time.
- The Interactive Intelligence PureCloud Social Customer Service application allows customers to choose their own agent based on who they think is best for them.
Source: Interactive Intelligence (click to enlarge)
It is all based on detailed agent and customer profiles, which, as the company says, means taking customer interactions beyond “second best.” Both help companies rise above the ordinary to deliver an exceptional customer experience, which translates into higher customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and permission-based opportunities for upselling. It also reduces first-contact resolution times because experts are reached quickly and equipped with the tools they need to resolve customer issues.
On top of all this, as noted above, PureCloud provides Interactive Intelligence with a very broad portfolio of solutions that now offer customers options tailored to their unique needs—which may include business objectives, financial situation, compliance and corporate governance concerns, skills, and a host of other variables. As Alley says, “PureCloud not only sets the bar high in terms of the functionality it delivers and all the advantages of the cloud, but it enables us to deliver solutions to customers however they want. Choice is a major theme.” He concluded by saying, “Our goal is to always ensure that we recommend the right solution based on customer needs, not based on what we have to sell.” In a customer-driven world, that is critical.
While the market will determine the pace at which customers adopt new technology—to borrow Interactive Intelligence’s phrase, “from next to best”—the addition of PureCloud will serve as a bellwether for tracking market trends. And the company has raised the bar for those who also believe that customer experience and collaboration have a decidedly cloud-centric future.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
