- World-class sales and marketing efforts enable the company to expand into newer markets
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 22, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its recent analysis of the contact center systems market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Interactive Intelligence with the 2014 North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Company of the Year. Interactive Intelligence is a strategic leader in all aspects of contact center systems, demonstrating systematic innovation across the product portfolio, as well as addressing the core needs of its customers through increased scale, reliability, and flexible deployment options.
Interactive Intelligence's entrepreneurial acumen is evident in its strategy of merging the contact center with the larger enterprise. Its Customer Interaction Center (CIC) 4.0 includes unified communications, mobile and business process automation features that form bridges with the contact center.
"Interactive Intelligence's all-in-one suite of products resonates well with customers looking to use a broad swathe of communication and contact center features without the breakpoints typically found in legacy vendors' systems," said Frost & Sullivan's Nancy Jamison, principal analyst in Customer Contact. "In most cases this architecture enables customers to add functionality without additional servers, which helps reduce cost and complexity."
With the release of CIC 4.0, Interactive Intelligence further cut down on system costs by delivering scalability enhancements two to eight times greater than before, resulting in the support of 10,000 agents on a single server.
The company continues to expand the functionality of CIC not only through innovation, but also through acquisitions. In 2014, it rebranded two of its acquired technologies, Interaction Collector from Latitude Software and Interaction Decisions from Bay Bridge Decisions, after adding new functionality to both.
To enhance customer value, Interactive Intelligence also created the Interactive Intelligence MarketPlace. This ecommerce website acts as a repository of value-add applications, process templates, custom reports, dashboards, Web services, and packaged integrations available from resellers and third-party developers.
Although Interactive Intelligence is primarily a software company, it also provides hardware to help solve specific customer issues. It even developed its Interaction Media Server, Interaction Edge, and Interaction SIP Station appliances as a combination of hardware and software.
Along with innovation, sales and marketing has played a huge role in Interactive Intelligence's success. Its outstanding Web-based marketing and sales initiatives have resulted in a top-tier, informative, and useful website. The company's 2014 campaign, "The Customer Experience Makeover: Contact Center Style," increases awareness of the brand by offering organizations all over the world a chance to have Interactive Intelligence and participating sponsors complete a makeover of their contact center at no charge.
"These efforts in sales and marketing have helped fuel the growth of both cloud and on-premise solutions, even as the entire industry moved to the cloud en masse," noted Jamison. "Due to this dual success, Interactive Intelligence's cloud-based orders increased by 87 percent, year over year, in 2013."
Interactive Intelligence has made considerable effort to offer higher scalability, functionality and reliability in its core products. These endeavors have enabled it to increase market share and gain a foothold in new segments and larger businesses around the world.
Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in devising a strong growth strategy and robustly implementing it. The recipient has shown strength in terms of innovation in products and technologies, leadership in customer value, as well as speed in response to market needs. In short, the award looks at the emerging market players in the industry and recognizes their best practices that are positioned for future growth excellence.
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.
