Envox capitalizes on the SaaS craze

Nov 04, 2008 (Datamonitor via COMTEX) -- CRM | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Making the most of Salesforce.com's recent push into the contact center market, CTI provider Envox has been winning ever larger deals for PhoneLink, its CTI adapter for the Salesforce Call Center Edition. For future growth in CTI linkages for SaaS platforms, Envox should look to target Siebel, as well as SAP's more nascent CRM On-Demand.

On-demand CRM leader Salesforce.com made its name in the salesforce automation market, but its ambitions are extremely broad. The company has been making a push to break into the contact center market, offering customer service and support applications based on its Force.com platform. Since Salesforce.com is not a communications infrastructure provider, the company's special Contact Center edition mainly provides an intuitive agent desktop with contextual access to customer data and numerous knowledgebase and self-service tools. To get a truly robust contact center with strong agent productivity, Salesforce.com customers need some way to link the Salesforce.com application to the telephony infrastructure.

That is where Salesforce.com's close partner Envox comes in. The company known for both its IVR platform and its CTI products already knows the ins-and-outs of connecting communications infrastructure to applications. Its CT Connect product provides out-of-the-box support for more than 20 leading switches, using numerous standards. But, Envox wisely spotted the emerging opportunity of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model in the contact center and created a specialized CTI adapter for Salesforce.com. That product, PhoneLink, currently supports nine switches, including models from Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, Siemens, Asterisk and Alcatel, all chosen based on specific customer demand.

At its most basic level, PhoneLink adds screen pop and click-to-dial capabilities to a Salesforce.com customer service and support implementation. Yet the sale of PhoneLink cannot simply focus on features: when properly deployed, the combination of a smooth CTI link and a strong CRM tool can dramatically increase contact center efficiency. When PhoneLink seamlessly provides customer information to the contact center agent as the customer's call comes in, the agent saves the time that would have been required to search for that information. For most enterprises, that screen pop can shave 20-30 seconds off every incoming contact. Contact center managers who are judged based on their ability to hit key metrics love these much-needed efficiencies. But, while such savings based on efficiency used to be enough to win converts on their own, enterprises have become much more savvy about focusing an equal amount of attention on contact center effectiveness. And this is the area where Datamonitor believes that Envox excels: PhoneLink provides agents with the information they need to achieve first call resolution, and to do so with more personalized interactions.

Envox has some compelling proof points of these benefits. TransUnion, one of the major credit reporting agencies, was aiming to beef up the efficiency of its contact centers and it chose Salesforce.com and Envox to provide a joint solution. In the initial phase of this project, the joint solution was rolled out to about 400 users. The addition of PhoneLink, cut nearly 60 seconds from each inbound call and first call resolution rates skyrocketed approximately 200%.

Even with such successes, Envox faces some challenges as it moves deeper into co-sales with Salesforce.com. Envox has traditionally sold a significant chunk of its product through distribution, but owing to the intimate nature of CRM and the complexity of linking the data and telephony worlds, the company wants to build a high-touch model for PhoneLink. That is a difficult cultural shift. Envox's recent acquisition by Syntellect a company known for direct sales with a very high-touch model could make that transition significantly easier than would be otherwise. That said, the acquisition itself provides another challenge for the PhoneLink product as it was likely not the key focus point for Syntellect's acquisition rather it was Envox's IVR and self-service tools that were the main prizes for Syntellect.

While Salesforce.com has been a clear thought leader in the on-demand CRM market, Envox also needs to expand its reach into the Oracle/Siebel world. Siebel CRM OnDemand has not been the world beater product that the company had hoped, but Oracle has been fostering development of its platform and will eventually build a more visible presence in the space. For future growth in CTI linkages for SaaS platforms especially in very large deals Envox needs to target Siebel, as well as SAP's more nascent CRM On-Demand.

Finally, Envox will be delivering PhoneLink as a premise-based CTI solution; Salesforce.com is the king of marketing around SaaS. While technologically the challenge of marrying the two deployment models is not particularly difficult, there will undoubtedly be an element of conflicting messages coming from the two partners. Envox will need to clearly explain the blending of the two models to Salesforce.com customers who have already made their bet on a SaaS delivery.

Ian Jacobs

http://www.datamonitor.com

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