Analyst Perspectives

The parent company of mplSystems, Message Pad Ltd., was founded in the U.K. in 1994 and provides the infrastructure to support contact center operations. mplSystems’ main product family is intelligentContact (iContact), which is available either on premises or in the cloud. It is an interesting mix of products that covers call, email, chat, SMS, social media management and routing from a universal queue, a new social media product that routes social media posts to agents and provides the interface through which agents can respond. It offers some WFO capabilities, such as call recording, quality monitoring and workforce management, along with a new tool set that allows companies to build mobile customer service apps and a suite of reporting and analytics tools. Companies can choose to deploy as many of these applications as they require, adding more at a later date based on business demands to build a solution that meets the organization’s business requirements. mplSystems provides services to work with customers on these type of projects.

Based on user case studies, companies can rapidly build solutions that meet business and user expectations. The resulting systems can then be deployed on the customer’s premises or can be hosted in the MPL Aurora cloud and accessed through the public Internet or a private cloud. The latter option allows companies not only to choose functionality on a needs basis but also to scale the number of users based on demand. The system can be integrated with existing PBX or ACD systems, allowing companies to continue to gain value from existing systems. It includes integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM so that companies can embed a softphone in user screens, simplifying the process of handling calls while providing access to required customer information. The system integrates communications management and WFO, the two core components required to support multichannel contact center operations.

Another key component is intelligentDesktop, a smart desktop web interface that companies can build by dragging and dropping components to offer any or all of the other functionality to employees handling interactions. This is unique way to custom-integrate capabilities. My recent research into the agent desktop shows that an appropriately customized desktop can make a vital difference to the customer experience. Mature companies have found it makes agents’ lives easier, allows them to support more types of interactions and communication channels, makes them happier and thus leads to improved customer experience and better performance against key customer metrics (and average handling time goes down as well).

The final product in mplSystems’ portfolio provides field service management, allowing companies to better manage their field service engineers. intelligentMobile is available as a mobile app, allowing integration with key smartphone capabilities such as maps and location intelligence and providing capabilities for service engineers to manage tasks through their phones. Although designed with field service in mind, from what I saw companies could use intelligentMobile to management other customer-related tasks.

mplSystems is not a globally recognized contact center provider, but it now has more than a thousand customers in 10 countries. Its portfolio of products is different from that of most companies I cover, and its integration of interaction management, WFO and the desktop is especially interesting.  I recommend companies that want to support multiskilled employees handling multiple types of interactions and communication channels take a serious look at mplSystems as they seek to improve interaction handling and the customer experience.

Regards

Richard J. Snow

VP & Research Director