Analyst Perspectives

Contact centers in the cloud are increasingly popular alternatives to managing them on a company’s own premises. Running many business applications on hardware owned and managed by a third party is relatively straightforward and requires less support internally. Also the payment model changes from a license to a recurring fee, and typically the vendor provides updates as part of the fee. The challenge with placing a contact center in the cloud is that it is not a single system or even a collection of similar systems. The center includes infrastructure systems to manage communication channels, a network to support telephone extensions and access points to business applications, specialist systems such as routing and IVR, business applications (such as ERP, CRM and workforce management) and performance management and analytics systems; increasingly the contact center has to support mobile and social media as well. Moving all these to the cloud in an integrated manner is a complex task.

Corvisa is one company that aims to overcome this complexity, and it does this through an interesting business model. It claims to provide a single source for cloud communications that includes both software as a service and a platform as a service. It consists of a business phone system, a contact center, a development platform and connectivity, all in the cloud. In another shift from the norm, clients can use the Corvisa platform and software to build their own systems, which within certain guidelines can include custom code to meet specific company requirements. Corvisa promises that if these developments remain within the guidelines, they will be supported by future releases of the core systems. Thus clients can get customizable software that runs in the Corvisa cloud.

A conventional on-premises contact center includes a PBX or an ACD that receives calls from the public telephone network and routes them to specific extensions based on rules that can be set by an administrator or by users on their handsets; they may include a greeting message, a busy tone, or instructions to divert to IVR, for example. The Corvisa Business Phone System replaces this with a cloud-based system. It supports capabilities to manage user profiles, recording of voice messages, call forwarding, voice mail and call division, which can be done using a browser-based app or supported handsets. It also has a soft phone so users can make calls through an on-screen dialer, which in conjunction with setting up contact profiles allows point-and-click dialing. Corvisa provides a mobile app that enables features to be carried out from a smartphone. The system is supported on Corvisa’s telephone carrier-grade network, which ensures quality of service, optimum routing of calls, scalability and reliability. Our benchmark research on the contact center in the cloud shows that telephone traffic is still the most common form of customer interaction, so companies still need to pay close attention to managing them. The Corvisa Business Phone System helps them do that in a more flexible, cost-effective and reliable way.

The CorvisaOne contact center suite builds on the business phone system to support core contact center capabilities. It is available in two versions. The Inbound version provides a software-based IVR so companies can set up flexible menus, which link to capabilities that route calls to the most skilled agent available to handle the call. It also provides the ability to set up call queues, which administrators can monitor in real time and adjust if times in one queue become too long. The Complete version supports all these capabilities and outbound features including an outbound dialer, campaign management and lead nurturing. The system also extends Corvisa’s services to support live chat between agents or agents and customer. President Matt Lutz says the company’s first objective is to support high quality, cost effective telephone services and then to develop additional channels and capabilities.

In my view the Corvisa Summit Platform is the company’s biggest differentiator. The platform enables users to customize Corvisa’s product suite and/or build new real-time communication apps specifically for their business. It goes beyond standard APIs and Web service calls, offering code-level access to the CorvisaOne suite, so users can build entirely new voice and instant messaging apps without starting from scratch. It supports integration with business application such as CRM, and its development capabilities support the end-to-end application development process. For companies that want to take advantage of this but don’t have the skilled resources, Corvisa and its partners offer them. I don’t know of any other vendor that provides such a combination of core capabilities and flexible development in the cloud.

My years of experience in the systems integration business showed me that building even a simple contact center is not easy; our benchmark research into next-generation customer engagement confirms that companies still struggle to integrate systems, to manage communication channels so they  appear as one to customers and to provide consistent responses at every touch point. The situation is increasingly complex as companies have to support more channels of communications and more employees become involved handling interactions. I am convinced that the only cost-effective way forward is a contact center in the cloud. I therefore recommend that companies looking to extend and improve customer engagement assess how Corvisa can help those efforts.

Regards,

Richard J. Snow

VP & Research Director