IEX Corporation: "We bring together the winning combination of people, processes and technology.”

NT: Why don't you start by telling us a little about your company?

DM: IEX Corporation is based in Richardson, Texas and was founded in 1988. We are a leading supplier of workforce management technology. Our TotalView Workforce Management system is installed in over 3,000 contact centers around the world, many of which are large multisite and multiskill operations. We excel in the multisite and multiskill arena because, over the years, we’ve focused on providing technically strong products while never forgetting the importance of customer service. For those same reasons, we were recently acquired by NICE Systems, which is also a market leader in their domain.

NT: What will be your continuing relationship with NICE Systems?

DM: Earlier this year NICE acquired both IEX and Performix Technologies, a pioneer in the performance management space. Now IEX is operating as a wholly-owned subsidiary of NICE and our performance management application, InSight, is being powered by Performix technology. I think the three companies are an excellent complement to one another.

What’s really unique about the coming together of these companies is that, while our systems are being integrated together – where it makes sense based on customer feedback – we’re really taking an open solution approach to contact center management. This approach gives customers the freedom to choose our entire integrated product portfolio or select any of the applications separately. That way, our customers can get any combination of our workforce management, quality monitoring, interaction analytics and performance management technologies.

We’re really excited about this strategy, and I think our customers are too, because it allows them to reap the benefits of our best-in-class portfolio — without being required to displace existing systems.

NT: There is quite a bit of technology involved in this area. Do call center managers really understand the capabilities, or do you usually need to go through the IT departments?

DM: When you have multiple applications working together, it gets quite sophisticated. Sometimes you need IT people in the discussion to look at how the systems integrate on a technical level. However, there certainly are a number of users who understand the issues 100 percent and know what they need. Then there is a whole other set of users: novice users, who have just been hired or promoted, that may not be as technically savvy.

That’s why it’s important to have a system that’s easy to use and to train people on. You want supervisors to be able to easily learn the system, and be able to concentrate on how to use it effectively in their daily lives. However, while it’s important to have a simple system, you also need one that’s very flexible. Managing a contact center, with today’s call routing scenarios, is a complex task. So not only do you need a system that’s easy to use, you also need one with the flexibility to meet the center’s unique and oftentimes complex requirements.

NT: So do you believe that marketing through education is very important with these more complex call center solutions?

DM: Yes. But it's not just marketing through education. We don't just provide a product and walk away. We firmly believe in partnerships with our customers. Part of partnering with your clients means finding ways to educate people. Through our "Wellness Program," we go back and sit down with our customers 3 to 6 months after installation just to see how they're using the system, and help them figure out how to take even better advantage of it. We also host three user conferences each year: one in the U.S., one in EMEA [Europe, Middle East and Africa] and one in Asia-Pacific. The main thrust of these conferences is to educate customers on how to use our products more effectively and to discuss contact center practices in general. So we very much believe in customer education throughout the product lifecycle.

NT: What are the greatest challenges facing your company today?

DM: I would like to answer that more as, “What are the greatest challenges that our customers are facing today?" because we always try to put ourselves in our customers' place, and then figure out how we can help. From that perspective, I think the biggest challenge facing both of us is the changing face of the contact center. A lot of our customers are looking at non-traditional ways to provide contact center services. They’re evaluating work-at-home programs, trying to find ways to work more closely with outsourcing partners, looking for effective ways to manage multimedia contacts like e-mail and starting to use workforce management tools in the outbound environment. So I think we're going beyond the typical inbound call center. Now we're looking at how to be most effective at scheduling and planning for these "non-traditional" environments.

NT: In your view, what would you say is the greatest need in the contact center industry?

DM: From the contact center’s perspective, I think the greatest need in the industry is effective strategies for reducing agent attrition. In some contact centers, it's still over 100 percent annually. Just the cost of recruiting, training and managing those employees is astronomical. To that end, I think agent empowerment and performance management tools can help reduce attrition rates.

We’ve spent a lot of time looking to see what we can do to help agents do their jobs better, from their desktop — without the intervention of supervisors. We developed task automation features that free up the agent to be more effective and time-efficient at their jobs while at the same time giving them a sense of control over their lives. Now they can go in and ask for time off at their desktops, and immediately get an answer – without a supervisor manually intervening, for example. But agent empowerment applications are just a small piece of the bigger performance management picture. Performance management tools supply the information needed to analyze what's going on in the center and positively influence agent and supervisor behavior for improved morale and service results.

NT: As a high-tech company, you probably come out with new products on a regular basis. Do you want to tell us about any?

DM: We are continually focusing on what our customers are looking to do and making sure we have the solutions they need to do it. Over the last year, we’ve come out with a number of new scheduling techniques that accommodate the many non-traditional environments that are emerging. We now have features that make work-at-home staff planning easier, offer skill block scheduling for better multimedia contact handling and deliver an outbound workforce management solution. We also recently introduced the TotalView Outsource Manager, which allows outsourced and in-house operations to share information more easily, which enables them to have a much tighter partnership.

However, I think one of the most important developments with IEX isn't necessarily product related. Now that we’re part of NICE, we're taking a hard look at how we can integrate IEX TotalView more fully with NICE Perform and the Performix platform. There are a lot of different integration possibilities between these three solutions. So we're talking to our customers, seeing what their needs are in this area, and focusing our development efforts on that. Our goal is to integrate the systems together where it makes sense, based on customer feedback, but remain open so they can still be integrated with other vendor’s solutions.

NT: The combination of your company with NICE Systems and Performix must be having a lot of cost savings and improvements on the bottom line. Can you comment on that?

DM: One thing that is a little different from many of the acquisitions that have taken place over the last couple of years is that IEX is operating as a wholly owned subsidiary of NICE. We aren’t being fully absorbed into the company. So when NICE acquired IEX, I don't believe the thought process was around how to save money by combining the companies. It was more about, “How can we take our product portfolio and help customers save on their bottom line?"

With a parent company in the contact center market, we'll be able to grow faster than we did before. From that perspective, it will increase all of our revenue. Now we have a total focus on workforce management but are part of a broader NICE product portfolio. Being part of the portfolio affords us the ability to go to our workforce management customers and offer them NICE and Performix solutions. That’s going to help everybody's bottom line, because we have a lot more solutions to offer now.

NT: How would you describe the current status of our industry: CRM, contact center and teleservices?

DM: There's an incredible amount of consolidation going on. We've seen that over the last couple of years; a lot of the players are looking to consolidate to offer a bigger solution set. But in the end, it's the customers who will win because they can get the entire solution from one vendor instead of multiple vendors.

NT: What is your vision regarding the trends for the future of the industry?

DM: My vision is for the contact center to become a more integral part of the company's culture and success. A lot of contact centers are still looked upon as cost centers. However, I think companies are starting to realize, more and more, that the contact center is the face of the company. As a result, there’s starting to be a lot more emphasis on the contact center from the executive levels of the company. Over time, I think we’ll see the role of the contact center truly shift from a tactical cost center to a strategic resource.

NT: What would you say is your company's core competency?

DM: Our core competency is workforce management. That is what we know, that is what we do best. We put that core competency into our software product, TotalView. But we also put that core competency into the services we provide around the product. All of our trainers are people who have actually done workforce management in the field. A lot of our customer-facing people have also spent what we call "time out in the real world." So we have a really good understanding not only of the sophisticated algorithms required for effective forecasting and scheduling, but how they need to be applied to the real world.

I also think customer service is one of our core competencies. We have developed a rather unique "Customer Advocate Program." We have a team of advocates whose job is to take care of our customers. They're not there to sell anything. They’re there to be the central point of contact for all the customer’s needs. If a customer has a question and they don’t know where to find the answer, they simply have to contact their customer advocate. If their customer advocate doesn’t know the answer, they’ll find it. Our advocates proactively reach out to clients on a regular basis, just to see how they are doing, find out if they are having any issues and make sure they are able to fully utilize the system. We try to keep a very close relationship with our customers.

NT: How do you differentiate your company against your competitors?

DM: There are a couple of ways to differentiate IEX. I believe that we have the best workforce management product for multisite and/or multiskill contact centers. Most workforce management products have real-time adherence, for example. The difference between TotalView and competing systems is the level of detail you get. While there may be many products that have a real-time adherence, people who take the time to understand how we do real-time adherence versus how some of our competitors do it know there is true differentiation there. But that's just one piece. Multiskill is another good example of our product differentiation. Our patented multiskill scheduling algorithms produce more accurate and effective staff plans than competing systems. Beyond technology, I think the level of customer service and time we spend on education is another differentiator.

I also think we gained a huge differentiator by being acquired by NICE. Now we have not only workforce management domain expertise but we are now a part of a bigger family. Together we supply the industry’s broadest best-in-class product portfolio. We have core expertise in workforce management and, as a part of the NICE family of products, we can supply quality monitoring, interaction analytics and performance management technology as well. I think we really have the winning combination of people, processes and technology to help our customers succeed.

NT: Thank you for your valuable time.