NT: Please tell us about your company, your type of business and your positioning statement.

MZ: We're a leading provider of on-demand call center and interactive voice response solutions. The company was founded in 1999 and we serve over 1,500 customers, including KB Toys, Reebok and Kellogg’s. At the moment, we have over 7,000 voice applications live within our customer base.

The reason I make the distinction between "hosted" and "on-demand" is because of our unique approach to the market. When we say "on-demand," we mean "everything." Every piece of functionality, everything you need to use our technology, can be done over the Web. There are a number of companies out there who say they're hosted providers of IVR applications, but it's still not on-demand, because it would require you to write your code and upload it, then wait for a few weeks to get it to the staging environment, then go live. In the Angel.com context, it's point and click -- there's no programming required. It's instantly deployed in our data centers and ready to take calls. We feel strongly that this is a very unique position.

NT: What is your biggest challenge at Angel.com?

"There are still not enough people who are aware of our approach. They're unaware that true on-demand call center and IVR solutions exist out there. A lot of business users still think big boxes, multimillion dollar investments and very complex technologies [are the norm]."

MZ: It's awareness. There are still not enough people who are aware of our approach. They're unaware that true on-demand call center and IVR solutions exist out there. A lot of business users still think big boxes, multimillion dollar investments and very complex technologies [are the norm].

The second awareness barrier is tied to the education of business users on the available products and technologies. People need to understand: What is a virtual ACD? What is a hosted IVR? How does it all fit together? Which product is more suited to my specific business needs?

Last, but not least, for us, the big challenge is the awareness of our company, Angel.com: what we do, how we fit into the industry. Still, a lot of decision makers right now still look at the incremental improvements of old-school technologies versus next-generation products and technologies, like Angel.

So what do we do about this? Well, what's pretty unique about Angel is that we're very open about publicizing our success stories. We're open about the benefits our customers can derive from using our technologies. We're not afraid of coming up with hard numbers. We have dozens and dozens of large and mid-sized reference customers who are willing to talk to anybody about the benefits of our technology. We also try to focus on business benefits. I think one of the challenges in the technology industry is that people focus too much on the actual technology. We take a different approach to messaging. Our message is always focused on speed of deployment, minimizing the risk for the business decision maker, and a true return on investment, if it can be measured.

"Our message is always focused on speed of deployment, minimizing the risk for the business decision maker, and a true return on investment, if it can be measured."

What the industry needs is to understand that more flexible and reasonable pricing models are the key to making this technology mainstream. I really believe there's a tremendous opportunity for this type of technology outside the classic high-end call center space. I believe there's real growth coming our way from informal contact centers…companies that would not even have thought of having a call center just a few years ago are now looking at [the call center] as a customer-centric and cost-efficient solution.

I also think the industry needs to move more toward the IT department. Up until now, a lot of the contact center technology was siloed in a very small part of the business, with proprietary technology. The emergence of open standards and service-oriented architecture will have a positive impact on the industry as soon as the technology becomes part of the overall IT strategy of these businesses.

NT: So what's new at Angel?

MZ: As you might know, we started out a with a very strong focus on IVR. We were the first company that launched an on-demand technology to build speech applications through a point-and-click interface without doing any programming. We rapidly acquired a lot of customers there, and then at the beginning of this year, we launched an extension of this offering, which we call Virtual Call Center. That's our approach to the hosted ACD market. It's fully integrated with our Site Builder toolkit, so users can really cover the whole spectrum of telephony-based contact center needs. You can route the calls to at-home agents, you can use external data sources to coordinate advanced routing, and down the road, you can steadily increase the level of automation using our IVR technology as you see fit.

Another new development is that we're looking closely at building our own ecosystem of partners. We see tremendous potential there. We already have dozens of companies that build extensions to the Angel platform.

NT: What is the growth rate of your company?

MZ: We're at a kind of inflection point. We're seeing growth rates in the double digits every month in terms of the traffic on the network. We're making money, so it's definitely a very exciting phase of our business.

Going back to my last comment, the commercial call center was really kind of a blockbuster success for us. We initially saw it as a kind of a logical add-on to what we were doing on the speech and IVR side, but it has become a phenomenal product success in its own right. It offers a lot of flexibility to have really high-end customer experiences over the telephone with no upfront commitment in terms of hardware or software…it works with any phone. We’re signing up new customers on a daily basis.

Competition is not the issue in this industry…it's awareness of the benefits of the technology. There's plenty of room for a dozen or two dozen companies to grow to 20, 50, or 100 million dollar businesses in the next few years. But the buyers need to understand which solution is best for their specific scenario. When we talk to buyers at large enterprises and say we have this hosted model for IVR, they say, "We've got IVR in-house."

"Competition is not the issue in this industry…it's awareness of the benefits of the technology. There's plenty of room for a dozen or two dozen companies to grow to 20, 50, or 100 million dollar businesses in the next few years."

Well, you might have IVR in your main call center, but you're probably not using speech, and you're probably not integrated with your CRM system, but that's another story. Think about all the other opportunities within your enterprise. Do you have an automated IVR for your employee-facing systems? There are tons of opportunities out there that IVR is not used for, because people don't understand what the right approach is for their specific business needs.

NT: You mention that there is a difference between "on-demand" and "hosted." Could you please elaborate on that a little?

MZ: For me, the best example for an on-demand approach is Salesforce.com. It's a well-established company…everything you need to run your company and get started is available. You set up your accounts using the service. We follow a very similar approach with Angel. You can go to our Web site, request an account, and then within a few minutes, you can start building your speech-enabled IVR solution in a very intuitive, easy way. You have a phone number provisioned by us, and you can make your first phone call. No player that I'm aware of has this type of "just a few minutes to successful deployment" [approach]. Most hosted providers take about nine months to build an application and then put it on their hosted data center platform…that's not really "on-demand," because if you need another application, it would take another nine months to deploy. With some companies, you have to write your VoiceXML code. You cannot simply provision an account, you have to go through a tedious contractual process to get your application provisioned, etc. This is what is unique about our approach. We follow the same approach with our ACD offering, as well. You can set up your agents through the Web site, you hit "save" and the phones will ring at your agents' desks, or their cell phones, if necessary.

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

MZ: Our vision has always been the same: I wholeheartedly believe that telephony, IVR and call center applications should be like Web sites. That's where we need to go. For the industry to be successful, we need to treat it as a logical extension of the billions and billions of dollars that companies have invested in their CRM infrastructures, in their customer databases, in the technology they currently use to serve their customer base. So that's one reason we don’t call our applications "telephony apps" or "IVR apps". We call them Voice Sites…phone-enabled versions of Web sites that fit into that paradigm.

Clearly, Voice over IP wasn't as important 12 months ago [as it is now], but I believe that it could be a fundamental catalyst for the speech recognition and contact center space. There are tons of opportunities now. The buzz around VoIP draws the attention of business decision makers to the area of serving customers over the telephone. I think the challenge will be educating the business decision makers on the benefits of VoIP in the context of speech and contact center solutions. A lot of people think [its only benefit is that it's] just cheaper. First, this is not necessarily true; and second, I believe the true impact of VoIP in our industry is the integration of data into the customer interaction -- passing on data from certain systems on premise to hosted providers like us in real-time. I think that's a key use of the technology.

NT: We really believe that the only way you're going to market high technology is through "marketing via education." There is no other way to do it.

MZ: I'm 100 percent with you on that.

Speech is one thing, but the true breakthrough is VoiceXML and a more open-standards approach to IVR technology. This opens up a whole new set of possibilities and makes it much easier to integrate with existing Web-based deployments.

NT: What about data security?

MZ: From conversations I've had with our customers, it's important, but it doesn't come up as often as people might think. Because we are focused on a Web-centric approach, it's understood that data is being passed on in an encrypted format between the customer premise data centers and ours, and it's a pretty easy story for us to tell.

NT: I was really thinking in the context of offshoring. How do you control the security of your data?

MZ: The way we solve it at Angel explains the difference between hosted and on-demand. We do not store any customer data in our data center. We, in real-time, establish a connection with our customers' CRM system, or whatever system they'd like, but there's no storage at our end, unless the customer wants to do it.

NT: What about home agents?

MZ: I do see a tremendous opportunity for the hosted/on-demand model in informal call centers. We focus our initial deployments of virtual call centers very much on making these type of home agent deployments as easy as possible so people can work from home, call into an Angel number and be confronted with a speech-based system that lets them log in and say, "I'm available to take calls." They hang up, and the phone starts ringing. They don't need any type of special equipment. They don't have to have broadband or a special router…it works with any type of telephone. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. For some customers, it's hard to recruit talent in certain areas. By going the home agent route, there's a chance to tap into a much bigger and potentially more qualified agent pool. It's much easier to do 24/7 staffing if you allow people to take calls from home versus bringing them into the call center in the middle of the night.

NT: Are you involved with offshoring?

MZ: We have a few customers that route calls to offshore call centers and agents. It’s not as big a play for us, but it's something we're watching very closely. If the customer wants it, then that's OK, but it's not something we market very aggressively for the moment.

Another technology I feel very strongly about is business intelligence — using data in the context of customer-facing IVR systems. I believe that's one of the problems that gave IVR systems such a bad rap — most companies put their customers through the same branch all the time. With new technologies, it's possible to instantly identify the caller, or based on certain patterns, determine what the likely request might be, and then really streamline the experience. I think this is the next wave for IVR systems…much more personalized applications, tapping into CRM systems and customer profiles to make the call experience as pleasant as possible.

We just did a deployment with a VoIP consumer telecom organization. They were getting thousands and thousands of calls, and they were putting the callers through the same "press one, press two" menu. They were routing the calls to the wrong agents. Agents who were the best at selling were taking customer support calls. It was grossly inefficient. With Angel.com, we were able to instantly tap into their customer profile database. While the system was saying, "Thank you for calling XYZ," we were already determining the most likely cause for the call. If we see that the caller is calling from a voice over IP number that's in the database then we know that it's an existing customer and we can instantly determine if one of the big drivers for support calls is number portability — taking the phone number they have with their Bell company and transferring it to the VoIP provider. We can immediately say "By the way, we saw that you initiated your number transfer on October 5th. The expected completion date is next Tuesday. Do you have any other questions?"

With [capabilities] like this, you can dramatically streamline the caller experience. If we determine that this is not an existing customer, then the caller will hear, "If you're new to our service, just say 'learn more,' or if you are an existing customer, say your 10-digit VoIP number."

NT: What would you say is the core competency of your company?

MZ: It's clearly product development. We have taken an incredibly customer-centric approach to our products and everybody who sees Site Builder immediately acknowledges that. As I said, we have 7,000 applications live and 1,500 businesses that give us feedback on an ongoing basis, so we're proud of this very customer-centric and product-centric approach we have.

NT: How do you position and differentiate your company from others?

MZ: Well, it's clearly the self-service approach, and the dramatic improvements in the deployment time and resources and money that come with this unique approach. We're seeing companies that have their application — their IVR solution — up and running in hours, versus months and sometimes years with other approaches. Just because we make it very intuitive and we have this integrated, on-demand approach. The customer is in full control of the deployment and the self-service aspect. We have a very unique pricing model…it's per-minute-based, kind of "pay as you go." We do not charge customers for our development tool kit. We offer free trials so people can make an educated decision about deploying their solution with us. Last, but not least, we really pride ourselves on superior service. We have our own client services team that is not just technical support; it serves as an education and advisory role for our clients. We see ourselves as more of a "market maker". Every month, we send out a newsletter to 10,000-plus people who have registered with us with not only company news, but best-practices and applications that have recently been deployed on Angel to help spur some creative thinking about IVR and speech in general. We try to be different. We're very business-focused in our marketing approach.

NT: Thank you very much for your time.