Transcript for Interactive Intelligence Announces Quarterly Webinars in 2011

Jim Burton: Welcome to UCStrategies Industry Buzz. This is Jim Burton and I am joined today by Tim Passios from Interactive Intelligence. Tim is the Director of Solutions Marketing, but more importantly, Tim is also going to be the moderator of a large-scale webinar series. Tim, last year, Interactive Intelligence had quite a number of webinars. What is driving the change from those multiple webinars to a focus on four large webinars?

Tim Passios: As we looked back over the course of 2010, Jim, and we were planning for 2011, we realized a lot of the messages that we were sending out, and as any company would send out, just gets lost in the shuffle. Customers and the audience get inundated with webinars left and right. We thought it best to bring the best and the brightest experts in the contact center under one roof and on one stage during one large event each and every quarter, to give the most information we possibly could to have the biggest impact and ultimately the best value for anybody who would be attending, and we thought this was the best way to do that.

Jim Burton: Well you brought up an important point and that is about the value. So what kind of value do you expect the attendees for this to enjoy?

Tim Passios: This is going to be an event unlike I think, any event we have ever done or any event the audience probably will have participated in before, because we are bringing the best industry experts under the contact center to be able to answer those driving question that the contact center needs. So for this first event, it is going to cover what every contact center should know and how to plan for it for 2011. Contact centers today, if they have not already started, they are in the process of figuring out what we need to do to be more impactful, provide better customer service and to drive revenues in 2011, that we have not done before. Again, this event will be able to answer those questions for them.

Jim Burton: So let’s talk about that a little bit. What are some of those areas that you will be discussing?

Tim Passios: Well I think it is important to bring in who will be talking about those first. So we are going to bring in Forrester Research Senior Analyst Art Schoeller, and our Chief Marketing Officer with Interactive Intelligence, Joe Staples, and they are going to be talking about several key drivers for 2011. Some of those are going to include things like the accelerated adoption of cloud-based solutions. Others would be an incorporation of social media into the multichannel mix. We have seen contact centers go outside the bounds of supporting just phone calls and finally starting supporting emails and even web chats. Now, social media is rapidly rising to the top of the list for the need for contact centers to be able to listen to their customers through a different channel than they ever have before. So Art and Joe will discuss how you are going to go about supporting them and why it is important.

We will also talk about the need to accurately capture the voice of the customer, to help improve customer satisfaction and increase revenues. Lastly, among other things I guess, it would be also to look at the new methods for measuring agent effectiveness to ensure that the agents are providing the best possible customer service that they can be.

Jim Burton: Will that include analytics?

Tim Passios: I’m glad you asked that because that is exactly what we will be including. So looking at things like word spotting, making sure your agents are saying the right things; making sure that when customers say certain words and phrases that the agents can handle them appropriately. Perhaps there are certain emotions that the agents or the customers are depicting. And you want to be able to know if the agent is handling those kinds of environments correctly. These are all brand new technologies that are becoming available to the contact center, at a much more affordable price than ever before. So it is imperative for contact centers to look at them and be able to determine if they are going to be ready to deploy these technologies.

Jim Burton: Will the participants be able to get involved in the Q & A session?

Tim Passios: I am glad you asked that because I think one of the problems with webinars today is that as an attendee, I come to the table with a host of questions on a particular topic that that webinar is to cover, and my questions often get overlooked; either because the moderator does not feel like it is important enough to ask for all the audience to hear, or perhaps they just ran out of time. We are hoping to overcome that by assembling a panel of experts that will also be available to answer questions. So after Joe and Art Schoeller from Forrester get finished with their general presentation, we have assembled the following analysts to help out as well: Blair Pleasant, who is President and Principle Analyst of COMMFusion, along with Sheila McGee-Smith, Founder of McGee-Smith Analytics, and Don Van Doren, the Founder and President of Vanguard Communications. Those three experts, along with Joe Staples and Art Schoeller, will be available to answer questions. So bring your questions, any question you have is likely to get answered with the best panel of experts that we could assemble for this event.

Jim Burton: Well, one of the problems of course is it always seems like they run out of time. Will this be an hour webinar or will it be a little bit longer so that those questions can get answered?

Tim Passios: Absolutely, this webinar will definitely go longer than an hour and that is a good thing because this means that you will hear the valuable information that Art will be able to present to you, but then you will be able to bring your other questions and get those answered as well. So right now, we are looking at about probably around 75 to 90 minutes total time for you to be able to get the information you need and get the questions you have answered, as well.

Jim Burton: One of the things that I find exciting about this is you have a lineup of both people and subjects that are things that are important to the marketplace, whether you are looking at Interactive Intelligence or quite frankly, even if you are looking at a competitor. So this has a lot of value I think for anybody who is developing a strategy for their contact center for next year.

Tim Passios: You are right Jim; this is not going to be an Interactive Intelligence sales pitch. We’ve designed these webinars and throughout the series to be educational in nature. We want to make sure that the audience members are getting all that they can out of these topics in each one of these events and we are honored to have for our first one, Senior Analyst Art Schoeller from Forrester to join us and I think the audience is going to walk away well informed and educated as a result.

Jim Burton: So when is the first webinar?

Tim Passios: This first event in our series of large-scale webinar events, is going to be held on January 27 at 11:30 AM Eastern. We will be following this webinar event with successive topics in Q2, Q3, and Q4 in 2011. So definitely be on the lookout for other notifications from us and UCStrategies for other webinar topics throughout the year.

Jim Burton: One of the reasons we are excited about doing this is we believe in market education, where our goal at UCStrategies is to help provide information so that people can develop a good comprehensive unified communications strategy and we believe that this webinar series you are doing really falls in line with that. So our objective is to work with you on each of these going forward, to help get the message out to the attendees so you and I will be talking on a quarterly basis, it sounds like.

Tim Passios: I am looking forward to it.

Jim Burton: Thanks a lot for your time today Tim.

Tim Passios: You’re welcome.