At his company's Interactions user conference today, Interactive Intelligence Group Founder and CEO Don Brown laid to rest the rumors that his company was going to sunset its Customer Interaction Center (CIC) solution in favor of PureCloud, its cloud-based contact center suite running entirely on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.
"We are continuing to sell and see big deals with CIC," he said. "It continues to be a big part of our business. We're continuing to rack up multimillion-dollar deals with CIC around the globe."
In fact, Brown noted that although CIC is a "solid, battle-tested solution," Interactive Intelligence continues to make refinements to the product, particularly in regards to new features and scalability. Among the recent additions have been multichannel support (including text, email, and chat), interaction recording, quality management, campaign management, dialer enhancements, and new administrative functions.
"CIC is a great product, and we are continuing to invest in it," Brown said. "We are complementing it with our cloud services through PureCloud."
Interactive Intelligence is also continuing to focus on its CaaS solution.
"Into 2017 and beyond, we will continue to sell CIC, CaaS, and PureCloud together, focusing on new customer acquisition for all three," Brown said.
But at the same time, a real focus for Interactive Intelligence will be to move many of its existing CIC customers to the cloud with PureCloud. The momentum is already moving in that direction. Interactive Intelligence signed 118 new PureCloud customers in the first quarter of 2016, five times more than in the previous quarter.
Brown said market adoption of PureCloud, has been "tremendous."
At the end of the quarter, the company had more than 140 PureCloud customers worldwide.
And while cloud deployments were largely the domain of small and midsized companies in the past, many larger firms with contact center seats numbering 1,000 or more are also adopting the PureCloud solution, according to Brown. "We're winning some very large contracts too," he said.
The company added more than 40 PureCloud channel partners in Q1, increasing global coverage and opening up new routes to market. These new partners have been quick to embrace PureCloud, with 119 partner technicians already certified on the new cloud service worldwide.
"The vast majority of new PureCloud customers took advantage of our simple, month-to-month licensing model, which validates the need for a low-risk cloud solution that’s fast and easy to purchase," Brown said in a statement. "Also of note is that nearly 25 percent of our PureCloud sales came from partners. This is a testament to our revamped partner program, which gives PureCloud partners improved margins, premium support opportunities, and the ability to build custom integrations and complementary applications."
Interactive Intelligence also reported a number of new PureCloud features now generally available, including the following:
- WebRTC softphone with recording, speech recognition, text-to-speech, and other media services;
- integration to CIC;
- time-off requests for workforce management;
- configurable supervisor alerts;
- up to 1,000 users in a chat room;
- built-in speech recognition and text-to-speech for Brazilian Portuguese, German, Japanese, and Dutch;
- integration to Verint workforce management with real-time and historical adherence;
- enhancements to PureCloud integrations for Salesforce.com and Zendesk, including single sign-on;
- Twitter monitoring, queuing, and response;
- real-time user geolocation;
- estimated wait time and place in queue announcements; and
- scheduled call-backs.
And the innovations don't stop there. Brown said Interactive Intelligence has "a long laundry list of innovations" that it is looking to add to PureCloud. Among them are the following:
- automated workflow service;
- built-in customer management to extend Salesforce.com and other CRM systems;
- real-time adherence for workforce management;
- agent/customer virtual reality sessions;
- real-time speech analytics;
- screen recording;
- Web co-browsing;
- customer/agent screen sharing;
- escalation of customer/agent chats to video; and
- HIPAA certification.
"PureCloud is being updated almost weekly," Brown reported. "It's mind-blowing to see how rapid the innovation around this product is."
Interactive Intelligence also intends to take some of the innovations “beyond the typical contact center,” such as gamification and virtual reality.
PureCloud was first released in North America in the middle of last year, quickly followed by Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. PureCloud was released earlier this year in Japan, Latin America, South Africa, the Middle East, and in other regions throughout the world.