March 1, 2013
By the Editors , CRM magazine

CRM Service Awards: Service Leaders

Enterprise Feedback Management

The Market

With the multitude of social channels available to consumers, staying on top of the constant stream of customer feedback has become more important than ever. Companies are clamoring for ways to collect and analyze feedback as well as act on customer insights, and the competition among enterprise feedback management vendors has become increasingly fierce. Advances in text analytics, fresh infusions of capital, partnerships, and acquisitions (Service Management Group acquired Locately and Confirmit bought CustomerStat from MarketTools) this year marked the continuing evolution of the EFM vendor landscape.

The Leaders

Allegiance kicked off 2013 with a new CEO, Carine Clark, formerly of Symantec. The company also expanded its offerings through a partnership with Clarabridge, giving customers access to Clarabridge's sentiment and text analytics solution as an integrated feature of the Allegiance platform. Ray Wang, CEO and principal analyst at Constellation Research, expressed his approval, noting that the partnership with Clarabridge and a new CEO will "help Allegiance take EFM to the next level." A strong performer in depth of functionality, Allegiance held steady in this category with a 3.8 for the second year straight. It received a respectable 3.6 for both customer satisfaction and company direction.

After landing in a three-way tie of ones to watch last year, Mindshare Technologies pulled itself onto the leaderboard with a 3.8 in customer satisfaction, a 3.5 in depth of functionality, and a 3.6 in company direction. The company has gained "good wins" at quick service restaurants and other hospitality venues, Wang notes. As it continues to grow, we should expect to see Mindshare Technologies expand beyond its "core strength in multi-unit retail and hospitality," comments Bruce Temkin, managing partner of the Temkin Group. In a nod to the growing demand for the use of text analytics in the customer service industry, the company also tripled the size of its text analytics team, with new product managers, developers, and text analytics engineers. Mindshare Technologies continued to enhance its offerings with products such as Outbound Dial, an automated callback service that gathers customer feedback to gauge the effectiveness of service interactions, and an iPhone app that gives users real-time feedback from an Android or iPhone device.

The Winners

In what turned out to be a very tight contest, we have a tie between IBM for its SPSS Data Collection and Vovici, a Verint company. IBM garnered a 3.8 in customer satisfaction and a 3.6 in both depth of functionality and company direction. "We've seen a long history of positive ROI and high customer satisfaction with SPSS," comments Rebecca Wettemann, vice president at Nucleus Research. "Since the [2009] acquisition, IBM has continued to invest in making the solution easier to use and faster to deploy, accelerating payback, and reducing risk." IBM's SPSS Data Collection is a "pretty advanced product that data geeks love," Wang notes. "The key benefits include the global capabilities from not only languages but also the ability to use one tool for multilanguage…. They've made progress in improving usability and it shows as we see them more on short lists."

Last year's winner, Vovici, returned with a 3.8 in depth of functionality and a 3.6 in company direction and customer satisfaction. The company remains a "core player in this industry," Temkin notes. "Adding Vovici's excellent survey and analysis tools into the Verint platform with voice and text analysis provides a very comprehensive solution for voice of the customer [offerings]," adds John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research at the Technology Services Industry Association. (Although Allegiance also scored one 3.8 and two 3.6s, the winners' higher revenue scores helped give them a total score of 3.7, versus Allegiance's 3.5 total score.)

One to Watch

Medallia came close to getting onto the leaderboard, with enhanced offerings, such as a sentiment analysis feature added to its text analytics platform and a social media brand advocacy feature added to its surveys. The company also received $35 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, which is being used to further develop its platform. Medallia has been showing a "strong growth" that "covers many industries," Wang observes. The company pulled in a 3.7 for customer satisfaction, a 3.5 for depth of functionality, and a 3.6 in company direction.

Outsourcing

The Market

Among the top challenges outsourcers continue to face are keeping up with the changing needs of today's consumer and training call center staff to meet the demands of the social customer. Additionally, "there's been more demand over the past twelve months for outsourcers that have got solid analytics backbones and the ability to manage large amounts of consumer data than you've ever seen as long as I've been in the industry," maintains Peter Ryan, lead analyst for business process outsourcing research at Ovum.

Outsourcers are tasked with diversifying the skill sets of their agents, and with figuring out how those agents should work. Ryan says there has been a "rebirth or renaissance" of the home-agent market, which is evidenced by some of the mergers and acquisitions activity that played out in the space this year. There has also been a trend toward more on-shore and near-shore delivery, "which is playing very well to the enterprise clients."

The Leaders

Convergys, which nabbed a 4.1 for company direction last year, upped its ante with a 4.3 this year. The company has continued to build a "strong internal research team, which is doing innovative work on demographic differences and voice of the customer," notes John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research for the Technology Services Industry Association. This year, Convergys introduced customer experience optimization solutions to its analytics portfolio, allowing companies to analyze why customers call more than once or the root cause of log-offs during a chat support session.

Sitel also makes a return to the leaderboard this year. While this outsourcer saw its depth of services score fall from 4.1 to 3.7, its company direction score crept up from 3.6 to 3.8. Sitel is going to need to try and "establish a beachhead in some of the more emerging locations in order to offset their European business, since the demand for contact center services in Europe is going to be tough in 2013," Ryan remarks. If Sitel continues to strengthen its market penetration in places like South America, the Asia-Pacific region, and EMEA, Ryan says it will be in a good position to succeed in 2013.

Sykes had an action-packed year, which explains why this company secured a place on the leaderboard once again in this category. In August, Sykes acquired Alpine Access, a provider of virtual contact center solutions and services. This made Sykes "the first call-center outsourcing firm that's actually gone after one of the pure-play home agent organizations," Ryan maintains, calling it a "brilliant move." Subsequently, Sykes saw its company direction score rise slightly, to 4.2, from last year's score of 4.1. As Ragsdale notes, Sykes is expanding the role of its service providers by taking into account social media support. Along with the Alpine Access acquisition came expanded talent management and development services to attract and retain call center talent. But, as with any acquisition, Ryan says the challenge in 2013 will be to incorporate Alpine's services seamlessly into Sykes' own business model.

The Winner

This year, Teleperformance ousted Convergys from the top spot in the outsourcing category, and earned the highest score for depth of services, at 4.4. This vendor, which also appeared on our leaderboard last year, continued to garner analyst and industry praise alike when it snagged a gold medal in the large outsourced contact center category in ContactCenterWorld's Top Ranking Performer Awards. "They've kept their finger on the pulse of where the market's going in terms of making sure they have good, solid social media offerings and an understanding of mobility," Ryan remarks. For this very reason, Teleperformance took home a 2012 Latin American Frost & Sullivan Competitive Strategy Leadership Award for its new flexibly priced social media customer support solution, e-Performance. As Ryan reiterates, "Multichannel's been important for them this year, and the long and the short of it is that they truly remain one of the real standards in the industry."

Ones to Watch

There was a tie in total score for West, last year's One to Watch, and TELUS International. If West is able to maintain its versatile model of both home-based agents and facilities-based operations onshore and abroad, Ryan says he expects the company to continue to find success. As for TELUS, it had a good showing for direction with a 3.8, "so it'll be very interesting to see how [it plays] out in 2013," Ryan maintains.