Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

Our benchmark research on the contact center in the cloud shows that today organizations have to support more channels of interaction with their customers in order to provide superior customer service. This places pressure on companies to find systems that provide integrated management of communications channels at affordable prices, are easily managed and accessible with the skills their employees have, and above all meet the needs of the business.

Corvisa Cloud recently briefed me on how it supports such capabilities. The first thing I learned about was its unique origin. Its parent, Novation Companies, has three subsidiaries that provide contact center services, and like many other companies they all were having trouble keeping up with the demands of their customers. To address this, Novation spent a large amount of money building a new cloud-based platform based on the needs of the three sister companies. It proved so successful that it launched a new company, Corvisa Cloud, at the end of 2012, to provide services to the general market. The new company was built on the ethos of the founders, which is based on finding out the business needs of companies and providing services that match those needs.

During its early days of operation, Corvisa Cloud determined that companies need an integrated platform that combines back-office PBX capabilities, contact center-specific, multichannel communications management and integration with salesforce.com applications. It found that companies typically had a separate PBX for basic call management for back-office business units and an independent system to meet contact center requirements. However, it also found evidence similar to findings of my contact center in the cloud benchmark research showing that more business units are handling customer interactions, making an integrated solution more compelling. Furthermore, both back offices and contact centers are heavy users of CRM, increasingly from salesforce.com, so Corvisa Cloud decided to combine PBX and contact center capabilities and integrate them with salesforce.com. It has gone one step further than vendors with similar integration features by adding functionality that takes data from salesforce.com, imports it into the Corvisa Cloud platform and uses it to automate more functions, such as targeted outbound marketing campaigns. On top of the overall platform, Corvisa has built a reporting and analysis system that can take data from any internal source, combine it with data extracted from other sources – on-premises or in the cloud – and produce real-time reports and analysis that can be tailored to individual user requirements. This in itself provides a business advantage in that users can see a fuller picture of customer interaction-handling.

The company targets centers of all sizes but especially smaller ones, up to 750 seats. Typically these centers distribute more interactions (something my research shows is happening more often), are salesforce.com customers and are either startups without the cash or skills to build an on-premises system or companies that have on-premises systems that are reaching the end of their life. Corvisa Cloud customers can work closely with the Corvisa professional services team to define their business needs, and Corvisa then will tailor a solution to those requirements. The system currently doesn’t contain a lot of bells and whistles but is functionally rich enough that it can be tailored to meet most business needs, at prices more companies can afford.

The contact center in the cloud market has recently become quite competitive, but most vendors don’t have the advantage of working with customers’ internal operational centers to discover new business needs. This gives Corvisa Cloud an early insight into what it needs to build into its platform, which combined with its refreshing approach to the market should stand it in good stead.

Regards,

Richard J. Snow

VP & Research Director