As those in the cloud contact center industry are well aware, inContact is the leader in that particular field; and they’re only growing stronger. In just the past year alone, the company raised $115 million through the sale of convertible debt (in March), it hired Rajeev Shrivastava as Chief Strategy Officer with a mandate to accelerate the company’s growth (in June), and it was less than a year ago that the company acquired Uptivity for $46 million in cash and stock to integrate its workforce optimization software into inContact’s call center software. Not a bad 12 months by any stretch of the imagination.
Now, according to a report in trade journal The Daily Cloud, the company is ramping up for more expansion, with Shrivastava leading the way. “We’ll continue finding technologies adjacent to our space, or core to our space, and buy those companies,” he told the publication. “We have the cash, we have the equity, and we have the desire.”
According to Shrivastava’s estimates, the contact center market is worth more than $10 billion annually, and growing at a high single-digit percentage. “He estimates that some 90 percent of the business is premise-based, i.e. based on technology located on the call center premises. The other 10 percent of the revenue goes on cloud-based call centers, and inContact has about 7-10 percent of that market”, the Cloud noted.
“We are seeing a big move to the cloud,” Shrivastava added. “It’s not about ‘the cloud’ in itself; it’s about what you can do, it’s about how you can make it easier [for customers]. For example, you can build APIs so all the systems can talk to each to each other.”
While such talk might sound high-level, it’s the simpler things that can make a big difference, he believes.
“The key to success in the contact center business is much more about solving mundane but important problems for customer, such as helping a contact center manager find the optimal solution when several staff members don’t show up in the morning”, The Daily Cloud said. It’s a common problem in an industry plagued by high staff turnover.
In keeping with its company protocol of not naming the companies it signs as clients, inContact does allow that it has customers among both the Fortune 500 and the Fortune 100, and intends to keep moving in that direction.
As Chief Strategy Officer, he reports to the CEO and has responsibility for product strategy, marketing, and M&A. “We’re strengthening the team,” he told the Cloud. “We need to have the right technologies, the right people, and the right partners, to take us to the next level.”