Gartner selects Interactive Media as “Cool Vendor”

Interactive Media

Rome, Italy (www.imnet.com)

Analysis by TJ Singh (Gartner)

Why Cool: Interactive Media offers virtual assistant automated interaction to bring a degree of personality to emotionless interactions between customers and their service providers — both BPOs and captive centers. Recent engagements have enabled high-quality service deployments to integrate with existing contact center processes and assisted services (such as smart city initiatives, in which terminals respond to natural-language queries from the public). These services have helped improve customer service efficiency, cut unnecessary costs (such as medical certificate processing) for both service providers and users, and increased revenue for clients such as taxi drivers when using an automated service.

It has a strong focus and offerings around voice and multichannel services (that is, voice, video, email, Web chat, Short Message Service or Multimedia Messaging Service [MMS]), and self-service (including multilingual customer management BPO services). These offerings are delivered via a virtual assistant to create a highly automated approach to delivering marketing, sales and customer care services.

The company provides solutions and services, such as an interactive virtual assistant, email management agent, automated dialogue agent, and speech management tools and technology
at a reasonable cost.

Interactive Media solutions and services help companies provide a relatively high quality of marketing and customer care automated services that legacy interactive systems cannot deliver. It can avoid inappropriate and, in some cases, inadequate responses due to the level of “stiffness” from some human-machine interfaces. Interaction based on natural-language understanding and IM software tools enable a higher quality of service deployment.

Interactive Media’s solutions and services enable the delivery of automated voice or multichannel services in a consistent manner. Interactions can scale in a cost-effective and sustainable way while maintaining a high level of customer experience.

One such solution is IM.MIND (also referred to as Multimodal Interaction Natural Dialogue). Its development methodology includes tools for performance analysis that help in application tuning (refining voice input understanding, dialogue strategies and human-machine conversation) to help deliver a more consistent service.

Application tuning uses mathematical methods (such as decision theory and receiver operating characteristic [ROC] curves) to assess the classification quality (including the recognition of true/false positives and true/false negatives), and it is a significant part of the realization process. Typically, the IM professional services team devotes 40% of its effort to design, 20% to development, and 40% to testing and tuning. Higher-positive responses will result in a more engaged and satisfied consumer.

While there are many other vendors offering automated voice and multichannel solutions
(including interactions via a virtual assistant interface), Interactive Media’s approach toward a service-based model, rather than just outright technology, makes it easier for the buyers to understand what they are buying and implement the service.

The multichannel interaction allows for comprehensive service delivery, regardless of how customers engage with the business. That helps solve a key challenge for clients as they deal with a customer base using interactive services across multiple devices.

Another reason why the solution is cool is that its multilingual capability helps deliver services, with the same degree of consistency, for many languages — not just English.

Challenges: The company has focused its investment in developing technology solutions and services, leaving fewer resources for the development of an integrated solution, as well as less spending on marketing and sales. Therefore, Interactive Media suffers from a relatively lower-brand visibility compared with rival innovators in this technology and service area.

A key challenge for the company, as is the case with any niche customer management solution
or service provider, includes finding the continuous investment required for the development and acquisition of technology, as well as for growth in new nontraditional markets, such as North America and Asia/Pacific.

The core team or decision makers are engineers by training, so the limited sales and marketing experience presents a challenge for growth. However, the company executives realize and accept the challenges, and are taking steps to address it through new hires and an adopted partnership model.

Interactive Media’s revenue mix is 60% from technology licensing and 40% from services. Interactive Media should consider moving its revenue mix more toward an annuity-based service model that will enhance its cash-flow position, allow for future investments, and help buyers — who do not have the capacity/capability to deploy such a service — acquire the end-to-end service rather than acquire just another solution. This can only be achieved if the company becomes a full-fledged business process service provider or a partner to customer management BPO service providers.

Who Should Care: Sales, marketing and customer services executives of small, midsize
and large organizations looking to improve consistency, multichannel adoption and customer experience should consider the benefits of natural-language-based automated voice and multichannel services in their internal and external customer management processes and functions. These processes and functions are typically aligned to marketing, sales and customer care.

Business process service executives and service delivery leaders who are looking to acquire solutions and service capabilities to help enhance their existing service offerings should consider partnering with Interactive Media for either part of or the entire comprehensive suite of solutions or services.