1. With so many companies providing monitoring solutions, how does etalk differentiate itself from its competitors? Who are your most significant competitors?
Organizations are now monitoring for numerous business reasons, particularly in light of varying federal, state, and industry regulations. Basic monitoring solutions are just that, call acquisition systems with limited functionality. Today, company’s require flexible options to satisfy different internal business needs, whether that be less hardware intensive quality monitoring or more robust full logging solutions for very high call volumes with the ability to effectively process, search, and analyze key customer information.
etalk differentiates itself from competitors by offering the industries only fully integrated call monitoring solution that can log or selectively record calls and allow customers to process and search conversations based on what is spoken in the conversation. In addition, the Qfiniti Enterprise solution provides customers with the ability to provide post call, real-time surveys, along with traditional eLearning and other performance management modules. No other competitor can offer such robust solution.
The strength of etalk’s solution is based on our own developed and designed speech analytics technology. This gives us a tremendous competitive advantage because we can respond to the needs of our contact center customers much more quickly, since product development occurs in-house. Additionally, our speech analytics technology, called Qfiniti Explore, delivers a conceptual understanding of the agent-customer interaction. Contact centers can leverage this data by sharing it across the enterprise, with their sales and marketing teams, and they can use it to gather in-depth customer intelligence regarding competitive differentiators and customer churn. This is a significant breakthrough for contact centers, because it is making them a more integral part of their entire organization, which we think is an essential tool for their continued growth in the industry.
Aside from that, we also tailor our solutions to help our customers meet their business objectives, which is why we offer value added professional services to aid in building customized reports, and consulting services, including Six Sigma certification, to help contact centers achieve their highest level of performance.
2. etalk provides a performance management suite called Advisor, and a speech analytics solution called Qfiniti Explore. What has been the market acceptance for these solutions?
The demand for newer technology such as Qfiniti Explore has been tremendous. Customer want a better way to process customer interactions for both agent performance and business analytics.
Advisor has evolved into Qfiniti Advise, which is part of our Qfiniti Enterprise suite of solutions along with Qfiniti Explore. Advisor was introduced to the market 14 years ago, and it has become a critical component of our customers’ quality assurance programs. To be sure, the market acceptance for Qfiniti Advise has been strong, due to a very real recognition of the need for both the enhanced agent evaluation and coaching that it offers.
3. Have you seen a change in the needs of contact centers over the past year? If so, what are they? What can we expect for the remainder of 2006?
More and more, contact centers are tasked with the role of being front-line service providers, cross-sellers and marketers to an increasingly demanding audience of consumers. The only way to effectively provide all of these services is to harness the data that comes into the contact center, such as customer survey feedback and customer-agent interactions, and make this information searchable, reportable and usable. The applications that etalk offers are helping to elevate contact centers by enabling them to gather this crucial data and share it across the enterprise, to reduce customer churn, and to help drive sales and marketing strategy.
4. What have been the ramifications of etalk’s acquisition by Autonomy?
The acquisition has only strengthened our ability to offer some of the most innovative and advanced technology available anywhere in the world. Autonomy (LSE: AU or AU.L) is the undisputed market leader for processing and managing information access of structured and unstructured data according to Gartner.
With the recent completed acquisition of its largest competitor Verity, the Autonomy group now has over 16,000 valued customers.
When you combine Autonomy’s powerful search technology, which we call the “Intelligent Data Operating Layer” (IDOL), with etalk’s advanced contact center quality monitoring, customer survey and speech analytics solutions, contact centers have the advantage of gaining customer insight that they just can’t get from another provider. In fact, the IDOL technology is now embedded in all of etalk’s Qfiniti applications.
Finally, the acquisition has allowed etalk to rapidly expand as a global company. Our international business segments are the fastest growing sectors due to our expanded market awareness and product localization capabilities.
5. What can we expect from etalk in terms of strategic and product/services direction for the remainder of 2006 and early 2007?
In April 2006, etalk launched Qfiniti Survey, our enterprise customer survey application. Qfiniti Survey records both the agent/customer interaction and the subsequent customer input via interactive voice response (IVR), and then links those recordings to the evaluation process in a single interface, greatly facilitating the calibration process. It is fully integrated into etalk’s Qfiniti Enterprise suite of solutions. etalk offers the only customer satisfaction survey technology that establishes this direct and powerful link between the performance of a contact center and the customer satisfaction that drives the business.
In addition, we will continue to innovate new features and functions to make the agent performance process more efficient as well as provide greater functionality to enable our customers to effectively manage and access valuable customer information.
6. What do you anticipate will be etalk’s greatest challenges?
Executing on the high demand for etalk products!
7. Please comment on etalk’s current financial status and your expectations for the remainder of 2006.
As part of Autonomy, below is a summary of our recently announced Q1 2006 earnings:
Record quarterly revenue, up 203% from Q1 2005
Record profit from operations (IFRS) up 158% from Q1 2005
Record quarterly profit before tax (adjusted), up 134% from Q1 2005
R&D investment up 336% from Q1 2005
12th consecutive quarter of year-on-year revenue growth
25th consecutive quarter of profitability
Gross margins (adjusted) at 90%