CollabXperience’19 Event Recap

OUR VISION

Pedro Quintas, Executive Board Member Collab

Pedro Quintas delivered the first presentation: Our Vision. Collab’s vision feeds on three strategic pillars: Cloud Readiness, AI and Automation and Digital Transformation. “We’ve achieved a state of maturity in those pillars”, said Pedro.

There were several factors that contributed to the maturity. One of them is the development of tools that rely on artificial intelligence and automation. Another key factor is the application of strategies to extract and incorporate consumer insights into Collab’s roadmap. Last but not least, Pedro announced that in 2019 Collab celebrated some large deals. Challenging new projects push our strategy forward and confirm that the market validates and supports our vision and products.

SALES ACHIEVEMENTS & AMAZING NEW PROJECTS

Paulo Porto, EVP Global Sales Collab

One thing
is for sure, Paulo made everyone smile with his funny slides!

The commercial growth of Collab was one of the focus of Paulo. The SaaS slice of Collab’s sales has been growing and this year (YTD) has reached 92% of the total licensing revenue from Collab.

But sales are not all roses. The sales team needs to tackle competition, legal constraints, being unknown in some markets or language barriers. Fortunately, Paulo’s team has a powerful strategy: consolidate partnerships, expand partner base and enforcing presence in every market by building local strong references on the different vertical areas, like finance & Banking, Insurance, Retail, Telcos and Outsourcers. According to Paulo, the focus is to take advantage of the benefits of our products, like Worldwide Cloud Offer/Infrastructure, strong and robust Omnichannel Contact Center solutions and competitive prices.

SFR FRANCE

Patrick Pouliquen, Marketing Manager, Customer Relationship Solutions, SFR France

SFR is part of Altice group, a major player in telco and media, with a presence in many countries. In France, SFR is one of France’s top telecom companies. Patrick Pouliquen stepped the stage and shared inspiring insights and business details. “Our objective is to be the privileged partner to help companies in their digital transformation, with UC, security, IoT solutions and based on very high-speed networks”, said Patrick.

SFR has partnered up with iAgility and Collab and the benefits of this relationship were one of the highlights of the presentation. Patrick Pouliquen stated that it’s a win-win partnership that strengthens SFR and provides opportunities for SFR and iAgility to have a new value proposition on the market.

iAgility

Frédéric Questroy, EVP Sales and Marketing, iAgility, France

The curriculum of Frédéric is remarkable: his experience in the contact center industry and in telecommunications give him a unique perspective on business. As a speaker on CollabXperience, Frédéric talked about the relevance of business partnerships with SFR and Collab.

He made very interesting points about the management of customer lifecycles. “After all, the truth is that the difference between ordinary and exceptional relationships sit in the ability to engage and be engaged”, he said.

Century Link

Guillermo Marmora, LATAM Regional Director – Voice and Unified Communications Services, Century Link

In Latin America, CenturyLink is present in more than 20 countries, has around 29 000 km of network infrastructure and 18 data centers. Those are some of the numbers that Guillermo Marmora used as an introduction in his slot at CollabXperience. Guillermo is CenturyLink’s LATAM Regional Director for Voice and Unified Communications Services. He acknowledges that technology is redefining how businesses engage with their customers and detailed how CenturyLink is responding to market needs. Some of the topics highlighted were unified communications, SIP Voice Services and UCC & Cloud Contact Center offers.

DEV & SUPPORT, José Luís Silva, Collab

With Nuno Centeio, Hugo Sobral and Pedro Rondulha Gomes

The third day started with techie updates. New features and versions were brought into the spotlight. The team went through One Contact CC, Email and Chat enhancements and One Contact Portal enhancements, CIH and its total redesign, New Microsoft Dynamics Integration, SIP Connector, One Contact PBX and its new app, Gamification updates and Workforce Optimization evolution to HTML 5.

Stats worth mentioning:

• Knowledge base has been enriched with new documentation to help support queries. In June 2019, Collab’s Support exhibits a Customer Satisfaction Score of 100%.
• The runtime updates of the last version of OneContact, 3.7, have shown a dramatic increase in the overall performance of the system compared to the previous version. On top of it, this version consumes way less CPU in the SQL Server.

COLLECTING INSIGHTS

Carlos Gonçalves, Product Manager, Collab

Our partners and clients are essential to our success. Carlos’s role is to encourage, empower and use their knowledge and feedback. In his presentation, he explained how Collab is planning to leverage partner and customer insights to feed Collab’s product strategy and roadmap.

Here’s how:

• Address real needs – Make sure our strategy and roadmap address the most relevant and real needs of our target group.
• Ensure a great UX – Ensure that the roadmap delivers true value, by validating that we’re implementing the right features and providing a great UX.
• Leverage your expertise – Leverage your market and technology expertise to generate high-quality insights from collected feedback.

LIVE AGENT ASSISTANT DEMO

João Pedro Marques, Special Projects, Collab

First-hand demo of a new launch: Live Agent Assistant. It’s a bot designed to help and guide the agent. The bot analyses customer’s queries and automatically suggests several possible answers. The agent selects one, edits it if needed and the message is sent without the need to type or search of bits of information. This feature is easy to use and time-saving, and the impact on productivity KPIs is expected to be big.

DRIVING NEXT GEN SALES

Carlos Vasconcelos, EVP Marketing, Collab

Carlos
began by inspiring the audience with numbers: AI and Customer Insight tools are
in the top 10 Sales Technologies with Highest Projected Two-Year Growth. The
majority of marketers from companies with revenues between $500-999 M are
utilizing AI for predictive analysis and customer service. Trends and data shed
light on future marketing strategies, but Collab’s main goal is more important
than numbers. “Customer engagement made easy” is our statement and goal.

The
marketing updates brought by Carlos emphasized the marketing efforts towards
partners, namely in the productions of brandable sales kits for every product
module, informative webinars, and in the Customer Advocacy Program.

The event calendar slide was packed with trade fairs, showing Collab’s compromise in being present in several markets. “This year we didn’t refuse any partner request for backing up events”, told Carlos. Events, social media, digital paid campaigns, and content marketing all contribute to lead generation. Carlos displayed a new method of lead qualification that eases their management.

In 2019 Collab redesigned its social media strategy to grow a closer, symbiotic and friendly relation with the audience. Results show more engagement, more page views, more likes and more visits to our website.

Carlos closed the presentation with exciting news for 2020: a new Collab website!

After Carlos, Pedro Quintas shared some closing thoughts and thanked everybody.