UCN Closes $1.2 Million inContact® Contract

UCN, the leading provider of hosted communication systems, today announced that Defender Direct, after an initial implementation phase, has expanded use of inContact® to a three-year hosted technology commitment totaling a minimum of $1.2 million, not including long distance. Significant bottom-line improvements prompted the company to expand its relationship with UCN by converting all 475 sales and customer service agents in five contact centers to the inContact all-in-one platform.

“Defender Direct’s expanding use of inContact highlights a significant industry trend of enterprises converting traditional customer-service contact centers into revenue-generating assets,” said Paul Jarman, CEO of UCN. “This demonstrates the value and flexibility of inContact’s hosted platform and integrated network for multi-site businesses.”

Defender Direct’s prior system lacked responsiveness and timeliness. “There were critical features that we saw as true drivers for our business, that simply weren’t getting developed; proposed solutions were prohibitively time-consuming and expensive,” said Sam Sipes, director of IT for Defender Direct. In addition, internal test calls confirmed president and CEO David Lindsey’s suspicion that agents weren’t receiving many of the calls attempted by existing customers and prospects. “InContact’s reporting brought to light that we were dropping 25 percent of inbound calls on our previous system due to inadequate network capacity on the application,” said Marcia Raab, vice president of sales and marketing for Defender Direct.

At this time, Defender Direct began exploring a variety of hosted and premises-based alternative solutions. “UCN’s inContact – with its superior network capacity, flexibility, rapid implementation, interoperability and ease of use – quickly emerged as the clear choice for us. We were now able to execute on the innovative measures we were envisioning and move beyond the revenue plateau we were experiencing at the time,” said Sipes.

When implementation of inContact began, after less than four weeks’ installation and set-up, Defender Direct noticed a rapid and measurable increase in sales from inbound calls. “Our sales results began to increase immediately, and the growth has accelerated since,” said Raab. “Capturing previously dropped calls gained us $100 each, and UCN’s skills-based routing has led to a five-percent increase in prospect-close percentage.”

“Our new IVR system ensures that calls get to the right person, so our sales team gets calls from people who are really interested in buying a system rather than looking for support, and vice versa,” said Raab. “This has streamlined our processes, facilitated strategic business improvement initiatives and produced a five-percent gain from relieving process bottlenecks. We also have realized an immediate eight-percent revenue gain from being empowered to route Spanish-speaking prospects to agents with that language skill set.”

An additional benefit of inContact is UCN’s carrier-grade server clusters that allow secure data transmission through the application. “While the inContact CTI allows us to efficiently perform secure data look-ups with a proprietary and a hosted CRM tool, it also allows us to do this without exposing sensitive company or customer data,” said Sipes.

Sipes added that inContact provides best-in-class flexibility and empowerment for Defender Direct. “With a lot of hosted solutions, you don’t have the flexibility to make call routing changes on the fly,” he said. “Using UCN’s inControl™, we make changes on a daily basis. Defender Direct is an extraordinarily agile organization; with UCN, we now have the communications flexibility to match our business dynamics.”