Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

I am happy to share some insight on IFS-mplsystems drawn from our latest research. The Ventana Research Value Index: Contact Center in the Cloud in 2018 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect the breadth of the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for contact centers in the cloud. We evaluated IFS-mplsystems and 12 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and data derived from our benchmark research on contact centers in the cloud.

The Value Index assessed IFS-mplsystems intelligentContact version 8D, released in October 2017. The UK-based contact center in the cloud vendor also provides CRM for customer and field service and has been steadily enhancing its omnichannel offering. IFS-mplsystems ranks 10th overall in the 2018 Contact Center in the Cloud Value Index.

IFS-mplsystems’ highest ranking is seventh in Adaptability, reflecting its high level of support for configuration and integration. It rates eighth in Capability, where its overall support for handling interactions and integration contribute to its good score. However, it does face some areas requiring improvement in workforce optimization and interaction-handling analytics.

IFS-mplsystems’ lowest ranking is in Reliability, where it ranks 13th due to the lack of in-depth examples and documentation across all levels of performance and scalability. It also ranks 12th in TCO/ROI due to the lack of information and examples on tools, services and investments to support organizations’ needs. And it ranks 12th in Manageability; the vendor did well in administration and security but lacked documentation and information as well as support for audits and compliance. It continues to provide the cloud offering on Microsoft but can offer it as well on AWS infrastructure.

While IFS-mplsystems has some challenges that lead to its placement overall, it has a platform that is designed to effectively manage customer service and support a broad range of needs for contact centers. Since the completion of this value index research, IFS-mplsystems has become IFS Customer Engagement and has added enhancements to its virtual assistance technologies in IntelligentResponse that will have digital self-service and voice self-service as well as the ability to use robotic process automation (RPA) to quickly respond to the needs of customers using voice recognition. It is also working with Google on interfaces to Dialogflow and further enhancing the sophistication of interactions. In addition, key improvements to chat clients have come forward with the use of suggested responses and supporting rich graphical content. It has also introduced new analytics that are presented in a dashboard and presenting processes and as customer journey that are quite robust.

This research-based index is the first such industry undertaking to assess the value of software designed specifically for enabling a contact center in the cloud. You can learn more about IFS-mplsystems and others in our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool and can read the whole Value Index report.

Regards,
Mark Smith
CEO & Chief Research Officer