CONTACT CENTER SOFTWARE VENDOR
How customer interviews saved our client millions in M&A costs
Helping our contact center software client choose the right chat vendor to acquire.
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Our Client’s Problem
Our client – the M&A team at a leading contact center software vendor – wanted to acquire a best-of-breed chat solution vendor that could enhance its capabilities. Our client already had its own chat solution, but being an integrated vendor, its chat solution was not the best, with many of its cloud contact center customers opting for stand-alone vendors that offered a deeper set of capabilities.
Our Brief
Our client wanted us to look at four leading contact center chat vendors that it felt would be strong tuck-in acquisitions. Our job was to find each of these target’s Top-10 leading customers and implement on them standard questions such as:
- How long customers have been working with Vendor X?
- Which products of Vendor X are they using?
- Are these Vendor X’s products used in your specific LoBs or across the organization?
- Did the customer consider other vendors in its decision-making process?
- Why did the customer choose Vendor X over other vendors?
- What was the customer’s overall satisfaction with Vendor X?
- What were the strengths and weaknesses of Vendor X’s products, including features coverage, stability, innovation, services, support, etc.
- Were there any changes in scope of work over time? Why?
- What were the customer’s plans for renewal and/or any changes in scope/size of engagement with Vendor X going forward? Why?
Our client’s target was for us to do up to 40 interviews and provide them with insights over the span of 12 weeks.
Our Method
Innovation is one of our four founding principles at 4D. For every project, we leverage the power of natural language processing (NLP) and generative AI to provide our clients with a super-fast insights stream that is unheard of in our industry.
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Given our emphasis on verifiability, we use our fine-tuned transcription models to provide our clients with call summaries and insights 1 - 2 business days after conducting an interview. The result is that this client – which had set a high goal for us of doing 40 interviews in 12 weeks – was receiving their insights within 1 week of project launch.
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Client Outcomes
Based on our due diligence, it was clear that not everything was “hunky dory” in the world of contact center chat solutions. The leading publicly traded vendors in this space not only had to contend with the integrated players (such as our client), they also had to contend with chat solutions from vendors such as ServiceNow or Salesforce that had a "sticky" foothold into customers’ contact centers, given their role in IT Service Management and sales management.
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The biggest change, according to our due diligence, was happening in the Generative AI space and the deployment of large language models (LLMs) applied to knowledge bases. Even before Chat GPT was announced as being publicly available, chat vendors both in the public and private markets were investing significant resources in developing their AI capabilities.
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Our recommendation to our client was clear: It needed to pick a vendor that had strong customer relationships (based on evidence we collected), is able to compete against the likes of ServiceNow or Salesforce because its solutions are preponderant inside client organizations (i.e., they are sticky), and has invested in its own AI capabilities that our client can leverage for its own solutions.
Based on this (and declining valuations among publicly traded companies) our client recently selected its acquisition target at a 60% discount from its peak price.