Jeff Mains, Founder & CEO, Intelligent Contacts Inc.

Intelligent Contacts: From a Small Technology Startup to an Enterprise-Level Provider

It was the year 2010, when Jeff Mains was searching for communications and payment solutions. Most of the options on the market were premise based, complex, and paired a steep learning curve with mediocre functionality. Most products were built by tech folks who thought like programmers and had spent little time with actual users. Business users think differently than programmers which revealed a significant mismatch. Jeff saw this as an opportunity to create a better way. He created Intelligent Contacts (IC) to deliver a cloud-based communication and payment experience that business users love.

Creating Frictionless Payment Experiences

Intelligent Contacts obliterates technological barriers for businesses to create meaningful connection and frictionless payment experiences their consumers love. 

Businesses and consumers need technology to meet different needs, but most share the same desire—both want a frictionless experience. A business wants technology that multiplies their time and productivity while being easy to use and manage. Consumers want business interactions to be personalized, convenient, and on their terms. IC constantly asks its clients “How can the company make this experience better?”

Delivering Businesses a Personal Touch

Intelligent Contacts deliver solutions that make every business stronger, faster, and better. Its clients need the ability to interact with consumers through their preferred communication channel—and increasingly that’s becoming digital mediums like email, text, and chat. However, as we’ve seen, many consumers want a phone call for one type of interaction, but an email or SMS message for something else.

The company’s contact center software is designed to help its clients track and manage their customers’ preferred channel. Then, through data analysis and machine learning, streamline future interactions using a personalized automation workflow. The end result is that Intelligent Contacts become a “people multiplier” for the business while the consumer feels well taken care of with a personal touch.

IC’s payment solutions expand on this preferred channel premise—that consumers also want to pay a business using a method that’s most convenient to them. The company has learned through the processing of millions of transactions that businesses which offer their customers flexible and convenient ways to pay collect faster and with far lower administrative expense. Its most successful clients have leveraged these preferred channel strategies built into both its communication and payment platforms to bolster customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs, and increase bottom line revenue.

A Trailblazer in Delivering Innovative Solutions

As big data and machine learning become more critical to improving business-to-consumer interactions, Intelligent Contacts has become a true pioneer in using AI, automation, and real-time performance dashboards to help clients leverage their own data to drive actionable results. The best reports in the world are useless if they don’t drive action. All the value is in the action.

Providing communication and payment solutions for some of the most heavily-regulated industries—including healthcare, financial services, EBOs, and government—also requires adhering to the highest security and compliance standards.

Intelligent Contacts has designed its technology to not only be consumer-focused and “non-techie”, but it also must meet the strenuous compliance standards outlined in TCPA and FDCPA legislation, as well as the latest rules handed down by the CFPB.

As a PCI-DSS Level 1 Service Provider, Intelligent Contacts maintains the highest levels of data security certifications required to handle high volumes of sensitive consumer information and credit card data.

As big data continues to be a powerful tool in helping businesses become more effective and efficient, the company has strived to remain a trailblazer in delivering innovative features and solutions that make consumer interactions more engaging, meaningful, personalized, and profitable.

Customer-Centric Approach

Intelligent Contacts stays ahead of the curve by listening and understanding the needs of its client base during each phase of the business relationship. The company believes that its clients are the experts of their business, and innovation is only valuable when it’s actually solving the problems of the companies using it. Many technology providers leave their clients’ needs behind racing to build the next big thing. Businesses can build the most robust, feature-rich product in the industry, but if it’s too complicated to use, they have missed the point. Or, if that product can’t integrate with their existing software or adapt easily to how they are used to running their business, it’s not really ahead of the curve.

Companies choose Intelligent Contacts because they want to increase productivity and performance while removing operational complexity. They don’t want to add IT staff or have to read a 200-page manual to run their software. The company doesn’t even have a manual for its products. The company believes that if it designs a solution that requires a product manual, it has built it wrong. It keeps its clients ahead of the curve by building solutions that can be configured and managed by its clients’ existing operations team, as they are the day-to-day experts, not IT.

Delivered a Painless Workforce Transition

The pandemic had an economic impact in almost every industry and Intelligent Contacts’ clients were no exception. A few of its clients saw significant drops in business and still haven’t fully recovered, but others adapted and rebounded quickly. However, all its clients faced the immediate challenge of transitioning hundreds of employees from the office to work-from-home which is completely counter-culture to the industry as a whole

The company’s contact center software was already designed and optimized for a remote workforce. It can be accessed securely from anywhere and business management maintains full visibility just like everyone is inside the same four walls. In fact, it had already helped a number of its more “forward-thinking” clients who make this same transition years earlier and thus, the company had a streamlined, time-tested process ready to go. While many of its competitors struggled to get their customers up and running, Intelligent Contacts was able to make that transition painless for its clients with nearly 100% transitioned in under 2 weeks The pandemic has taught Intelligent Contacts a number of valuable business lessons, but the most important is that its clients rely on it to be more than a software vendor. The company has to be a true business partner who is there with agile, future proof solutions, unique ideas, and sometimes even pivot strategies in a time of crisis. Its role is to deliver certainty and hope even when the world is uncertain and unpredictable.

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