Commitment to Connection Drives Success for Intelligent Contacts
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At its core, Intelligent Contacts’ technology offers cloud-based, omni-channel contact center technology and consumer-friendly digital payment platforms. As the world becomes more digitally-aware, successful companies are leveraging consumer convenience and preferred-channel communication to grow their business and retain customers. Intelligent Contacts is a software firm that helps create these meaningful connections between its’ clients and their customers like no other, thanks largely to the experience and expertise of its outstanding CEO, Jeff Mains. Mains has also won the title of CEO of the Year, 2020 – The USA in this issue of CEO Monthly, so we profile both the man and his work with Intelligent Contacts.
Since its inception, Intelligent Contacts has sought to offer the most innovative and configurable contact center technology and consumer-friendly digital payment platform available. Instead of building products, Intelligent Contacts creates solutions designed to be frictionless for both the business and its customers—creating a seamless and integrated experience between its’ communications and electronic payment platforms. The success of Intelligent Contacts can be attributed to a number of factors, but there are few more influential or impactful than the vision and leadership of its’ founder and CEO, Jeff Mains. Throughout his career, Mains has been a keynote speaker, bestselling author, and business transformation expert, and he always seeks to share the good, the bad, and the downright ugly from over two decades of leading companies in a wide variety of sectors and industries. Over the years, Mains has consistently found ways to solve the operational challenges of his clients in a way that also simplifies the experience for the end consumer.
The inspiration for Intelligent Contacts came while Mains was running a SaaS CRM company, and noticed that his clients were struggling to find communication and payment tools that worked the way they wanted. Most of the available options were mediocre and out-of-touch with where the industry was moving. Many were rigid and overly complex. They were “built by techies for techies,” and lacked the flexibility that clients needed. Rather than take this as it was, Mains decided that there must be a better way.
Out of this glaring need, Intelligent Contacts sprang into being, quickly becoming a key player in the financial services and healthcare revenue cycle management space. Mains set out to build his technology on a foundation of flexibility, simplicity, and speed-to-market. That meant creating a cloud-based solution that eliminated the need to buy hardware, software, or employ an IT staff to manage.
Today, Intelligent Contacts delivers enterprise-level cloud contact and consumer-focused payment solutions to healthcare and financial services companies that helps them to meaningfully connect with consumers to create engaging and personalized communication and payment experiences.
Because the products are so easy to use and integrate seamlessly with other systems, Intelligent Contacts has a built a cult-like following among its user base. Client satisfaction is confirmed by their 99.5% retention rate for 2020.
However, 2020 was a year quite unlike any other. Like many other businesses, Intelligent Contacts soon found itself needing to adapt to meet the needs of a changing marketplace. Few businesses are the same today as they were a year ago. Some industries have found themselves majorly disrupted while others skyrocketed. The clients that Intelligent Contacts works with have certainly experienced their own issues, and what Mains observed is that the severity of the issues often came down to agility and mindset.
For example, the most successful companies adapted quickly and found ways to make lemonade from their lemons, while others panicked, resisting change, and decided it would be better to simply wait it out. Intelligent Contacts works with clients that have historically been resistant to the idea of remote working, but this has now become a new reality and something that all businesses must plan and account for long term.
Intelligent Contacts has created solutions that are built to work securely from anywhere, and managers have the same visibility into activity and productivity regardless of location. Many of the firm’s clients are more forward-thinking than the industry as a whole, and a large number had already begun transitioning to remote working either partially or fully prior to 2020. This gave Intelligent Contacts a proven process to seamlessly transition hundreds of clients, many with hundreds of employees, from centralized offices to a “work from home” setting in just a two-week period.
Quite remarkably, 100% of clients forced to make this rapid transition managed to hold firm and steady throughout 2020, and many clients set new revenue performance records.
Jeff Mains specific role was working with client CEOs and executives in helping them rethink and pivot their businesses to meet the changing needs within this new reality. Remaining agile and raising the level of engagement rather than retreating was the path to success, and Mains helped his clients find that.
Mains also knows a thing or two about sharing a message in a way that is accessible. In his bestselling book Small Fish Big Pond: Building a World Class Business That Swims Circles Around Competitors, Mains describes how markets are always in motion. Disruption is both fluid and inevitable. To prepare for this flux, Mains stresses the importance of always engineering the business for speed and agility. A company optimized for speed and agility can anticipate a disruption in the market and move quickly to capitalize on it. Or, quickly pivot to lessen its impact.
Undoubtedly, the biggest impact in 2020 was the COVID-19 pandemic which has caused many companies to look inwards at themselves. It was at the onset of the pandemic that Intelligent Contacts made the proactive decision to reach out to its clients and offer its help as a cloud-based contact center software company that cared about its’ clients and was already built with the speed and agility to help them adapt. In addition, Mains helped other CEO’s rethink their business models, leverage the resources they had, and redeploy those resources to serve existing markets in a new way.
The challenges brought on by 2020 confirmed how critical it is to stay close with clients, especially during times of crisis. This experience proved once again that the most valuable type of capital in existence is relational capital. Revenue may go up and down, but trust is a commodity that never loses its value. Mains discovered, in a fresh way, that his clients at Intelligent Contacts count on them for more than just great software. They look to IC for solutions, and they want a business partner who will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them to provide hope and certainty when the world seems to be crumbling around them. Then, at other times, to be ready with innovative ideas that create unseen opportunities and drive greater levels of business success.
None of this is possible without meaningful connections, proactive engagement, and taking time to deeply listen and understand what a client is saying. Mains is more than an exceptional CEO; he is someone that understands the humanity of business and has built his own business to serve its clients consistently and whole-heartedly.
