How Irwin Mortgage Put Its Contact Center into the Cloud

As the call center industry moves more into the cloud, urban legends are being formed. Younger call center managers soon may not even remember “the old days” of premise-based equipment. They certainly won’t remember that in many cases, premise-based legacy equipment was leased. So let’s take a look at how a company using legacy-based equipment completely reworked its contact center – for the better – in the cloud.

In 2000, Irwin Mortgage realized it needed to replace its legacy Avaya PBX (News - Alert). The company had been leasing the PBX, which meant a pricey per month fee and frequent vendor intervention.

“We began exploring replacement options in order to gain more control over system administration, maintenance, and customization,” said information systems manager for Irwin Mortgage, Jason Perry, recounting the experience. “We also wanted to incorporate IP into our infrastructure to take advantage of cost savings associated with a converged network.”

In addition to its Avaya PBX, Irwin Mortgage was also looking to replace its Conversant IVR, a proprietary computer telephony integration system, a standalone voice mail system, and its Melita (News - Alert) dialer. The new system, therefore, had to provide a wide range of functionality, with the capacity to support a workforce distributed among multiple branch offices: something premise-based equipment was not able to do.

The company began to research its options, and realized the cloud was its best option for high functionality distributed across multiple sites. While the company approached several vendors and considered settling on a Cisco (News - Alert) solution, after receiving a price quote on Cisco’s IPCC contact center solution, Irwin Mortgage felt that it was cost-prohibitive. Converged communications solutions provider G3 Technology Partners recommended an alternative solution that combined Cisco’s CallManager with an all-in-one IP communications software suite from Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) called Customer Interaction Center (CIC).

CIC was installed for the mortgage company’s 40-agent customer service department, information technology and help desk departments. Interaction Dialer was used to support the company’s collections department, using the product’s session initiation protocol (SIP) option to enable it to communicate with CallManager. Today, CIC and Interaction Dialer support more than 800 Irwin Mortgage employees. The company is using CIC’s automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, unified messaging, presence management, fax-on-demand, and reporting features.

Since installing the new solution, Irwin Mortgage has reported benefits ranging from increased productivity and improved customer service, to reduced costs.

“CIC’s GUI-based customization tool has enabled us to create a host of features in-house, whereas before we were either severely limited to what we could customize, or we had to pay a lot of money for third-party assistance,” Perry said. “For instance, we’ve used CIC to offer callers an in-queue callback request so they don’t have to wait on the phone during long hold times.”

According to Irwin Mortgage, perhaps an even greater benefit of CIC is its IVR feature. The company’s old IVR offered limited customization options, so it was used to request information from customers, rather than push the information to them. This led to low rates of use—referred to as low penetration rates—which put a heavier burden on live agents.

Interaction Dialer’s blended capability has increased the call center’s productivity, because the company no longer has to manually log agents in and out of inbound queues. He also stated that the administrator feature has helped the company more quickly and easily manage campaigns.

While many contact centers have approached the cloud – or are considering doing so – not all cloud-based contact center solutions are the same, and it’s important for companies to understand how to evaluate all-in-one contact centers to best meet their own needs and their plan for growth.

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