In the contact center solutions community, we hear so much these days about improving the customer experience and doing so with the additional objective of reducing costs. Contact centers after all are the front lines of customer interactions. Being able to be more responsive is key, along with taking advantage of state-of-the-art communications to dramatically reduce operating expenses.
An illustration of this is the announcement by customer experience solutions provider Interactive Intelligence that the The CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® (C.A.R.), a trade association of 165,000 California real estate agents, has replaced its PBX system with Interactive Intelligence Group Inc.'s Customer Interaction Center™ (CIC), the company’s flagship all-in-one IP communications software suite.
Solving a series of challenges with a comprehensive customer interaction solution
The reasons cited by C.A.R. for replacing its legacy PBX with CIC were the requirements to improve system integration, support remote staff, and add disaster recovery capabilities.
"CIC has accomplished precisely what we wanted," said Joshua Sharfman, C.A.R.'s chief technology officer. "Its single-platform, open software architecture has reduced integration requirements and made it easy to interoperate with our Microsoft Dynamics system. This streamlined architecture has also led to a 67 percent decrease in annual maintenance costs."
CIC has also enabled C.A.R. to incorporate its on and off-site agents and attorneys into its contact center. "We handled more than 168,000 calls from our members in 2013, mostly concerning crucial legal questions," Sharfman said. "CIC's remote support has enabled us to tap into our offsite agents and attorneys so we can more quickly and effectively respond to important member questions."
In addition, C.A.R. has taken advantage of CIC's failover support. "We have offices in Los Angeles and Sacramento," Sharfman said. "CIC provides rock-solid disaster preparedness with its ability to maintain full functionality and automatically route calls to our Sacramento office should we have a failure in L.A. or vice versa."
C.A.R. worked with Advanced Call Processing (www.acp-us.com), a Southern California-based reseller specializing in unified communication solutions, to select, deploy, and support CIC.
"ACP was careful to understand our objectives for a new communications system," Sharfman said. "As an Interactive Intelligence Elite Partner for the last seven years, ACP also brought the highest level of CIC knowledge. Combined with its more than 20 years of experience working with UC systems, these attributes helped us achieve a fast and smooth deployment, along with maximum return on investment."
Today, CIC supports all of C.A.R.'s employees located at its L.A. and Sacramento offices. C.A.R. uses CIC for audio conferencing, automatic call distribution, faxing, unified messaging, and voicemail.
"CIC has performed flawlessly," Sharfman said. "The icing on the cake is that our maintenance costs are now just a third of what we paid for our legacy PBX maintenance."
As can be seen from the volume of contact center interactions, many of which involve what really are mission critical exchanges, the real estate sector is in a host of ways a prime candidate for a solution like CIC. As somebody who in a previous life was a real estate agent, I can attest to the need for having real-time access to the resources needed to close a deal in this hotly contested area. In fact, the term “time is of the essence,” is almost an under-statement as to why agents need access to people and resources that can quickly address challenges.
For those who might not fully appreciate just how important being responsive is in real estate, to be successful an agent needs to be at their customers’ service literally a 24/7/365. Deals can be lost for a variety of reasons, but the most infuriating is when information does not appear on time or it is impossible to get a subject matter expert to render an opinion. Plus, with so much information needed in closings, the importance of having disaster recovery capability should not be underestimated.