Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Unified communications (UC) is fast becoming an essential solution, especially when linked to presence because it integrates multiple channels into one, thereby giving organizations access to and a view of customers regardless of which one they use. Yet deploying the software can be resource-intensive, both money and time, which detracts from the ROI and the realization of benefits.

 

To deliver UC easier and faster Interactive Intelligence has introduced a new communications-based process automation product called Interaction Process Automation (IPA). IPA is aimed to reduce costs and provide a quantifiable ROI for UC by automating processes that are far more efficient than their manual counterparts.

 

Interactive Intelligence developed IPA as an alternative to traditionally complex process management suites and tool-kits, which require extensive professional services, costly custom programming, and lengthy implementation cycles. The company has leveraged its IP-based unified communications platform to orchestrate the delivery of work, and give organizations everything they need to capture, prioritize, route, escalate and track each step of a business process.

 

Core Interactive Intelligence UC platform functionality adapted for process automation includes the following:

 

*          Contact center-style queuing and routing are used for accurate and flexible prioritization and distribution of process work

 

*          Enterprise presence becomes ‘process presence’, indicating availability for a work assignment and speeding processing time

 

*          Automated escalation functionality ensures that service level goals are met

 

*          Recording becomes an essential part of compliance for business processes

 

*          Real-time monitoring provides management visibility into every step of the work process

 

*          End-to-end reporting delivers the ability to manage and measure each process attribute

 

*          VoIP provides complete location-independence, enabling employees to participate in businesses processes from anywhere in the world.

 

The link between business process automation and UC is evident as shown in a recent survey of CIOs and IT leaders conducted by IDG Research in conjunction with CIO magazine. The results showed that 87 percent of respondents saw a clear relationship between UC and business process automation, with 50 percent stating that they believed communications technology could effectively be used to automate business processes.

 

IPA targets mid-size to large organizations across all industries that require the automation of multi-step, people-centric business processes. Examples include new employee on-boarding, lead management, insurance claims processing, loan application management, new student enrollment, requests for government services, and order discount approvals.

 

“IPA is a completely new approach to process automation,” says Interactive Intelligence founder and CEO, Dr. Donald E. Brown. “We’ve taken mature communications technology and applied it to the broader area of business process automation. IPA helps organizations increase efficiencies and cut costs by decreasing the number of employees and the amount of time involved in a given business process; by eliminating process latency; by reducing the chance for human error; and by providing standardized methods for handling business processes.”