Most customer-facing companies have the goal of improving the customer experience at the top of their list. The problem is, the list is often just on paper and doesn’t coalesce into real practices. Thanks to cloud-based solutions, however, companies of all sizes, but in particular SMBs, are finding functionality and next-generation applications that can help them offer customers more channels, more choices and better service than ever before.
The call center cloud is particularly compelling. It allows SMBs to offer large enterprise quality customer support at reasonable cost, and it helps them tie together remote locations and functions into a cohesive whole that can help drive the heavy burden of providing the highest quality customer support to customers whenever they need it and by whatever channel they choose. As a result, many players in the contact center space are upping their game when it comes to offering cloud environments.
Contact Center solutions provider Interactive Intelligence this week is introducing Interactive Intelligence PureCloud, a suite of cloud-based services for communications, collaboration and customer engagement. The new suite of cloud-based application services is based on new distributed cloud architecture built atop Amazon Web Services, said the company. It was designed to provide rapid deployment, maximum reliability, and unlimited scalability, while connecting customers and employees in new, more efficient ways.
"Many of the current cloud-based communications offerings are far from enterprise-grade," said Dr. Donald E. Brown, Interactive Intelligence founder and CEO, in a statement. "Most of them leave their customers dead in the water if Internet connectivity is lost or the service itself is interrupted. PureCloud, however, was designed to handle the scalability, reliability and security needs of the largest global organizations. With PureCloud, organizations also have the option to deploy Edge devices within their networks that enable them to continue to operate even if the Internet is unavailable, and also to keep voice traffic on their networks rather than passing it over the public Internet."
The PureCloud suite offers a number of services, including Interactive Intelligence PureMatch, a “matching scheme” that matches customer interactions with contact center agents based on multiple attributes and criteria. It also takes social customer service to the next level with a feature that allows customers to view agent profiles and performance, including their service ratings and wait time, then choose the agent best qualified to assist them. PureCloud also offers IP PBX, unified messaging, instant messaging, presence management, conferencing, persistent group chat, fax, video, and other UC features that run across Web browsers, smartphones and tablets.
The PureCloud suite will be generally available throughout the U.S. in the last quarter of this year, said the company.