While not very long ago, the term “contact center” referred to a physical place, today, it’s more of a concept. Many companies are finding business benefits, cost savings and overall value by using smaller, distributed call centers spread out all over the country or even the world. It leads to the ability to offer follow-the-sun service through time zones, multilingual support and disaster recovery in case of power outages or storms. Unified IP communications, of course, is what has enabled this distributed call center concept.
Yardi Systems, a provider of property management software and services, recently deployed Interactive Intelligence Group Inc’s all-in-one IP communications software suite, Customer Interaction Center (CIC), to support its four distributed contact centers in Irving, Texas; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Cleveland, Ohio; and Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
“CIC has given us the sophisticated workflow and skills-based routing tools we need to easily and reliably manage an unlimited number of multichannel interactions daily,” said David Felton, call center operations manager for Yardi, in a statement announcing the deployment.
“We’ve used CIC to create numerous business rules to effectively manage interactions across our diverse client base, which ranges from commercial and multifamily, to military and university properties. It’s like we’re managing 100 different call centers, yet CIC makes it simple and ensures that our costs are predictable.”
Yardi stated that it chose CIC over competing systems based on its single-platform, all-in-one architecture. Among the many benefits the company cites is the solution’s broad reporting features.
“CIC’s comprehensive reporting has enabled our supervisors to drill down into activity by work group and client,” Felton said. “The CIC dashboard enables them to see real-time service levels at a glance. They can also use CIC’s custom controls to set alerts when service levels fall below pre-set minimums.”
CIC is a standards-based, multichannel software contact center platform designed to blend all media types with a company’s business systems. It can be deployed either cloud-based or premise-based, and it provides real- time and historical information that organizes the service experience in a seamless and expedient manner.