Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

 

Officials with Interactive Intelligence Inc. say the product – “Interaction Process Automation” – will tie interactions with the business processes that surround them so that companies can essentially author a work-flow and route the process as if it were an “automatic call distributor,” or “ACD” task.

 

“We’re very excited about this,” Rachel Wentink, Interactive Intelligence’s senior director of product management, told ContactCenterSolutions during an interview at the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo, which runs through tomorrow, Feb. 4, at the Miami Beach Convention Center. “This will be a tremendously powerful tool to help organizations better manage their businesses and find ways to cut costs without cutting the key services they need.”

 

In this slower economy, that’s a difficult balance that many businesses are seeking to accomplish.

 

For contact centers, a solution that Interactive Intelligence introduced last month – called “Interaction Feedback” – is designed, in part, to help managers find out how to save money while retaining customers.

 

“Let’s face it, hanging onto the customers you have is important,” said Wentink, who also discusses Interaction Feedback in a video interview with TMC Group Editorial Director. “You have to understand what your customers want because that helps you say, ‘These things are important, and these things are less important.’ ”

 

Specifically, Interaction Feedback lets companies create and manage post-call surveys that produce customer perceptions of an organization and its service quality. Results from a survey may be compared with operational data from a contact center so that companies can pinpoint key areas for improvement and take action.

 

For Wentink, the solution falls into a category of technologies that companies may invest in so that they can save money in the long run.

 

“There are technologies that help retain customers and also enable you to save money if you do it right,” she said. “That’s counter-intuitive but true. Here’s another one: speech recognition. Depending on the industry you’re in, you may find it really allows you to improve your completion rate, that it can be extremely user-friendly, and that you can use it to do things without live agents.”

 

Leveraging technologies to focus on customers, learn what they want and serve them better may sound like something a company would always want to do – but the difference now, in this recession, Wentink said, is that many organizations are being forced to go through the process.

 

“You have situations where you have to essentially ‘fire a customer,’ or cut a customer when that customer is not profitable,” she said. “You need to look at customer segmentation and make important decisions. It’s counter-intuitive, but the fact is this: one way to certain failure is to try and be all things to all people.”