There are all kinds of industry recognition and validation, and in the last few months, Interactive Intelligence has garnered a raft of honors for its contact center solutions and unified communications software from the likes of research firms Frost & Sullivan and Ovum. While such recognition, along with customer testimonials and outstanding performance in the market are important, getting performance certification from premiere test labs Miercom is in many ways the gold standard in our industry. In fact, it has been for several decades. The reason is simple, Miercom’s impeccable reputation for scrupulous independent testing.
The Interactive Intelligence all-in-one IP communications software suite, Customer Interaction Center™ (CIC) 4.0, received Miercom’s Performance Verified Certification, based on its features, scalability, and call-handling/processing capabilities. In fact, it was cited for its performance in several key contact center and unified communications (UC) areas.
CIC 4.0 demonstrates its performance across a broad range of capabilities
“Based on our observations during the multi-day lab test, CIC 4.0 showed impressive performance results, processing about 32,000 simultaneous interactions without a hiccup,” said Miercom CEO Rob Smithers. “Combined with a wide range of features for both agents and business users, CIC 4.0 has proven to be a reliable and comprehensive communications solution for organizations with up to hundreds of thousands of users.”
The test was conducted over a two-day period at the Interactive Intelligence headquarters. The CIC 4.0 configuration used in testing consisted of a primary and a backup server. It should be noted that CIC’s N+1 architecture enables it to be configured to accommodate additional servers for virtually unlimited scalability.
The test environment simulated a true contact center and enterprise environment in which CIC 4.0 supported 10,000 agents, 10,000 stations (phones) and 5,000 live automatic call distribution (ACD) agents. Interactions included calls, emails and Web chats. Text-to-speech and speech recognition were also tested, as was a simulated failure.“We simulated a failure with up to 5,000 active calls on a single, redundant server pair,” Smithers said. “The backup server came up immediately without a loss of calls demonstrating CIC’s ability to provide rock-solid business continuity.”
Miercom praised several CIC features. These included:
Miercom also touted a soon-to-be released content management application. “Interaction Content Manager™ offers the unique ability to tie an organization’s content to its communications and business processes,” Smithers said. “By enabling the right content to be available at the right time, and to the right person in the right context, organizations can further reduce costs, increase employee productivity, and improve customer service.”
Miercom, while doing separate evaluations of CIC 4.0 for its contact center and unified communications functionality, also praised the company for being able to test the same platform for both contact center and unified communications features. “Overall, we think it’s a huge benefit to customers that they can deploy CIC 4.0 to support their entire organization,” Smithers said. “Its inherently developed applications running on a single platform eliminate costs associated with integration, while simplifying administration, customization and reporting.”
The Miercom CIC 4.0 for the contact center test lab report can be reviewed at: http://www.inin.com/resources/ProductLiterature/Miercom_Report_cic40.pdf, and the UC report at: http://www.inin.com/resources/ProductLiterature/Miercom_Report_CICforUC.pdf.
With multi-channel interactions becoming a requirement for success, and the need for administrators to have visibility along with management control over not just historic contact center capabilities but increasingly being able to have agents interact with critical resources across the enterprise through UC and other collaboration tools, the last point about CIC 4.0 being truly an all-in-one solution, including it flexibility of being offered configured as premise-based, cloud or hybrid, should not be over-looked.
Contact center transformations from call centers into true multiple media hubs for understanding and delivering improved customer experiences, tapping into all of the resources of an enterprise to make such interactions compelling, are one of the big technology trends of our times. Receiving certification of the ability to deliver on the promise of being solution capable of delivering performance across the critical areas enabling this transformation is as Miercom says several times, “impressive.”