Interactive Intelligence has long been on the leading edge of contact center technology and trends. We have caught up with this dynamic company to find out what is happening in key solutions and applications. Jeroen Buis, Product Manager, Roe Jones, Product Manager, and Tim Passios (News - Alert), Director of Solutions Marketing have kindly shared their insights.
TMCnet What top trends do you see happening in both contact centers and in your industry and what is driving these trends?
We’re seeing continued interest in unified communications driven by the productivity and customer service benefits that result from contact centers being able to access enterprise-wide resources. Unified communications (UC) applications that enable this include the ability to interact with subject matter experts via presence management and instant messaging. Also driving UC is the increased use of remote agents to reduce overhead costs and improve agent retention. With its ability to capitalize on the cost-savings of voice over IP (network convergence), along with its ability to blend business rules and provide consistent management and reporting (applications convergence), UC has become a significant enabler of remote agent support.
TMCnet What new products, services, and/or enhancements to your existing solutions have you developed, or perhaps are currently working on in response to these issues, and how will they help contact centers improve their performance?
Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) architected its all-in-one IP communications software suite from day one as a unified solution. Because the company’s software runs on a single, unified platform, it’s always offered contact centers the ability to leverage enterprise-wide resources and easily support remote agents. Interactive Intelligence has also been a frontrunner in SIP (session initiation protocol), having first incorporated it into its all-in-one suite back in 2002. Interactive Intelligence continues to build on these inherent UC advantages through enhancements such as increased reliability, security, scalability and ease-of-deployment.
TMCnet What's new in the way of messaging and notification solutions?
Interactive Intelligence offers our messaging and notification solutions via an enhanced Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS) model. Advantages of this model include reduced capital expenditures, faster time to market (customers can be up and running in a matter of hours), and greater scalability (from hundreds to thousands of simultaneous notifications). This model also offers easy data exchange and management via a Web portal that gives customers the ability to quickly and easily manage campaign configuration and contact list details.
The Interactive Intelligence standards-based software also allows for easy data exchange via Web service uploads, downloads, and custom interfaces to customer back-end systems. In addition, customers receive multiple script options for notifications based on connection results, such as answering machine detection, and busy or unanswered line detection.
TMCnet New technology solutions specifically aimed at supporting home-based agents?
Since its first product introduction in 1997, Interactive Intelligence has included features that support remote agents. In fact, all features for the in-office agent are also accessible to remote agents, and all are supported by the Interactive Intelligence SIP-based platform. These features include a softphone with presence management and company directory lookup; call control features such as record, transfer, and conferencing; multichannel queuing and routing; and the ability to access all of this functionality from a multitude of devices. In addition, supervisors can monitor, coach and report on remote agents the exact same way they do for in-office agents.
Interactive Intelligence has also further addressed two key areas of concern related to remote agent deployments: security and ease-of-setup and IT management. The company now supports secure real-time transport protocol (SRTP) and transport layer security (TLS) standards, providing end-to-end call encryption. Other new security features include recording encryption, stricter password generation requirements, the use of public and private key certificates, and the ability to handle communications between secure and non-secure devices. Interactive Intelligence has also introduced auto-provisioning for Polycom (News - Alert) phones, automated service updates, and an enhanced Web version of the software’s desktop client to further simplify remote agent set-up and management.
TMCnet Where does your firm fit in your marketplace? What are your core differentiators? How would you describe your view of the future evolution of the company? Have you recently or do you plan to enter new markets and if which ones, why, and through what means?
UC’s return on investment is typically referenced in terms of ‘improved productivity’ – something that is often difficult for companies to quantify. However, UC, implemented in the context of the automation of business processes, has a well-defined, hard ROI. As a result, Interactive Intelligence has developed a Communications-based Process Automation (CBPA) solution that eliminates process inefficiencies introduced by human error and latency. CBPA takes the key components of UC, such as enterprise-wide presence, queuing and routing, call and screen recording, and VoIP, and uses that functionality to automate critical business processes and save companies money.
By using these components to eliminate human error and latency, thus dramatically reducing processing time, CBPA can provide the kind of quantifiable ROI CIO’s require today. Key differentiators of the Interactive Intelligence CBPA approach include the following:
- Provides hard ROI for unified communications
- Based on a true unified, all-in-one communications platform
- Offers a cost-effective and simple alternative to traditional business process automation solutions
- Includes consultative services to ensure change management best practices. Interactive
Intelligence plans to launch its CBPA solution, called Interaction Process Automation™ (IPA), by the end of Q4 2009.
TMCnet Discuss the state of technology with UC solutions. Is it arriving, has it arrived, or does it have a ways to go and if so why and what is needed for it to get there?
The majority of applications that make up UC have been around for many years, so from that perspective, it arrived quite some time ago. When Interactive Intelligence entered the market in 1994, however, these applications weren’t being developed in any “unified” way. Telephony vendors at that time had grown out of a hardware-based, multipoint product model, which required multiple servers to run multiple applications. When the UC term became “en vogue” recently, these vendors simply renamed their product lines to include the UC label. Their offerings, however, are still composed of a set of loosely integrated multivendor products that require a multitude of servers and lengthy integration cycles to get everything to work together. So, from that perspective, UC has a long way to go.
The whole reason we entered the market back in 1994 was to offer organizations a different approach; one that really was unified in that a single communications platform could run multiple applications; and this platform would be software-based and incorporate open standards throughout. Today, we’re leveraging UC to provide hard ROI through business process automation. Similar to our introduction of the first all-in-one communications system to include PBX (News - Alert), ACD, IVR and other applications running on a single platform, we’re developing a complete and manageable all-in-one Communications-based Process Automation (CBPA) solution. We believe this is what will drive UC next.
TMCnet What shape do you see contact centers and your industry going forward? Where are the growth markets? What is the ROI for UC and why are and should firms invest in these solutions in today’s challenging economic times? What do you see happening post-downturn?
We believe there will continue to be interest in UC, however, that interest won’t result in dramatic growth until a quantifiable business case can be made, which we believe will come with the introduction of CBPA.
TMCnet What best practices do you recommend in buying, installing, and getting the most value from your offerings?
A. Interactive Intelligence recognizes that technology is just one piece of the puzzle in order to realize a successful UC deployment. That’s why we offer multiple resources for customers with different needs. These include the following:
· Global channel of more than 300 VARs selected for their ability to provide configuration, deployment and support services for converged voice/data and communications applications solutions
· Professional services organization offering packaged solutions and integration
· Education team for training and certification
· Support services with a dedicated, full-time team of support engineers
· Managed services for system management and proactive remote monitoring
· Strategic consulting for business process optimization and ROI modeling.
For CBPA specifically, Interactive Intelligence is also partnering with leading vendors of human and operational performance improvement solutions to ensure best practices are met for change management.
Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by
Jessica Kostek