Resource Center: White Papers
Contact Center
The amalgamation of changes in business and consumer technologies, the protracted effects of the economic crisis of 2008, increased scrutiny by federal regulatory bodies, and a minefield of individual state and local laws, increases collection agencies’ reputational risk, drives litigation and overhead expense, and poses very real challenges to the fundamental business model of ARM companies.
Don Van Doren, president of Vanguard Communications and Joe Staples, chief marketing officer for Interactive Intelligence, recently sat down to discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of all-in-one vs. best-of-breed communication offerings, and to respond to the questions that customers typically ask when facing a purchase decision.
The demand for customer centricity is not only increasing it’s becoming the driving principle behind any successful customer service strategy.
Cloud computing has quickly established its rightful place in modern IT organizations, helping
enterprises become more agile while keeping costs in line. And with near-mainstream
appeal, the new delivery model has proven its stripes with applications like messaging,
storage and CRM. Now, technology innovators are applying what they’ve learned—and
what they’ve gained—to business communications. This recent study by IDG Research
Services explores how and why enterprises are taking communications into the cloud.
Consolidation and centralization provide excellent opportunities for cost savings in contact center environments. These savings stem from simplifying and streamlining the operations, maintenance, and administration of the system involved as well as potentially reducing the number of licenses necessary.
Cisco is a long-term strategic partner for many organizations that have invested in Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM). This infrastructure is based on the principles of interoperability, openness and cutsomer choice. Adding the Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Center® (CIC) to a Cisco environment is easy and a great way to leverage the existing IT investment.
If IT is to drive product/services delivery and contribute revenue to a greater extent, IT teams as a whole must view the infrastructure they provision in a progressively creative light — to ensure that it is both lean enough and agile enough to extend new product and services offerings at the business’s pace, not “whenever IT can get to it.”
The issue of control is an important one for those considering moving business communication applications to the cloud, especially those as mission critical as the contact center. Richard Snow, VP & Research Director at Ventana Research, shares valuable insight into this issue and reveals how cloud-based contact centers can actually offer users an even greater level of control than they are accustomed to with premise solutions.
With the contact center serving as the “front line” of the customer service experience, resources increasingly involved in service delivery and problem resolution often include subject matter experts, back office support staff, and knowledge workers or field service teams. When evaluating a technology strategy, consider whether your contact center automation can extend to process automation and increase the effectiveness of all employees involved in providing service to the customer.
This white paper examines seven critical drivers that are aligning themselves and together will shape the future direction of contact centers.
Legislative and regulatory compliance represents the fundamental link between every market segment (first-party credit grantors, third-party agencies, debt buyers, and collection law firms) and across all asset classes (credit cards, healthcare, utilities, telecommunications, student loans, etc.) in the accounts receivable management (ARM) industry. Compliance is at once a legal requirement, a reputational risk management strategy, an ethical imperative, and an unavoidable operational expense for debt collection service providers. But successful compliance is also an ongoing and mutable challenge for these companies.
Insurers that can implement an integrated CCM approach across the enterprise will gain a competitive advantage through a more complete understanding of their customers and the ability to capitalize on interactions in real-time.
When organizations successfully reach beyond the confines of bricks and mortar sourcing, they tap into a vast labor pool filled with unprecedented talent. And when they re-engineer their scheduling models to enable more flexibility, employee satisfaction climbs. Right along with it, the customer experience improves, and delivers incremental revenue and sustained loyalty.
With their minimal up-front costs, quick deployments, favorable ROI and a “try before you buy” approach, hosted solutions like Communications as a Service (CaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) are steadily gaining ground. Unfortunately, misperceptions continue to hinder a more widespread adoption of such solutions. DMG Consulting LLC identifies five top misperceptions, and dispels them with findings from their recent customer satisfaction study for hosted contact center services.
Interactive Intelligence has spent the last decade creating a sophisticated software platform for business process automation based on advanced communications technologies including voice over IP (VoIP). This document provides a high-level technical description of this platform and illustrates how it can act as the foundation not only for IP communications, but for comprehensive process automation in organizations of all types and sizes.
Many companies consider Cisco an important long-term strategic partner and have invested significantly in the Cisco networking infrastructure, including Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) for IP telephony. To maximize the value of their investment and partnership, these same companies are embracing the Cisco Collaboration Architecture — Cisco’s comprehensive, modular foundation that enables partner components and applications to easily plug into the Cisco framework. It is an open approach that’s important to customers and central to the strategy of both Interactive Intelligence and Cisco.
The Intelligent Contact Center is the next phase in an ongoing evolution of the traditional contact center— a phase that stands to provide significant benefits to those companies that embrace it.
Contact centers face a tall order: Deliver stellar service and real-time response to customers, and still get more out of the workforce without risking burnout and turnover.
For businesses that don’t pay sufficient attention to regulatory guidelines, the difficulty in proving compliance often leads to a number of nuisance lawsuits in which consumers threaten to lodge complaints with the hope that a firm will “pay them off” for not reporting a regulatory transgression.
This document explains security concepts from the framework of the OSI network model, along with the network operating system environment, network security policies, and compliance issues.
After a few fits and starts, Speech Recognition is now a solid technology that can deliver on its promise of both reducing transaction costs and improving customer satisfaction.
This paper discusses workforce management from the perspective of the small and medium call center.
Only by using the right technology in combination with survey best practices will contact centers be able to gain actionable information from the post-call customer satisfaction surveys they conduct.
With the explosion of broadband services and ubiquitous access to the Internet not only at home but anywhere via smart mobile devices, the types of services customers are looking for have changed dramatically. eServices, the handling of non-voice interactions such as email, chat, faxes, SMS, Social Media and others in the contact center, can be an important part of an organization’s response to this challenge.
One common mistake that contact centers leaders often make is an investment in workforce management software without fully evaluating how they will use it, or what processes and best practices will support it.
This paper discusses how workforce management relates to workforce optimization, the segments that constitute WFM, and how your contact center can leverage its workforce management / optimization point solution in an integrated way to make agents and business processes more effective.
Workforce optimization is a combination of systems and best practices that enable collaboration, support informed decision-making, and streamline internal contact center processes.
IP Telephony
This paper provides a broad overview of information to help make an informed decision when preparing an enterprise communications system roadmap. Included is an overview of what exists in the market today, new system justification factors, what’s coming, and recommended planning guidelines to help you move your communications system forward.
When selecting the best enterprise communications delivery model, CIOs are making crucial trade-offs between control and the desired freedom to focus on core business activities.
IP Telephony adoption reaches mainstream as business and information technology needs collide with hard-dollar returns for all
By now we know that Avaya has purchased Nortel enterprise, and that a roadmap for the Nortel product line was announced on January 19, 2010. The announcement was broad and deep. With an estimated 80M Nortel phones deployed worldwide, almost every enterprise user is affected in some way.
IP telephony is delivering on its claims of reducing calling costs, simplifying administration, and providing greater communications flexibility with software applications taking the place of traditional hardware systems.
Reducing consumption, costs and GHG emissions with an all-in-one platform.
Interactive Intelligence has found a way to offer organizations the advantages of Communications as a Service (CaaS) while providing the functionality of an in-house communications system.
Generating phone calls over the Internet really does work, and enterprise CIOs and IT chiefs are increasingly finding Internet Protocol (IP) technologies to their liking for business communications, namely IP telephony and voice over IP (VoIP).
This paper outlines the requirements for adhering to PCI DSS, discusses the implications of PCI DSS for the VoIP industry, and examines the solutions available to achieve compliance in companies that utilize VoIP technologies.
Justifying the move to VoIP requires weighing the financial aspects and benefits of an IP communications system deployment, plus security and voice quality. Get an overview of key considerations for evaluating and implementing the right IP solution for your organization.
Unified Communications/Messaging
Unified communication it seems is the extension of contact center functionality into the enterprise, enabled by technology innovation that has allowed siloed enterprise communication applications to interoperate.
Unified messaging and visual voicemail capabilities that enable a recipient to convert voice messages to text provides a convenient way to satisfy the needs of both message originators and recipients, providing time-saving micro-productivity to both parties and macro-productivity to the business process interchange.
The security news for businesses utilizing Internet Protocol (IP) communications and voice over IP (VoIP) is good.
IP telephony keeps remote employees connected, communicating and collaborating as effectively as their in-office counterparts.
Quotes about the acquisition by Verint of Witness systems
As the legacy process goes, proprietary voice mail hardware reaches end-of-life status roughly 5 years after being manufactured, if not sooner.
Communications-Based Process Automation
To set the best possible benchmarks for process automation initiatives, the trick is to automate and implement the first few processes, observe how they impact operations, measure their benefit, and then pursue additional opportunities using the standards you’ve established.
Interactive Intelligence has spent the last decade creating a sophisticated software platform for business process automation based on advanced communications technologies including voice over IP (VoIP). This document provides a high-level technical description of this platform and illustrates how it can act as the foundation not only for IP communications, but for comprehensive process automation in organizations of all types and sizes.
Effective business processes help create a positive customer experience. Fixing dysfunctional service-related processes requires addressing four general problem areas first.
Insurers are renewing their focus on top line growth, and many are learning that growth requires improving the customer interaction process first. Deb Smallwood, founder of Strategy Meets Action (SMA), and Mark Breading, SMA partner, pinpoint what insurers must do to deliver “good” customer interactions: They must effectively integrate content and communications solutions with their core systems for underwriting, policy servicing, and claims — to make the customer experience superior.
The biggest waste of resources, time and money in an organization is implementing key processes informally. But transform a unified communications system into a process automation platform, and the result is greater organizational efficiency plus quantifiable ROI.
Today’s successful BPA initiatives are based largely on five key considerations as a whole.
Find us on:
