Jason Alley
I spent last Wednesday in beautiful Southern California hanging out with Interactive customers, partners, consultants, product managers, engineers, and sales, marketing and professional services folks. It was an awesome day of learning…sharing…fellowship...and as the organizer of the event, Clare Kawamura, would say…getting into a little “mischief.”
One of the highlights was a customer panel session where we heard about how customers have extended Customer Interaction Center to realize greater benefits. They talked about how…
- Recorder and Optimizer played a critical role in virtualizing disparate centers, revealing operational gaps and opportunities not previously exposed.
- Flexible skills-based routing enabled access to highly skilled and specialized resources operating remotely. Accurate and reliable handling of calls is literally a life and death matter.
- Outbound dialing with interactive options upon connection helped deliver better care to callers and improved the corporate image.
- Interaction Media Server enabled mission critical inbound and outbound operations to scale cost effectively, without compromising call quality.
- Some great tools are being used to help monitor and manage call quality. The network and application are treated equally in terms of issue resolution.
- Handlers are being used to extend CIC to address very specific business needs in a cost effective and supportable manner.
Getting more out of existing platforms is critical during a slow economy. It was cool hearing from Interactive customers that have done just that. The session concluded with a challenge not to forget the lessons learned as the economy picks up and to be proactive in planning for growth. The panelists all stressed the importance of ensuring your communications infrastructure is streamlined and architected in a way that will allow you to move and react quickly.
Something I want to share in closing…
You know how every now and then something hits you in a profound way? Call it a realization, epiphany, whatever… Well, I had one of those moments at the User Forum. As a newbie, I was struck by how unique the relationships between Interactive customers, partners and employees appear to be. There seems to be a retro culture of trust, respect, cooperation and innovative thinking. It’s a “what you see is what you get, roll-up your sleeves and get the job done while having fun” mentality. I haven’t yet figured out exactly what makes up the secret sauce, but it sure is refreshing…and I’m darn glad to be here!
Grateful for the legacy of character John Wooden left behind.
Jason