Interaction Process Automation™(IPA) FAQs
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A. Interaction Process Automation™ (IPA) is an all-in-one communications-based process automation (CBPA) solution designed for the automation of people-intensive processes for mid-size to large organizations. Interaction Process Automation provides a unified platform to track work, people, and resources allowing business processes to be automated more comprehensively.
A. Short answer- CBPA is a methodology and IPA is a product. Communications-Based Process Automation (CBPA) acts like an umbrella over all the related communications and work within a given process, directing work to the best place to ensure the entire process is completed efficiently and initiating or responding to communications as needed or desired.
Interaction Process Automation (IPA), the solution for CBPA from Interactive Intelligence, moves beyond just enabling communications within applications or business process management suites. Rather, IPA becomes the process automation platform for the company, orchestrating processes across people, departments, and existing core business applications.
A. Automating a business process has the same basic requirements as automating multichannel communications in a contact center. Contact centers use core unified communications (UC) application functions such as routing, presence and collaboration to direct customers to the right agent with the right skill-set. In the same way this technology prioritizes routes, escalates and tracks interactions in the contact center, it can be used to automate and move work through each step of a business process.
A. No, IPA provides a full end-to-end automation for any business process imaginable, providing meaningful IPA brings automation and management to virtually any business process.
A. IPA is its own distinct add-on module to the Customer Interaction Center (CIC) platform.
A. No, IPA is a software-based solution, and is installed as an extension of an existing CIC system, enabled by activating licenses.
A. IPA is designed to easily integrate with existing core business systems, making use of web services for connectivity between internal systems and to external systems. IPA allows process flows to access applications (e.g. SAP, MS CRM, Salesforce.com, SharePoint, etc.) as well as available web services from external service providers.
A. Unlike other products that force you to keep data in silos and separated, IPA connects to your enterprise applications to automate processes in conjunction with CRM packages, financial management applications, databases and other back-end business systems.
A. Yes, IPA supports integrated knowledge management via e-FAQ for improved speed and accuracy in performing work activity. For example, users could benefit from being able to select the appropriate business process given a text description of a customer’s request, or by getting support on how to perform individual work tasks.
A. IPA uses a simple process-flow definition and graphical interface to speed design, deployment, and the modification of automated business processes. Organizations will automate processes in four easy steps.
- Step 1 – Decide what information you want to track in the process
- Step 2 – Design the user interface forms that end users will see
- Step 3 – Lay out the process flow
- Step 4 – Deploy!
A. Interaction Process Automation was designed from the ground up with security in mind. Data integrity is enforced at the very first step when designing the process information map or schema. You can establish who has viewing access or modification rights to each piece of data. You can even specify that certain pieces of information (e.g. social security numbers) be encrypted so that no human being in your entire organization can ever view them, but the system can. Certificates can be used to allow data to be decrypted only under very tightly controlled conditions, such as when a credit card number is required for an external payment system.
A. No, The primary end‐user interface for IPA is the Interaction Client. The same client that has been shipping with CIC for over 10 years and used to manage calls, email, faxes and other media is the same interface used to manage processed in IPA.
A. No, while the early ROI might come out of the contact center, IPA will allow you to keep track of work throughout your organization: people, skills, qualifications, availability, resources, and progress. No matter which department or office location they’re in, IPA knows who and where those people are and delivers the work to them.
A. Yes, IPA offers a real-time monitoring interface that gives supervisors total visibility through every step of the processes. In addition to real-time, there is also a set of historical reports for measuring items such as employee performance as well custom report from data stored in an open SQL database.
A. Yes, we invite you to watch an online demonstration of IPA.
A. Yes, we’ve built a detailed ROI tool to show exactly what benefits an organization will realize by turning over one or more processes to IPA. Please contact your local authorized reseller , partner or sales person and they can assist you in building as easy to understand ROI model for your organization.
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