Whitepapers

How the Interaction Center Platform® has Changed the Communications Industry When Interactive Intelligence introduced its standards-based multichannel software platform for unified business communications and voice over IP (VoIP), it changed the communications industry. Now more than 17 years later, this platform is still revolutionary, and just as versatile, practical and straightforward as first envisioned. Read what makes the Interaction Center Platform a true-all-in-one solution for the contact center, the enterprise and the cloud, from Interactive Intelligence president and CEO Don Brown, and Tim Passios, senior director, Solutions Marketing.

Cloud-based Contact Center / Communications as a Service (CaaS)

Taking Control: The Contact Center in the Cloud Offers Users More Control Functionality. Resources. Deployment. Availability. Security. Control is an important issue whenever a business considers moving its communications applications to the cloud, especially those as mission critical as the contact center. In a Q & A format with Richard Snow, VP and Research Director at Ventana Research, and Jason Alley of Interactive Intelligence, read how cloud-based contact centers can actually offer users a greater level of control than premise solutions do.

Hosted Contact Center Solutions - Setting the Record Straight 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.

A New Approach to Communications as a Service (CaaS) Two things make Communications as a Service more beneficial than Software as a Service: voice functionality, and local control that puts you squarely in charge of your CaaS solution — right down to keeping your current telecom vendor and deploying your own VoIP phones. Read why the CaaS offering from Interactive Intelligence delivers a positive ROI from the start.

The Contact Center

A Realistic Look at Social Media and the Contact Center Integrating social media for customer care isn’t really the question for businesses anymore. The bigger question is, “How do we manage it?” Blair Pleasant of COMMfusion LLC and Tim Passios of Interactive Intelligence identify four steps a company can take to address the issues of overseeing a social media initiative, and making it successful both in the contact center and organization-wide.

The Business Value of Consolidating and Centralizing Communications Increasingly powerful servers. Robust IP infrastructures. Innovative architecture designs. For contact centers, it’s getting easier to consolidate and centralize communications architectures and realize the benefits. Obviously, there are fewer applications and physical boxes to be administered and maintained. And costs are reduced. But according to Don Van Doren, president of Vanguard Communications and Brad Herrington, senior Solutions Marketing manager at Interactive Intelligence, consolidation can also do things like help eliminate “transfer trees” across an organization and make it easier to measure contact center performance and the customer experience. Read what else consolidation can do.

Part 1: Home Agents: The Big Game Changer It’s a vast labor pool filled with unprecedented talent. They’re termed at home agents, and when an organization enables the appropriate flexibility for them, employee satisfaction climbs, the customer experience improves, incremental revenue is better — and agent loyalty is sustained. But to make at home agents a positive force, companies need to more effectively leverage tools that reside on the corporate platform, and extend them more fully to the contact center. Read how in this first installment of a three-part series from two industry experts: Michele Rowan, president, At Home Customer Contacts, and Tim Passios, senior director of Solutions Marketing at Interactive Intelligence.

The Secret to a Lasting Relationship, or How Proactive Customer Contact Improves Customer Satisfaction Businesses have called their customers using auto dialers and telemarketing for years. But with proactive customer contact (PCC), companies are now building creative applications that leverage customer and product information from across the enterprise — to extend personalized messages and sales offers that grow customer relationships and enhance loyalty. Read what companies are doing to make PCC initiatives an integral part of their unified communications and customer retention strategies, from Mathew Erickson, senior product manager for outbound solutions at Interactive Intelligence, with contributions from analyst firm, Frost & Sullivan.

Executive Summary – Consolidating Infrastructures: IT’s New Call to Business Information technology isn’t just about technology anymore. For CIOs and IT leaders, an emerging corporate objective is to generate new IT-based products, services and revenue streams — a business model that’s requiring IT to consolidate multi-point architectures into a leaner, more agile infrastructure able to execute at the business’s pace. Read about the various consolidation paths IT leaders are taking to streamline their operations, so IT can succeed in its new business role.

Cisco and Interactive Intelligence: The Value of a Combined Solution for Enterprise IP Telephony and Customer Care It’s a key issue. Your enterprise is standardized on Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) for IP telephony, but what about your contact center and customer care? You can either expand your Cisco architecture for those operations, or you can look for an alternative solution that supplements CUCM to better meet the needs of the business and simplify IT tasks at the same time. Read how the Customer Interaction Center™ (CIC) suite from Interactive Intelligence does just that with its straightforward integration to CUCM via the SIP standard. From industry veteran Lori Bocklund, president of Strategic Contact, Inc.

The Value of Blending eServices and the Contact Center How a contact center deploys and manages eServices — non-voice interaction channels such as email, chat, SMS and social media — is the key to offering electronic services that attract modern tech-savvy customers. Learn about eServices best practices from Sheila McGee-Smith, founder of McGee-Smith Analytics, and Tim Passios, Director of Solutions Marketing at Interactive Intelligence, and how three diverse companies successfully utilize eServices to their advantage.

Building Customer Centricity through Expertise-Based Interactions The demand for customer centricity is not only increasing it’s becoming the driving principle behind any successful customer service strategy. Learn more about the recommended approach to customer centricity, from Marlon Machado, Product Manager, IBM and Brad Herrington, Sr. Manager, Solutions Marketing, Interactive Intelligence

Success with Remote Agents – Is Not so Remote Thanks to social media, expectations for customer service and support have sky-rocketed — and remote agents are the answer to keeping up. And thanks to the new breed of centralized all-in-one IP communications systems, companies anywhere, of any size, can successfully utilize remote agents. Read how from some industry experts: Blair Pleasant of COMMfusion LLC, Nancy Jamison of Jamison Consulting, and Jason Alley of Interactive Intelligence.

Optimizing Agent Performance in a Real-time World 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. Lori Bocklund is president of Strategic Contact, and Rachel Wentink is the senior director of Product Management for Interactive Intelligence, and when they discuss how to optimize agent performance and offer outstanding service, it’s worth reading.

Back to Basics: All-in-One versus Individual Best-of-Breed Solutions An all-in-one communication solution, or best-of-breed multipoint solutions? Both approaches offer distinct benefits, but for enterprises and contact centers, the trend has shifted toward the all-in-one model. Read what two industry veterans have to say about the advantages and disadvantages of all-in-one vs. best-of-breed offerings — Don Van Doren, president of Vanguard Communications, and Joe Staples, chief marketing officer for Interactive Intelligence.

Workforce Management: It’s More Than Just Software To create a successful workforce management deployment, the first step is to evaluate your WFM product and determine how you’ll use it along with the processes and best practices that support it. Next, consider how your ACD is configured, what type of forecasting and scheduling practices you’ll use and goals for various metrics including schedule adherence. For more insights, read how to get the most out of workforce management.

Top 10 Customer Satisfaction Best Practices for Contact Center IVR Surveys It really does matter what customers think, and contact centers are increasingly using automated post-call surveys to better manage and improve the customer experience. Follow 10 best practices from industry leader CFI Group, and your surveys will produce the precise feedback data your contact center needs to improve satisfaction drivers and, ultimately, the service experience for every customer.

Recording and Quality Monitoring for Regulatory Compliance Compliance should be a constant concern in contact centers, and managers and trainers must continuously mentor employees and measure their performance towards regulatory guidelines and organizational goals. Learn about best practices for monitoring, recording and scoring agents to achieve and substantiate compliance, and more importantly to prevent exorbitant fines.

The Social Alphabet: What You Need to Know About Social Media as the Ultimate Communication Channel There’s no question. Social media is a valued communication channel for business. Yet many businesses still have questions about how to implement social media initiatives and where the contact center fits in. With their “social alphabet,” Shama Kabani of The Marketing Zen Group and Jennifer Wilson of Interactive Intelligence offer some proven guidelines for managing a social media strategy, and making social media the ultimate communication channel for your business.

Business Process Automation

Humanizing Business Process Automation: Optimizing Performance for Employees and Customers Business process automation software can improve quality and accelerate processes. But BPA software is a tool, not a magic bullet. Determining a firm's values and the processes it uses to run the business come down to its leadership and people. And to its culture. Jesse Clark of Revelant Technology and Rachel Wentink of Interactive Intelligence explain why the human perspective is vital to BPA success.

The Evolving Role of Process Automation and the Customer Service Experience True, customer service usually starts in the contact center. But a customer’s satisfaction might easily come down to support staff and knowledge workers in other areas of the business. With advances in contact center automation, businesses are finding they can extend the same automation to service processes and touch-points throughout their organization. When they do, according to authors Kyle Lyons of Ponvia Technology, Inc. and Gina Clarkin of Interactive Intelligence, businesses improve efficiency and cost containment… as well as the customer experience.

A New Approach to Business Process Automation The biggest waste of resources, time and money in an organization is implementing key processes informally. That is, relying on employees to make sure things run smoothly — which can have its shortfalls. But transform a unified communications system into a process automation platform, and the result is greater organizational efficiency plus quantifiable ROI. Read how.

Best Practices for Process Automation Most businesses have a greater need for business process automation than they realize. Learning how to successfully automate a process, however, takes practice. Read about best practices that can help your organization build success into each process it automates, from a process automation expert.

Top 5 Considerations for Automating Key Business Processes Business process automation — BPA — can help any business do more with less. However, successfully automating a business process requires more than just technology. Read how taking five straightforward steps to BPA planning can root out inefficiencies to improve key processes and give your business a clear competitive advantage.

The Exceptional Customer Experience: It’s All About the Process Effective business processes help create a positive customer experience. So why do processes break down, and why do companies continually incorporate them when they’re “broken”? Fixing dysfunctional service-related processes requires addressing four general problem areas first. Read how to identify and fix those areas, and service will consistently exceed customer expectations.

Unified Communications

A Customer IP Communications System Roadmap Goodbye PBX... all-in-one IP communications systems have become the new trend in the enterprise as well as contact centers. To successfully choose and implement an IP system, the best place to start is with a roadmap — current offerings, justification factors, upcoming solutions, and suggested planning guidelines. Without one, your new system might never move forward. Read more.

Accounts Receivable Management

	Beginner’s Guides to Data Security, IT Security Compliance & Audits ARM performance no longer is measured only in terms of liquidation, dollars collected, and right-party contacts per hour. It’s also measured in terms of compliance and quality practices. Use this collection of Beginner's Guides to make sure your compliance program is up to the task in the event of an audit, courtesy of insideARM.com in conjunction with Latitude Software and Interactive Intelligence.
	The Future of Compliance for the Debt Collection Industry: 10 Forecasts for 2012 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. More so for debt collection service providers, compliance is an ongoing and mutable challenge. With several major federal and state compliance issues on the horizon in 2012, read what ARM industry professionals are forecasting. From insideARM.com, Latitude Software and Interactive Intelligence.
	8 Tips for Outbound Calling Compliance for the Debt Collection Industry Accounts receivable management is a minefield of federal regulations and individual state and local laws — which makes compliance for outbound calling a moving target. But are the challenges of compliance insurmountable? No, they aren’t. With regard to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Foti Decision in particular, a few straightforward tips can help collection firms overcome compliance hurdles. Read what those tips are, from the experts at insideARM.com and Latitude Software.

The Insurance Industry

Beyond the Insurance Contact Center: The Communications Center of the Future Direct sales. Policy servicing. Claims. In the insurance industry, call centers have become increasingly sophisticated in terms of their business capabilities and enabling technologies. It’s an evolution that, according to Mark Breading of SMA Strategy Meets Action, can be characterized as: 1.0 the call center, 2.0 the contact center, and 3.0 the communications center. Learn how leading insurers are now creating competitive advantages at the 2.0 level, and how 3.0 will make those advantages even greater.

The New Customer Service Model in Insurance: Enabled by Unified Insurance Solutions The question insurers should be asking is, “How can I best achieve great customer service?” The answer is to unify the communications between an insurer and policyholders — and unify them across the entire business. Do so, and customer retention improves. Cross-selling and up-selling improve. Claims efficiency improves. And market opportunities improve. Read how from insurance and IT industry authority, Mark Breading, SMA partner at SMA Strategy Meets Action.

Integrated Content and Communications: A Key Business Issue for Insurers 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.

Holistic Customer Communications Management (CCM): Building Profitable Relationships in Insurance For insurers, CCM is the key to maximizing every customer interaction — to capture more information about that customer’s needs, make timely offers, and enhance the service experience. Read how CCM is most valuable when insurers take a holistic approach, which allows them to create enterprise-wide flows of information from all voice and data communications, and generate structured as well as unstructured data via a wide range of channels.