[Updated May 11] Interactive Intelligence is taking a new approach to helping its corporate customers “go mobile.” The Interaction Mobilizer(TM) platform addresses two of the well-known choke-points associated with extending quality care to mobile devices. It will make it far less complicated for IT personnel to develop and distribute branded mobile applications for a variety of smartphones, tablets and social media (specifically Facebook). On the flip side, its approach stays in the spirit of “putting the self in self-service” by making it easy for mobile subscribers to find, download and use mobile apps from their favorite vendors or brands.

The novel aspect of the new approach is as follows: Targeting its installed based of 4,500 companies running its Customer Interaction Center platform, it provides a complete application development and distribution platform for mobile apps that can run on popular OSes (iOS, Android, Windows…), and conform to Facebook’s OS as well. But the code-base for the customer care apps – focusing on deep integration with CIC – will be developed and run on one centralized server using tools (resembling C#) which any competent mobile app developer will recognize and be able to use. The integration with CIC means that mobile customers, when they press a “click-to-call” button, will be able to see their status in queue, decide whether to stay “on hold,” schedule a call back, engage in a text chat, or take another action.

From the contact center operator’s perspective, calls (or chats) are initiated by customers from their smartphones and brought into an intelligent queuing system along with as much context as can be gleaned from direct input, capture of activity streams, location and other metadata. Integration with CIC also means that call center managers as well as executives from multiple departments and business units will be able to view reports based on the activities of their mobile subscribers. They can learn the mix of devices or OSes originating calls; detect when customers are opting out of their automated system, correlate activities with business success; and a host of other analytic results that can be tailored to meet an executive’s requirements.

When they use Interaction Mobilizer, application developers generate a light-weight app (and a set of rules) to go through the approval process of each “app store” or outlet. Once approved, it can remain static. Upgrades or the addition of new features, functions or “connections” are introduced at the platform level, where development, care and feeding of the mobile app is conducted. Mobile customers download the app once; upgrades happen transparently. This is a win-win approach that minimizes friction with the mobile customer and staff expenses for the enterprise customer.

Interactive Intelligence has taken an “end-to-end” approach to app development that augments its “all-in-one” approach to customer interaction management. More details on pricing and product attributes will be available when the service is generally available “in Q2 2012.” It will be delivered under license as on “on-premises” solution or as part of the Communications as a Service (CaaS) approach that InIn has been pursuing with CIC in the past three years, with the price derived from “unique mobile app connections per day.”

Categories: Articles

Tags: customer care, Contact Center, CRM, Mobile Experience, Interactive Intelligence