Scheduling general availability in Q4 of this year Interactive Intelligence announced PureCloud℠ a new suite of cloud-based services for communication, collaboration and customer engagement.

This enhancement of Interactive Intelligence’s four-year-old CaaS (Communications as a Service) portfolio brings three new functions to cloud-based and hybrid implementations of the flagship Customer Interaction Center. Specifically:

• Interactive Intelligence PureMatch℠, a “matching scheme” that dynamically assigns customer interactions to contact center agents based on multiple attributes and criteria.
• Interactive Intelligence PureCloud Social Customer Service℠, sort of like a “look-ahead” for customers, enabling them to view agent profiles and performance, like their service ratings and wait time, before choosing the agent best qualified to assist them.
• Interactive Intelligence PureCloud Directory℠, which stores a broad set of user attributes, such as skills, work experience, location, and syncs with popular enterprise systems, such as Active Directory, Exchange, WorkDay, SharePoint, and Salesforce.

These are noteworthy additions to the Interactive Intelligence’s long-standing portfolio for four reasons:

1. Realistic approach to cloud migration, reducing risk when moving to the cloud from legacy platforms as extension to the Customer Interaction Center (CIC) and other offerings
2. Full service cloud offer for new/greenfield customers
3. Fail-safe architecture with on-premise failover available
4. Customer-Agent matching for better customer experience

Let’s examine each of these a bit more.

Realistic approach to cloud migration – Anytime companies migrate to another platform or delivery mode, there is risk; risk that something isn’t going to work right whether it be voice quality, security, routing or any number of other issues. Interactive Intelligence has a good grasp on those concerns by customers who are evaluating a cloud strategy, and who want to move cautiously as they begin to implement one. Interactive Intelligence is also leveraging Amazon Web Services’ good name and promising “enterprise-grade” performance in terms of scalability, reliability and security.

By introducing cloud as an extension of existing, on-premise gear such as the Customer Interaction Center (CIC), Interactive Intelligence acknowledges the reality of a planned migration by introducing cloud over a period of time.

Full service cloud offer – Interactive Intelligence’s full services suite covers enterprise and contact center concerns. The suite has a full complement of enterprise-class services known as unified communications. Additionally, the suite includes a full arsenal of contact center capabilities, with the ability to address voice, social, mobile and all other channels. Interactive Intelligence has experience over the years to understand how these channels interact with one another in a production environment. Legacy experience, coupled with a new cloud platform can make Interactive Intelligence formidable provider.

Fail-safe architecture – Following on the point above about a realistic approach to migration, I3 has included capabilities to run a fail-safe enterprise or contact center. Through their architecture and on-premise back-up devices, Interactive Intelligence is addressing a key concern of IT/Contact center manager who worry about the stability ongoing business operations.

Customer-agent matching – Interactive Intelligence introduced PureMatch, which matches callers with agents based a number of factors. I do think this is interesting and will be curious to see how this plays out. Several contact center venders are developing this type of capability. There will probably be some bumps requiring tuning needed over time as this capability develops. However, I’m sure it will play a factor in the customer experience equation over the long term.

Many of the new capabilities were developed by the personnel of OrgSpan, which Interactive Intelligence acquired a couple of months ago. Management deserves credit for making the fruits of the acquisition into the foundation of a comprehensive set of cloud-based and hybrid services that move to a public cloud (AWS) and also go beyond the boundaries of a traditional contact center.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Articles

Tags: Contact Center, Mobile care, The cloud