Communications Products, Inc. - Blog » Jeff Dean

What is the Business Case for ININ’s Communications-as-a-Service (Cloud-Based Contact Center)?

Jeff Dean — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 16:35:51 +0000

From a business perspective, Interactive Intelligence’s Communications as a Service (CaaS) solution provides many of the desired features of a standard premise-based communication system without the typical large, up-front capital investment.

Take a look at this video for a quick overview of how ININ’s cloud communications technology works:

So, from a business perspective, does a Cloud Based Communications System make sense for your organization?
Ask yourself these questions: Am I

a. Relocating, moving or opening a new contact center facility?

b. Expanding, growing, or redesigning our contact center workforce?

c. Trying to improve customer satisfaction or customer experience?

d. Needing to upgrade an existing call center product?

e. Need to add features to an existing call center product?

If you answered even, “Maybe” to any of these questions, then you may be a good candidate for Interactive Intelligence’s CaaS.

From a technology perspective

ININ CaaS has several methods of deployment but, for our purposes we will discuss the most common and desired method of “Local Control.” ININ CaaS provides a Contact Center solution that will work side by side with an existing PBX and allow you to use your existing or additional phone lines from the phone company, provide GUI based administration tools, and equip agents with a desktop client that simplifies their experience by providing valuable information and advanced call control.

Typical concerns that we have heard regarding cloud based communications

Q. What happens if I lose my connection to the data center? Will my contact center go down?

A. With the ININ CaaS solution, a proxy server is utilized at your Contact Center location to ensure that calls continue to be answered even if the connection to the Interactive Intelligence data center is lost.

Q. Another concern is call quality in a cloud based communications environment

A. With the ININ CaaS solution, the Contact Center must use a QoS network, but when that is in place, all of the calls remain at the Contact Center location itself and operate as any other IP Telephony solution would. In other words, the calls are not moving all over the world to get the Caller connected to your Agent, they go thru your Contact Center only which ensures exceptional call quality.

In summary, the Interactive Intelligence CaaS solution acts in most cases just like a premise based contact center solution and could be a great way for you to leverage the latest world-class technology without making the typical large capital expenditure request.

This is part 1 of a series, “Is Interactive Intelligence CaaS (Communications as a Service) a Cloud Based Contact Center the right solution for me”, from a business, technical and financial perspective.

Have you been to sales training recently? Are they getting it right?

Jeff Dean — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:37:43 +0000

A colleague of mine told me about a recent sales training that had a key point of befriending the gatekeepers, which has a place when there is a gatekeeper, but a very insightful sales person recently conveyed a truth about the evolving world, “there are no gatekeepers any more”.

With the many methods of communication today and the openness of the paths to that communication, very rarely is there a gatekeeper to contact the person you need to get to. Today’s corporate America does not employ a person to protect and ward off communication to the management personnel; rather the management is striving to reach out to more people to convey their message and information.

So what is the future of communications and how does the next generation communicate? I recently had the privilege of attending a lecture at a college campus and noticed that as everyone entered and exited the lecture no one talks to each other. Almost all had an mp3 player in and did not speak to their peers. What I came to find out was that they all had been communicating during the entire lecture via texting. This is the reality of how the next generation is communicating. Business needs to embrace these types of communications and work with how they communicate rather than change how they communicate.

With all that is said, how does corporate America begin to incorporate this into standard communications? It all starts with acceptance and a willingness to be open to change. In these tough economic time it is easy to fall back into old habit that have worked in the past, which also may still work. However, in addition, it is also important to spend time reflecting on the big picture and look at how innovation and evolution of your communications can lead your business to places it has never been.

What happened to EIC?

Jeff Dean — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:12:39 +0000

Undoubtedly some may have heard that recently Interactive Intelligence eliminated the EIC (Enterprise Interaction Center, formerly Vonexus) product name. For those that just freaked out, the good news is that the spirit and support of the EIC product is alive and well and now called CIC, which has always somewhat been referred to as EIC’s big brother. ININ has built a very nice strategy around the former EIC product to convert existing customers to CIC and allow for EIC customer to now enjoy the tremendous benefit of optional customization of their system to better suit their needs. This has been one of the restricting things that has made many shy away from EIC to start with and frustrated some of those that did opt for EIC. In my opinion, this may be the springboard that the enterprise market may have been looking for. With the addition of customizations, integrations and using of IPA (Communications Based Process Automation product from ININ), the enterprise environment can leverage the product to meet their needs when often they only need small customizations to gain significantly more benefit.

More to follow…