Interactive Intelligence – CIC 4.0 – New Release, New Ideas

I’ve written here before about Interactive Intelligence, and have always been impressed with their fresh approach in bringing technology innovation to the contact center. There are a handful of companies I follow that continuously push boundaries and keep adding value, and Interactive Intelligence is definitely one of them. Enough cheerleading – I’m an analyst after all – and let’s get to the news. Aside from the press release that went out earlier today, this will probably be the first analysis you’ve seen about CIC 4.0, as I had an in-person briefing and demo last week, and am happy to share my thoughts here, exclusively on UCStrategies.

CIC – Customer Interaction Center – is their flagship platform for contact centers, and given the focus on multichannel, multimodal communications, there is very much a UC component here. The 4.0 update has three key enhancements, one of which I’ll hone in on here. Before doing that, I’ll just touch on the other two. First is their architecture, which is now more cloud-based and built around virtualization. They’re not alone going down this path, as all vendors are looking for ways to scale at lower cost. There is another architecture-related update to note – CIC has now shifted audio processing out to the Interaction Media Server, with the prime benefit being improved reliability in the contact center should the CIC server have an outage.

The second enhancement relates to their Web portal, which has several new features, plus support for non-Windows clients. This provides a better user experience for agents, and a more responsive interface for contact center supervisors to manage their teams. There is definitely some added value here, but not much of a UC angle, so let’s move on.

Of greater interest to UCStrategies readers would be Interaction Analyzer. This new application provides real-time speech analytics to help contact center supervisors better do their jobs. While there’s nothing new in terms of bringing speech recognition into the contact center, Interactive Intelligence has tied this to a key UC value driver – improving business processes. There is a strong Web 2.0 element here, and even some social media thinking, with the bottom line being a proactive tool that really helps in the multichannel contact center environment.

Just consider a simple reality facing all contact centers today. Increasingly, agents are using multichannel tools to handle inquiries, and many are real-time. Touching on social media, many of these modes require short-form responses, and if things don’t go well, they can spiral out of control in a matter of seconds. Sometimes it’s an upset customer, and other times the agent handles things poorly, leading to confrontation. These are the moments that make or break customer relationships, and sometimes they come and go before a supervisor knows what’s going on.

Interaction Analyzer includes a host of monitoring applications developed to address these challenging situations. The main idea is to track key words and phrases, and using pre-defined criteria, tie them to positive or negative outcomes. This is a heuristic model, and with enough data points, these key words and phrases can become pretty good indicators of future outcomes. Analytics is a complex discipline, but the underlying idea supports contact center supervisors in a very tangible way.

Interactive Intelligence call this “spotability,” and it proactively alerts supervisors when pre-defined keywords or phrases are spoken. This gives them real-time visibility into situations that could require their help. First of all, Interaction Analyzer tracks call flows for both customers and agents, and a distinct set of keywords or phrases can be used for each. Supervisors may be responsible for dozens of agents, and without this capability, they can only be reactive after-the-fact. That’s usually too late.

With spotability, they can focus on specific situations and give them proper attention on the fly. At minimum, the supervisor can monitor the call, but as required, he/she could then whisper coach the agent, either by voice or text. If that doesn’t work, the agent could request that the supervisor joins the call and either resolve the issue on the spot, or escalate it elsewhere.

Aside from better management of live calls, Interaction Analyzer tags keywords and phrases, and by allocating scores for both agent and customer responses, new performance metrics can be established. This allows contact centers – perhaps for the first time – to assess agent performance in real time. Just like the way social media sites track keywords to help people focus on what’s trending now, contact centers can do the same. Think about how valuable that can be for time-sensitive marketing campaigns or seasonal spikes in activity where agent performance matters the most.

Over time, contact centers can build a powerful knowledge base that will allow them to reliably predict interaction outcomes based on what agents and customers are saying. This can become a very granular analysis to evaluate individual agents, and even how each agent interacts with specific customers. Conversely, on a macro level, they can now identify patterns based on specific problems, such as “I was put on hold for 10 minutes” – or agent responses, such as “well, your warranty has expired.” When this is married to the customer database, contact centers will be much better equipped to prioritize which calls to handle first, or assign the best performing agent for a particular situation.

If you think this is more of a contact center story than a UC story, you’re probably right. However, there is certainly a UC element, especially for supervisors, who need all the tools at their disposal to respond to these real-time scenarios. Not only that, but if they need to get directly involved, that’s the time when multichannel, collaborative applications could very well save the day.

Regardless, I think there’s enough here of interest to UCStrategies readers, and whatever details you choose to give credence to, don’t miss the bigger picture. Interaction Analyzer should be well received, but it’s the company behind it you really should pay attention to. Innovation comes in all shapes and sizes, but few do it better than Interactive Intelligence.

Also on UCStrategies.com on this topic: Interactive Intelligence Releases New Version of Customer Interaction Center, by Robbie Pleasant.