Every now and then something in our industry has the potential to make customers sit up and have an “ah-ha” moment. After talking with Dr. Don Brown, president and CEO of Interactive Intelligence Inc., I believe that an “ah-ha” moment is in the making.
In our discussion, Don focused on Interaction Process Automation (IPA), Interactive Intelligence’s soon-to-be-available business automation tool. As the background for the discussion, Don explained how Interactive Intelligence’s contact center solutions customers had been nudging Interactive to extend its expertise in traditional communications queuing and routing to cover more abstract types of queuing and routing that typically occur in various business processes. Don described a simple example of automating the process of managing a trouble ticket in a Help Desk environment. The flow of the trouble ticket, while not really communications-based, nevertheless benefits from queuing and routing the appropriate information to the correct person(s). This led to the development of IPA, part of an all-in-one solution that offers a structured way to track and deliver work.
Most of us are familiar with the concept of automating certain processes within a business as a way of providing greater efficiency. And many of us are also familiar with the concept of Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), which adds a layer of communications functionality to an already-automated business process. A number of communications vendors have been offering various “flavors” of CEBP thus far. Don explained, however, that Interaction Process Automation is quite different from CEBP offerings. Don notes that while CEBP generally comes in at the end of automating a business process, Interactive Intelligence has developed IPA as a Communications-Based Process Automation (CBPA) tool. CBPA is about how the process gets automated in the first place (see http://www.ucstrategies.com/untangling_cbpa_and-cebp.aspx for an explanation of CBPA). IPA comes in at the very beginning of the automation process, not at the end. It is a single tool to design, automate, and monitor a business process as well as provide the user interface to the process. Of equal importance, IPA can be used in place of more expensive business process automation tools currently available.
Dr. Brown also described how IPA can leverage a customer’s current infrastructure – certainly an important consideration in today’s world of tight budgets and reduced spending. IPA uses Web Services to ensure that it “plays well” with a customer’s existing hardware and software. As Don went on to explain, there are only two reasons in today’s environment why customers are making new purchases/investments –to make more money or to save money. The goal of business process automation is to do more with less by identifying key processes where automation could drive down costs associated with those processes, whether it is enabling a company to perform more transactions with the same number of people, or to perform the same number of transactions with fewer people. In other words, execute processes more efficiently and more effectively, while minimizing latency and human error.
Don went on to explain that, typically, there are two different situations that Interactive Intelligence encounters when talks to prospective customers. Either the customer has a process currently in place, but no tool to automate the process, or they have created some sort of process but don’t really know how to make it the most efficient. In the latter case, “process re-engineering” is often necessary to develop an efficient process before it can be automated. Interactive Intelligence addresses this issue of “process re-engineering” by offering the customer consulting resources to guide them through the re-engineering and automation steps.
As we concluded our conversation, Don emphasized how by leveraging their current infrastructure, customers can use IPA to cost-effectively help either increase their revenue or reduce their expenses – and so the “ah-ha” moment.