Find us on:

Newsletter Sign up
Request a Quote
Customer Care
602-797-1411
800-827-5759

Corporate Headquarters
Phoenix, AZ
602-797-1000
866-982-5848 (Toll Free)

Business Office/ Mailing
PMB 166
4570 Avery Lane SE, Ste. C
Lacey, WA 98503

Technical Operations Center
Park Central
Phoenix, AZ

Canadian Toll Free Number
Toronto, Ontario
800-326-2740

Resource Center: Contact Center

Resources View:

On-Demand Webinars

Product Demos

Research

2011 Frost & Sullivan, Company of the Year Award, Contact Center Systems, North America, 2011

Interactive Intelligence was the only company to grow in all the sub-segments that make up the Contact Center Systems Market. In the core infrastructure segments, it grew despite a decline in the overall market. The company’s strength is due to its strong product portfolio, the steady improvements it makes to its portfolio, the tight integrations among its applications, and the fact that it gives its customers strong TCO and ROI arguments for purchasing its solutions.

All-in-One vs. Multi-Point Solutions: Cost Comparison

This report explores the costs of all-in-one systems and multi-point systems. The survey findings show a lower total cost of ownership for all-in-one versus multi-point contact center systems.

All-in-One vs. Multi-Point Solutions: Migration Strategies

Contact center managers tell what they learned about migrating to an all-in-one solution: That a rip-and-replace approach isn’t needed, that migration can successfully follow different paths, and that self-knowledge, meticulous planning and ongoing integration capability are key.

All-in-One vs. Multi-Point Solutions: Which is better?

Contact center managers, CTOs and IT professionals surveyed by BenchmarkPortal say they prefer a single, all-in-one source for all technology needs-and that they want their chosen single-source vendor to provide best-in-class functionality.

Building an ROI Model for a Cloud-Based Contact Center

Many companies are looking toward systems and applications located in the cloud as an alternative or a supplement to traditional on-premises deployment. In our benchmark research on agent performance management, 64 percent of companies preferred on-premises systems for their contact centers, 21 percent preferred cloud-based, and 22 percent had no preference.

Emerging Trends and Technologies Shaping the Contact Center Industry in the New Economy

After months of cost controls taking top priority, contact center executives say their organizations are finally planning to start investing again in new technologies and service initiatives. Among the top considerations: multimedia interaction channels, proactive customer contact, hosted contact center solutions, and social media.

Gartner Contact Center Magic Quadrant

This report provides an analysis of the major vendors in the contact center market based on their ability to execute and their completeness of vision.

IT Spending in a Down Economy: Smart Investments Make for Competitive Advantage

The economy is the topic of many water-cooler discussions and boardroom debates worldwide. IDG Research discovers how today’s economic conditions are affecting CIOs’ purchase decisions.

North American Agent Performance Optimization 2009

Interactive Intelligence has taken a fairly simple proposition (e.g. that communications can automate processes) and used it to cut the Gordian knot tangling UC, agent management and business process optimization. And the company has done it without having to invent a new technology or re-architect its software suite or market strategy.

Success with Remote Agents – Is Not so Remote

Thanks to social media, expectations for customer service and support have sky-rocketed — and remote agents are the answer to keeping up. Thanks to the new breed of centralized all-in-one IP communications systems, companies anywhere, of any size, can successfully use remote agents.

White Papers

8 Tips for Outbound Calling Compliance for the Debt Collection Industry

The amalgamation of changes in business and consumer technologies, the protracted effects of the economic crisis of 2008, increased scrutiny by federal regulatory bodies, and a minefield of individual state and local laws, increases collection agencies’ reputational risk, drives litigation and overhead expense, and poses very real challenges to the fundamental business model of ARM companies.

Back to Basics: All-in-One versus Individual Best-of-Breed Solutions

Don Van Doren, president of Vanguard Communications and Joe Staples, chief marketing officer for Interactive Intelligence, recently sat down to discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of all-in-one vs. best-of-breed communication offerings, and to respond to the questions that customers typically ask when facing a purchase decision.

Building Customer Centricity through Expertise-Based Interactions

The demand for customer centricity is not only increasing it’s becoming the driving principle behind any successful customer service strategy.

Business Communications: The Next Wave in Cloud-Based Computing?

Cloud computing has quickly established its rightful place in modern IT organizations, helping enterprises become more agile while keeping costs in line. And with near-mainstream appeal, the new delivery model has proven its stripes with applications like messaging, storage and CRM. Now, technology innovators are applying what they’ve learned—and what they’ve gained—to business communications. This recent study by IDG Research Services explores how and why enterprises are taking communications into the cloud.

Business value of Consolidating and Centralizing Communications

Consolidation and centralization provide excellent opportunities for cost savings in contact center environments. These savings stem from simplifying and streamlining the operations, maintenance, and administration of the system involved as well as potentially reducing the number of licenses necessary.

Cisco and Interactive Intelligence: The value of a Combined Solution for Enterprise IP Telephony and Customer Care

Cisco is a long-term strategic partner for many organizations that have invested in Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM). This infrastructure is based on the principles of interoperability, openness and cutsomer choice. Adding the Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Center® (CIC) to a Cisco environment is easy and a great way to leverage the existing IT investment.

Consolidating Infrastructures: IT’s New Call to Business

If IT is to drive product/services delivery and contribute revenue to a greater extent, IT teams as a whole must view the infrastructure they provision in a progressively creative light — to ensure that it is both lean enough and agile enough to extend new product and services offerings at the business’s pace, not “whenever IT can get to it.”

Evolving Role of Process Automation and the Customer Service Experience

With the contact center serving as the “front line” of the customer service experience, resources increasingly involved in service delivery and problem resolution often include subject matter experts, back office support staff, and knowledge workers or field service teams. When evaluating a technology strategy, consider whether your contact center automation can extend to process automation and increase the effectiveness of all employees involved in providing service to the customer.

Four ‘Must Have’ Utility Contact Center Enhancements to Improve Customer Service and Save Money

Utility contact centers have a great opportunity to improve their performance and contribution by making four strategic changes. These changes are entirely consistent with industry trends and contact center developments, leveraging technology and best practices to deliver new levels of service. Southwest Gas is one of several companies implementing these strategies today. LeAnne Foster shares their experiences here, along with industry trends and best practices presented by Trish Patterson.

Future Direction Drivers for the Contact Center

This white paper examines seven critical drivers that are aligning themselves and together will shape the future direction of contact centers.

The Future of Compliance for the Debt Collection Industry: 10 Forecasts for 2012

Legislative and regulatory compliance represents the fundamental link between every market segment (first-party credit grantors, third-party agencies, debt buyers, and collection law firms) and across all asset classes (credit cards, healthcare, utilities, telecommunications, student loans, etc.) in the accounts receivable management (ARM) industry. Compliance is at once a legal requirement, a reputational risk management strategy, an ethical imperative, and an unavoidable operational expense for debt collection service providers. But successful compliance is also an ongoing and mutable challenge for these companies.

Holistic Customer Communications Management: Building Profitable Relationships in Insurance

Insurers that can implement an integrated CCM approach across the enterprise will gain a competitive advantage through a more complete understanding of their customers and the ability to capitalize on interactions in real-time.

Home Agents: The Big Game Changer

When organizations successfully reach beyond the confines of bricks and mortar sourcing, they tap into a vast labor pool filled with unprecedented talent. And when they re-engineer their scheduling models to enable more flexibility, employee satisfaction climbs. Right along with it, the customer experience improves, and delivers incremental revenue and sustained loyalty.

Hosted Contact Center Solutions: Setting the Record Straight

With their minimal up-front costs, quick deployments, favorable ROI and a “try before you buy” approach, hosted solutions like Communications as a Service (CaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) are steadily gaining ground. Unfortunately, misperceptions continue to hinder a more widespread adoption of such solutions. DMG Consulting LLC identifies five top misperceptions, and dispels them with findings from their recent customer satisfaction study for hosted contact center services.

IC Interaction Center Platform by Dr. Don Brown

Interactive Intelligence has spent the last decade creating a sophisticated software platform for business process automation based on advanced communications technologies including voice over IP (VoIP). This document provides a high-level technical description of this platform and illustrates how it can act as the foundation not only for IP communications, but for comprehensive process automation in organizations of all types and sizes.

Increasing Intelligence for your Cisco® IP Phone System

Many companies consider Cisco an important long-term strategic partner and have invested significantly in the Cisco networking infrastructure, including Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) for IP telephony. To maximize the value of their investment and partnership, these same companies are embracing the Cisco Collaboration Architecture — Cisco’s comprehensive, modular foundation that enables partner components and applications to easily plug into the Cisco framework. It is an open approach that’s important to customers and central to the strategy of both Interactive Intelligence and Cisco.

Intelligent Contact Center

The Intelligent Contact Center is the next phase in an ongoing evolution of the traditional contact center— a phase that stands to provide significant benefits to those companies that embrace it.

Optimizing Agent Performance in a Real-time World

Contact centers face a tall order: Deliver stellar service and real-time response to customers, and still get more out of the workforce without risking burnout and turnover.

Recording and Quality Monitoring for Regulatory Compliance

For businesses that don’t pay sufficient attention to regulatory guidelines, the difficulty in proving compliance often leads to a number of nuisance lawsuits in which consumers threaten to lodge complaints with the hope that a firm will “pay them off” for not reporting a regulatory transgression.

Security Considerations for an IP PBX and Contact Center Application Server

This document explains security concepts from the framework of the OSI network model, along with the network operating system environment, network security policies, and compliance issues.

Speech Recognition: Fulfilling the promise

After a few fits and starts, Speech Recognition is now a solid technology that can deliver on its promise of both reducing transaction costs and improving customer satisfaction.

Spreadsheets and Workforce Management — An Odd Couple

This paper discusses workforce management from the perspective of the small and medium call center.

The Contact Center in the Cloud Offers Users More Control

The issue of control is an important one for those considering moving business communication applications to the cloud, especially those as mission critical as the contact center. Richard Snow, VP & Research Director at Ventana Research, shares valuable insight into this issue and reveals how cloud-based contact centers can actually offer users an even greater level of control than they are accustomed to with premise solutions.

 

The value of Blending eServices and the Contact Center

With the explosion of broadband services and ubiquitous access to the Internet not only at home but anywhere via smart mobile devices, the types of services customers are looking for have changed dramatically. eServices, the handling of non-voice interactions such as email, chat, faxes, SMS, Social Media and others in the contact center, can be an important part of an organization’s response to this challenge.

Top 10 Customer Satisfaction Best Practices: For Contact Center IVR Surveys

Only by using the right technology in combination with survey best practices will contact centers be able to gain actionable information from the post-call customer satisfaction surveys they conduct.

Workforce Management: It’s more than just software

One common mistake that contact centers leaders often make is an investment in workforce management software without fully evaluating how they will use it, or what processes and best practices will support it.

Workforce Management: The Move from Efficient to Effective

This paper discusses how workforce management relates to workforce optimization, the segments that constitute WFM, and how your contact center can leverage its workforce management / optimization point solution in an integrated way to make agents and business processes more effective.

Workforce Optimization Decade

Workforce optimization is a combination of systems and best practices that enable collaboration, support informed decision-making, and streamline internal contact center processes.

Practical Guides

Effective Use of Automated Dialing in Collections

Collections agents are only successful when they’re talking to people. However, the low contact rates of manual dialing can leave agents talking to live persons less than 15 minutes every hour. Learn how an automated dialer solution and best practices can improve contact success and increase agent productivity levels to 45 to 55 minutes each hour.

Infrastructure Consolidation

In the growing movement to offer IT-driven products and services, consolidating multi-system, multi-site infrastructures that impede communications, business processes, and contact center and enterprise operations can help alleviate such concerns, and enable IT to succeed in its new role.

Jumpstarting your Contact Center with Communications as a Service (CaaS)

Executives are turning to the CaaS model for their contact center to minimize startup costs and monthly cost structure, add advanced applications like workforce management and outbound dialing, and attain the flexibility they need to create and maintain a dynamic business environment.

Making SMS a Valuable Media Channel for Business

When Short Message Service is referred to by any of its more recognized given names — text messaging, texting, mobile messaging, etc. — it’s readily seen as a wireless tool for social interactions and checking the weather. Yet in classifying SMS as a media channel for business, many businesses still aren’t sure where it fits into their enterprise and contact center operations. But the sooner they formulate a plan for SMS, the better. Because as texting volumes threaten to surpass those of email and voice, the value of SMS has become increasingly magnified.

Measuring and Managing Shrinkage in the Contact Center

Measuring and managing shrinkage is a core piece of the workforce management process. When properly implemented, it can assist contact center leaders in achieving service level goals and minimizing unproductive agent time. In this guide, read how to measure shrinkage, the steps to setting attainable shrinkage goals, managing with shrinkage in mind and how to leverage shrinkage in your corporate culture.

Measuring Customer Satisfaction in the Contact Center

Read why post-call IVR surveys are an effective low-cost method for measuring customer satisfaction, and how 10 best practices based on the American Customer Satisfaction Index™ (ACSI) published annually by the University of Michigan significantly improve the make-up of a survey and the reliability and usability of survey data.

Articles

About Expert Agents

Questions to consider for how to best use subject matter experts.

Automating for Efficiency

Recent research among CIOs and IT leaders reveals that with communications as the foundation of automation, enterprises are striving to drive latency and human error out of business processes.

Benchmarking: A Prescription for Excellence in Your Contact Center

Many contact center managers and executives continue to struggle with how to objectively determine whether they are maximizing organizational performance.

Best Practices in Workforce Management

Effectively managing contact center resources requires the best workforce management tools, processes and practicies. The goal is to continually align agents and their skills with an organization's business objectives in the most cost-effective manner—while resolving major contact center issues and leveraging the workforce's unique capabilities.

CRM Magazine Selects Interactive Intelligence as Contact Center Infrastructure Winner 2012

Interactive Intelligence has finally emerged as a serious contender in the contact center infrastructure category, with the top scores in the industry in company direction, customer satisfaction, and cost.

Customer Interaction Recording: Your Key to Measuring Service Performance

As call centers continue shaping themselves into contact centers, recording is fast becoming an urgent need. Beyond basic call recording, customer interaction recording that will become key.

Finding Hidden Treasure in Your Schedule: Five Big Rewards for the Contact Center

For all the difficulty involved in scheduling, there is hidden treasure in doing it right. As a result, contact centers are adopting new processes and technologies to optimize their efforts.

Interactive Intelligence Debuts Customer Feedback Management Products

Customer feedback management products are designed to help organizations better measure and improve customer service.

Interactive Intelligence Unveils New Customer Feedback Products

In order to meet the growing need for differentiation in customer service, companies must be able to accurately measure customer satisfaction.

Optimizing Your Workforce To Advance the Customer Experience

Forward-thinking companies are deploying new performance improvement cycles that use recorded agent-customer interactions to promote agent self-awareness.

Reinvention of Workforce Management: New Implications for Today's Enterprise

This paper focuses on the reinvention of workforce management within the context of business and technological drivers.

Seven Questions about Benchmarking from Contact Center Managers

In this article, Dr. Jon Anton of Purdue University’s Center for Customer Driven Quality responds to some frequently asked questions on benchmarking.

Seven Things You Should Know About Quality Monitoring

How exactly can Quality Monitoring help contact center managers in their quest to improve their operations in one way or another? The answer to this question comes by clarifying seven key issues.

Tracking the Modern Workforce

As workforces become more diverse in their skills and activities, more mobile, and more geographically dispersed, traditional adherence systems are no longer adequate.

Case Studies

Videos

Product Information