Interactive Intelligence - Cisco Integration

12 Feb 2012

One of the fundamental decisions CIOs and IT managers have to make is whether they will give all of their business to one vendor or build a network using the best-in-breed solution for each specific area. One of the most challenging decisions regarding specialized systems is the contact center. Originally a specialized telephone system designed to accept and distribute a large volume of incoming calls, the contact center has evolved to a multifunction, multi-process mechanism for supporting customers and a key part of an organization's public face. With the complexities of call routing and skills management, the contact center sits at the convergence of telecommunications, marketing, and the specialized skills required to build those customer-winning relationships.

Cisco has come to lead the market for traditional business communications systems with the Cisco Unified Call Manager (UCM), and numerous companies have built their business telephone solutions on the Cisco platform. While Cisco may be the choice for core business telephony, contact center managers may still require solutions that are built from the ground up to service the specialized needs of the contact center environment. What's more, the growing demand on IT staffs can create tensions with the contact center managers who are putting stress on those scarce IT resources to create the specialized scripting, call routing, and IVR interfaces required in that ever-changing customer contact role.

The key to success is to craft solutions that empower contact center managers to create those functions themselves while allowing IT to focus on the myriad tasks that fall under its umbrella. Fortunately for organizations with Cisco UCM for core telephony functions, the Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Center (CIC) is designed to interoperate fully with the Cisco solution. Interactive Intelligence has been a Cisco development partner since 2000, is certified on CUCM v8.5, and supports interoperability across 30 releases of Cisco UCM and 6 releases of CIC. Most importantly, the Interactive Intelligence platform enables that customer empowerment so that the core functions of contact center management can be handed off to the key stakeholders who are focused on that all-important "customer experience."

CIC allows contact center managers to easily manage customer-focused solutions while allowing IT to focus on the core enterprise needs. With CIC, contact center managers have a wide palette of core applications at their disposal and all on a single platform. Those functions would include a single interface point for all call recording, outbound predictive dialing, workforce management, and multichannel ACD. At the same time, the integrated nature of the CIC solution allows these functions to be delivered on a platform requiring a fraction of the number of servers needed in many competitive offerings.

IT departments are often reluctant to relinquish control of critical infrastructure elements given the potential for security or operational instability. However, so long as those systems are designed to fully interoperate with the core IT components, those specialized functions can safely be offloaded without the technical risk.

The Interactive Intelligence CIC can interface to a Cisco UCM in a number of ways depending on the requirements of the application. The contact center system could have a separate set of trunks connecting it to the public network, or all of the trunks could be connected to the Cisco UCM, which in turn would pass calls through to the CIC. The former is typical where the contact center operates independently of the core IT group, while the latter is more typical of environments where the contact center and infrastructure are supported by a common team.

The key to finding the best solution for an organization is to put together a cross-functional team with representatives from IT, the contact center, and the business units supported by the contact center to evaluate the options. That team should begin by developing clear evaluation criteria that are agreed to by the entire team; those agreed upon criteria will ease the process of making a final decision as the "ground rules" will be clearly defined. The assumptions must also be spelled out and the evaluation should look at all of the critical elements including functionality, architecture, vendor fit, implementation, and support.

In essence, the evaluation team will have to think through the entire business plan for the contact center, including the full range of call types to be handled, how the initial scripts will be generated, the process for modifying scripts to address new or changing processes, and how those will impact ancillary functions like staffing and quality assurance. If it is determined that a separate contact center solution is called for, it is critical that it be designed to work in conjunction with the core telephony infrastructure.

In the end, IT and contact center managers have a considerable amount of common ground. Both groups are focused on supporting the organization's basic objectives, using systems that are secure, reliable and scalable, and with simple solutions that incorporate common management and administrative tools. However, while many contact center vendors preach the idea of "simplicity," the solutions don't always measure up to the promise. A truly integrated solution needs to be designed from the ground up to work as a whole, or the competing parts (often with their own management interfaces) will bring the entire system crashing down.

Interactive Intelligence has developed that type of fully integrated solution that allows organizations with an investment in Cisco UCM to take full advantage of a purpose-built contact center solution. For companies looking for an alternative and a third-party contact center solution, CIC can securely and reliably interoperate with the Cisco UCM and most importantly, empower contact center managers to take much of the maintenance workload off of IT's shoulders.

This paper is sponsored by Interactive Intelligence.

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