Whitepapers
Advanced Analytics and Actionable Intelligence: How Ambit Energy is using data analytics to deliver business value
Data and effective use of technology are prominent in the decision-making processes for Ambit Energy. In fact, data is at the core of new product development and initiatives to transform the customer experience. Find out how the company’s focus on data as a strategic asset touches every aspect of how it manages operations and customer relationships.
Back to Basics: All-in-One versus Individual Best-of-Breed Solutions
An all-in-one communication solution, or best-of-breed multipoint solutions? Both approaches offer distinct benefits, but for enterprises and contact centers, the trend has shifted toward the all-in-one model. Read what two industry veterans have to say about the advantages and disadvantages of all-in-one vs. best-of-breed offerings — Don Van Doren, president of Vanguard Communications, and Joe Staples, chief marketing officer for Interactive Intelligence.
Best Practices for Successfully Deploying and Using Speech Analytics
Speech analytics is a powerful technology, but is as much an art as it is a science. This whitepaper and how-to guide, from Scott Bakken of MainTrax and Brian Spraetz of Interactive Intelligence, tells you how to successfully plan, prepare for, deploy, and implement a speech analytics solution. Learn industry best practices, how to avoid common pitfalls, and why context matters just as much as content when analyzing agent-customer interactions.
Cisco and Interactive Intelligence: The Value of a Combined Solution for Enterprise IP Telephony and Customer Care
It’s a key issue. Your enterprise is standardized on Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) for IP telephony, but what about your contact center and customer care? You can either expand your Cisco architecture for those operations, or you can look for an alternative solution that supplements CUCM to better meet the needs of the business and simplify IT tasks at the same time. Read how the Customer Interaction Center™ (CIC) suite from Interactive Intelligence does just that with itsstraightforward integration to CUCM via the SIP standard. From industry veteran Lori Bocklund, president of Strategic Contact, Inc.
The Cloud-based Contact Center: Does it Make Sense for Your Business?
Functionality.Integration.Deployment models.Risks.TCO.Benefits to expect. When does it make sense to consider a cloud-based contact center, versus a premise-based solution? A move to the cloud is a critical decision for any business. Two industry authorities help you make it an informed decision: Donna Fluss, president of Fluss/DMG Consulting, and Joe Staples, CMO, Interactive Intelligence.
Comfort & Security in the Cloud: How Communications as a Service Delivers Superior Technology Stability and Resiliency
Compare cloud-based approaches to premises-based solutions for the contact center, and the cloud wins. Intelligent monitoring, dedicated support resources, ongoing management, formalized security architectures and processes, and assured business continuity/disaster recovery capabilities. Lori Bocklund of Strategic Contact, Inc. discusses strategic insights of the cloud, and Jason Alley of Interactive Intelligence discusses customer insights. All in one enlightening white paper.
Contact Center Enterprise Analytics: Advances in Decision Technologies
How and why do executives make strategic decisions in contact centers? What is the standard process? Enter enterprise analytics, the application of specialized decision technologies to contact center performance monitoring, forecasting, scenario development, plan development and evaluation, business risk analysis, and ultimately, strategic decision-making. Read how it all works.
Contact Center Metrics that Matter
Many performance metrics are as old as the contact center industry itself, and are still in widespread use. But as new communications channels such as social media emerge, and as the definition of efficient customer service evolves, new metrics are gaining the attention of the industry. Paul Stockford of Saddletree Research and Joe Staples of Interactive Intelligence explore some of these “metrics that matter,” and discuss how they’re changing the definition of the contemporary contact center.
The Customer Experience: the Journey from Good to Great
Providing a great customer experience has emerged as the holy grail of competitive advantage. And more than just efficiency, operational metrics and the “acceptable level of service” that contact centers have focused on for decades, the leap from good service to a great experience requires a different journey. Richard Snow of Ventana Research and Karina Howell of Interactive Intelligence guide you through this journey. Read what these two authorities on the customer experience have to say.
Process Automation and Multichannel Technology: Exceptional Customer Experience Drives Success
Today, business process automation isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about operating a business for your customers. To ensure a positive customer experience, a process must trigger an automated action, and automation must then manage the experience across multiple channels, personalize the customer’s interaction, and predict the best next actions. Read more, from Chris Thalassinos, MahnazMeshkati, and Frank Chiu of Communications Intelligence Group, and Brad Herrington of Interactive Intelligence.
Top 5 Considerations for Automating Key Business Processes
Business process automation — BPA — can help any business do more with less. However, successfully automating a business process requires more than just technology. Read how taking five straightforward steps to BPA planning can root out inefficiencies to improve key processes and give your business a clear competitive advantage.
Top 10 Customer Satisfaction Best Practices for Contact Center IVR Surveys
It really does matter what customers think, and contact centers are increasingly using automated post-call surveys to better manage and improve the customer experience. Follow 10 best practices from industry leader CFI Group, and your surveys will produce the precise feedback data your contact center needs to improve satisfaction drivers and, ultimately, the service experience for every customer.
Top Tips for Managing the Contact Center Strategy
A capacity plan is the best big picture decision-making device for a contact center executive. In many ways, this plan and the resourcing decisions it expresses is the overarching statement of how management wants to treat its customers and agents. Read how a well-managed and funded strategic plan can lead to a well-managed operation, and to achieving desired satisfaction levels for customers and agents alike.
Using Contact Center Strategic Planning and Budgeting Tools to Optimize the Customer Experience
Customer Experience (CX) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are two of the benchmark measurements companies now use to gauge customersatisfaction. And to understand how budgetary decisions impact CX and NPS outcomes, companies are turning to advanced contact center technology for strategic planning and big data. But business requirements to manage these outcomes successfully must incorporate back-officeoperations as well as the contact center.
Using Real-Time Speech Analytics to Turn a Negative Experience into an Extended Revenue System
In a contact center environment, real-time analytics provide the live information needed to respond to difficult situations before a customer, a sale, or an opportunity is lost. Scott Bakken and David Patchen from MainTrax and Brandon Rowe from Interactive Intelligence discuss how real-time analytics help your business operate at optimal levels and experience increased growth and reduced costs.
The Value of Blending eServices and the Contact Center
How a contact center deploys and manages eServices — non-voice interaction channels such as email, chat, SMS and social media — is the key to offering electronic services that attract modern tech-savvy customers. Learn about eServices best practices from Sheila McGee-Smith, founder of McGee-Smith Analytics, and Tim Passios, Director of Solutions Marketing at Interactive Intelligence, and how three diverse companies successfully utilize eServices to their advantage.
What’s Driving the Future Direction of Contact Centers: What you Need to Know
This white paper examines seven critical drivers that are aligning themselves and together will shape the future direction of contact centers. These drivers are the contact center value evolution, cultural evolution, technology evolution, Social Media, employee engagement, virtual workplace and the customer experience.
Why Industry-Best Call Analysis Matters
How often do you validate the results of your dialer’s Call Analysis? Did you know that a 1% increase in accuracy can represent millions of dollars in savings in campaign efficiency, carrier costs and staff productivity? Find out how Interactive Intelligence has changed the game with Media Server advanced pattern and speech recognition algorithms that can have up to a 30% increase in accuracy of Call Progress Analysis.
Payment Compliance: Same Rules, Different Game
It’s an economic climate best described as post-recessionary, yet in sluggish recovery. And throughout the ARM industry, companies are facing challenges ranging from business operations to avoiding fraud to mitigating risks when collecting and processing payments. Chris Gonzales of BillingTree and Ian Winder of Interactive Intelligence discuss collections compliance and highlight strategies and best practices that mitigate risk and improve operational efficiency at the same time. Read more.
Driving to One Percent: Call Analysis/Answering Machine Detection
In the accounts receivable management industry, automated dialing has become a prominent tool for consumer outreach. And the most critical capability of automated dialing is call analysis, which impacts operations and account workflow as well as profitability. So how much can be gained with even a 1% improvement in call analysis? Find out, in this first of the “Driving to One Percent” series from insideARM.com, and Interactive Intelligence.
Best Practices for Improving Compliance in Collections
Some aspects of call center compliance are straightforward, such as recording calls. Other aspects are trickier, such as collectors being FDCPA-compliant when they’re on the phone with consumers. But the biggest issue is, can you guarantee compliance? The likely answer is, no. But with this latest paper from insideARM.com, Interactive Intelligence and Latitude Software, you can get pretty close.
8 Tips for Outbound Calling Compliance for the Debt Collection Industry
Accounts receivable management is a minefield of federal regulations and individual state and local laws — which makes compliance for outbound calling a moving target. But are the challenges of compliance insurmountable? No, they aren’t. With regard to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Foti Decision in particular, a few straightforward tips can help collection firms overcome compliance hurdles. Read what those tips are, from the experts at insideARM.com and Interactive Intelligence.
The New Intelligence of Business Process Automation
Many of the tools for business process automation aren’t new. Yet it’s odd that most of them still don’t offer a way to involve the people who actually perform each task in a process. Communications-based process automation (CBPA) is different. To involve people directly at every step, CBPA transforms the corporate IP communications system into a process automation platform. It then tracks processes using the same communications notions that call centers have used for decades. Read how, and why, CBPA is a more practical and more effective approach, from Interactive Intelligence CEO Don Brown.
The Interaction Center Platform®
When Interactive Intelligence introduced its standards-based multichannel software platform for unified business communications and voice over IP (VoIP), it changed the communications industry. Now more than 20 years later, this platform is still as revolutionary, versatile, practical and straightforward as first envisioned. Read what makes the Interaction Center Platform a true-all-in-one solution for unified communications, the contact center, business process automation, the enterprise and the cloud, from Interactive Intelligence CEO Don Brown, and Tim Passios, VP, Solutions Marketing.
The Value and the Future of the Insurance Contact Center
Contact centers are widespread in insurance today and play a central role in interactions with prospects, policyholders, producers, and employees. The good news is that upgrading contact center capabilities to support new initiatives can be accomplished in small steps, often with capabilities that are already in-house and ready to be activated.
How Insurers Can Use Collaboration for a Competitive Advantage
Collaboration — working together for a common goal — is an integral part of the insurance business. But today, the need to rapidly assemble teams and capitalize on human expertise to provide faster, better decisions makes collaborating all the more important. Author Mark Breading of Strategy Meets Action explains how applying collaboration technologies to specific insurance business problems is enabling insurers to realize the true promise of collaborating for a competitive advantage.
Insurance Contact Centers in the Cloud: Communications as a Service (CaaS) Goes Mainstream
Insurers manage some of the most critical technology environments in any industry, and they’re increasingly turning to the cloud to provision their computing resources and services. Many insurance organizations are using cloud-computing approaches for servers, data storage and network capacity as well as for business applications, and are finding Communications as a Service (CaaS) in particular to be a natural fit. Read why, from author Mark Breading of Strategy Meets Action.
Transforming the Insurance Customer Experience with Business Process Automation: A Three-Tiered Approach
Claims. Licensing. Underwriting. For many insurance companies, each area can negatively impact compliance risk and associated costs as well as the customer experience and future revenues. Business process automation can help improve these areas, however, and make the customer experience more rewarding. Read how, from Diane Halliwell of Sperco, and Gina Clarkin of Interactive Intelligence.
Beyond the Insurance Contact Center: The Communications Center of the Future
Direct sales. Policy servicing. Claims. In the insurance industry, call centers have become increasingly sophisticated in terms of their business capabilities and enabling technologies. It’s an evolution that, according to Mark Breading of SMA Strategy Meets Action, can be characterized as: 1.0 the call center, 2.0 the contact center, and 3.0 the communications center. Learn how leading insurers are now creating competitive advantages at the 2.0 level, and how 3.0 will make those advantages even greater.
The New Customer Service Model in Insurance
The question insurers should be asking is, “How can I best achieve great customer service?” The answer is to unify the communications between an insurer and policyholders — and unify them across the entire business. Do so, and customer retention improves. Cross-selling and up-selling improve. Claims efficiency improves. And market opportunities improve. Read how from insurance and IT industry authority, Mark Breading, SMA partner at SMA Strategy Meets Action.
Holistic Customer Communications Management (CCM): Building Profitable Relationships in Insurance
For insurers, CCM is the key to maximizing every customer interaction — to capture more information about that customer’s needs, make timely offers, and enhance the service experience. Read how CCM is most valuable when insurers take a holistic approach, which allows them to create enterprise-wide flows of information from all voice and data communications, and generate structured as well as unstructured data via a wide range of channels.
The Patient Engagement Revolution: The Role of the Contact Center
By focusing on increased integration, improved customer service strategies, and assessment of current business procedures, healthcare organizations can make the decision to move to a more proactive strategy for patient engagement. And the contact center or patient service center can serve as a great starting point and pivotal location for this change.
5 Initiatives to Make Your Contact Center an ACA Customer Service Powerhouse
A market transformation like the Affordable Care Act brings the excitement and possibility of technology advances, process improvements, and a new outlook to increase business with exceptional customer service. For the ACA, five contact center initiatives, working together, can generate measurable improvements in the customer experience. Read how, from Jennifer Wilson Peevey, Solutions Marketing Manager for Insurance & Healthcare at Interactive Intelligence, Inc.