Interactive Intelligence offers Interaction Dialer 2.4.

Interactive Intelligence recently announced that it has launched Interaction Dialer, the company's standards-based outbound dialing system that offers power, preview and predictive dialing, outbound campaign management and inbound/outbound call blending. Interaction Dialer is SIP-based, which allows it to operate in an all-software, all-VoIP environment. This version also includes a new SIP gateway called Interaction Gateway, an appliance device for protocol conversion and bandwidth management between networks designed to work with Interaction Dialer to give high-volume outbound contact centers predictive call analysis capabilities.

Unlike standalone dialers offered as part of a product portfolio requiring expensive integration, Interaction Dialer includes switching capabilities via the company's contact center automation software, Customer Interaction Center (CIC), eliminating the need to purchase a separate PBX/IP-PBX. The bundled approach also provides more cost-effective multichannel support, call recording, inbound routing, outbound campaign management, outbound IVR, blended dialing and more. All components can be deployed incrementally on an as-needed basis with simple license purchases.

The solution is built on existing scalability improvements to CIC with support of up to 1,000 outbound agents per server; as a result, the new SIP-based Interaction Dialer, combined with the company's new Interaction Gateway, can accommodate the digital trunking needs of busy outbound contact centers, including those with distributed locations. With its "NxM" or "rack and stack" architecture that enables multiple gateways to pass calls to multiple dialer servers, flexibility, load-balancing and fault tolerance can be vastly improved compared to traditional standalone dialers, according to the company.

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Call abandon rates are a concern for most companies nowadays, particularly in light of federal restrictions brought about by the Teleservices Sales Rules. A poorly paced dialer can create more problems than it solves. To counter these problems, Interaction Dialer offers a staged predictive dialing capability that identifies and projects the length of call stages such as introduction and closing to more effectively pace automated outbound calls. This not only helps improve agent effectiveness, it can help increase revenue opportunities compared to more old-fashioned outbound dialing solutions.

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As real-time data is a must in today's call center, Interactive Intelligence is offering a new dialer "Health View" for supervisors. "Health View" offers call center supervisors a single interface for viewing the health of their campaigns, workflows and outbound operations. Messages displayed in this Health View provide an evaluation based on combinations of statistics gathered over time with links to the Interactive Intelligence Web site for more in-depth analysis and suggested improvements.

Another new feature includes "Contact Import Wizard," which is designed to make campaign management easier by providing a simple tool to import records into call list tables from commonly used source such as CSV files, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, SQL Server and Oracle. Contacts can be added on-the-fly and scheduled to dial immediately or at a future date, and specific agents can be assigned specific contacts for preview dialing. A new "Contact Exclusion" interface enables contacts to be marked "uncallable" for one or many campaigns, whether active or not.

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