Interactive Intelligence optimizes the contact center.

"Real-time" is a word you hear a lot in the call center today. But unlike many terms used to describe enterprise software, this one has a sharp and to-the-point meaning. Historical data are nice to have, but they are just that: historical. Historical data tell you what you did wrong (or right) last week, last month or last year. The information is nice to have, but it seldom helps you today. "Real-time" information, on the other hand, is becoming vital to the operations of a world-class contact center. Real-time data let supervisors and managers actually alter the operations of the call center, on-the-fly, to make the best use of resources available at any given time. Problems can be corrected immediately in response to what's happening now--not what happened last week.

You may already know Interactive Intelligence's contact center automation software, Customer Interaction Center (CIC). CIC is the company's flagship product. It is an innovative, standards-based, pre-integrated communications application suite that enables contact centers to manage phone calls, faxes, e-mails and Web interactions from one platform. What we'll see coming from Interactive Intelligence next is its Interaction Optimizer software, the newest component of the company's growing workforce management offering, ideal for contact centers large or small. Along with Interaction Recorder, offering quality management, call scoring, and screen recording, CIC's customer satisfaction surveys, and its Interaction Supervisor application for monitoring and whisper coaching, Interaction Optimizer was designed to help deliver usable data in real-time to managers and supervisors for the purpose of agent management. The solution helps simplify supervisors' jobs while at the same time maximizes service levels and ensures adherence to company goals and assigned shifts.

Interaction Optimizer combines historical data with predicted market expectations. The solution actually anticipates the expected volume of interactions: phone, e-mail, chat. It then automatically assigns the optimal number of agents to manage the given forecast. Interaction Optimizer generates agent scheduling to accommodate vacation time, schedule changes and variances, labor/union laws, employee availability and skill matching (considerations that, when managed manually, can lead to one very large migraine headache). As a result, Interaction Optimizer can produce a demand forecast that can be used to determine appropriate scheduling targets with great accuracy. By combining agents' scheduling requests and any last-minute changes that are made, Interaction Optimizer is able produce a schedule to balance the interaction demands with the agent preferences and skills, the latter being a step that has been shown to reduce agent turnover and keep call center employees happier. One other much-touted feature of the product is the inclusion of real-time adherence functionality, allowing the contact center manager to track how well agents are complying with the defined schedules.

Interactive Intelligence stresses that the solution requires no third-party integration, no additional implementation time, and no upgrade hassles--a large bonus for many busy call centers, particularly the small and medium-sized centers that have historically been unable to bear the cost and complexity of standalone WFM solutions. Interaction Optimizer also provides a common interface for CIC, Interaction Supervisor and its administration tool, Interaction Administrator, further simplifying management.

"Our customers are telling us that there is a major disconnect in the workforce management market," said Joseph A. Staples, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Interactive Intelligence. "On the one hand there are distinct advantages to WFM in creating a more effectively managed contact center. Yet, on the other hand, the integration time and cost of buying a third-party product and incorporating it into the contact center software can be expensive and burdensome beyond belief. We took a different approach. In our offering, Interaction Optimizer is just another module that shares the common CIC platform. No integration to worry about. No multi-vendor finger-pointing. And all the benefits of a solid, highly scalable workforce management system.

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"Because Interaction Optimizer is completely integrated with CIC's ACD application, we have access to data, information and statistics that can be fully utilized as part of the workforce management planning and adherence process. Integrating third-party WFM applications either requires a tremendous amount of effort to accomplish this same job, or else they simply can't do it at all," said Staples.

Interaction Optimizer is planned for general availability in the third quarter of 2006, and will be offered through Interactive Intelligence's VAR channel. For more information, visit www.inin.com.

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By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Inter@ction Solutions