The day your phone system runs your business
It is not unusual to feel your life is run by your phone, but imagine if your phone system could run your business? Dave Paulding, regional sales director for UK, Middle East and Africa at Interactive Intelligence says the development and release of offerings in to the market today makes this a possibility. If, that is, you can separate the value from the gumphf.
Phone systems have come a far way. In 1994 they were pretty dumb, offering dial tone and voice mail. In those days, intelligence was added in the form of applications – primarily for the call centre – by means of computer telephony integration (CTI). Other functionality was provided by completely separate devices such as automatic call distributors (ACDs), interactive voice response (IVR), call loggers, predictive dialers, fax servers, and others.
In the last 15 years there has been considerable development in the communications arena, says Paulding. From session initiation protocol (SIP) and voice over IP (VOIP) to the concept of unified communications which entered the market to much fanfare.
“The whole unified communications concept has been vaguely defined by marketers and is commonly based on a ‘shock and awe’ approach to product development where you keep adding features until you convince the customer there must be value in there someplace. Frankly, the general cost-justification of unified communications is laughable. The shame of it is that there are golden nuggets in UC, but they’re nowhere close to new – presence, unified messaging, multimedia communications,” he explains.
The problem with communication technology development is not the development itself, but rather the intent. The industry should be looking at ways that their customers can do more work with fewer people, because communications technology can be the basis for process automation, explains Paulding.
“This is what we did with our new product ‘Interaction Process Automation’ (IPA). We designed a product which would automate communications-based process consequently improving efficiencies, reducing costs and providing quantifiable return on investments,” he says.
By taking mature communications technology and applying it to a broader area of business process automation, Interactive Intelligence’s IPA enables organisations to redeploy or decrease the number of employees and the amount of time involved in a given business process. This is achieved by eliminating process latency; by reducing the chance for human error; and by providing standardised methods for handling business processes.
Leveraging its own IP-based unified communications platform, Interactive Intelligence adapted functionality to enable process automation, in the following ways:
- Contact centre-style queuing and routing are used for accurate and flexible prioritisation and distribution of process work.
- Enterprise presence becomes ‘process presence’, indicating availability for a work assignment and speeding processing time.
- Automated escalation functionality ensures that service level goals are met.
- Recording becomes an essential part of compliance for business processes.
- Real-time monitoring provides management visibility into every step of the work process.
- End-to-end reporting delivers the ability to manage and measure each process attribute.
- VoIP provides complete location-independence, enabling employees to participate in businesses processes from anywhere in the world.
“The IPA takes what we know of communications technology and business process automation, and merges the two to result in a solution where your phone can essentially run your business. It is a communication system that handles not only phone calls, contact centre applications, and process automation but other advanced services such as document management, e-learning, and business analytics,” concludes Paulding.
