Interactive Intelligence, a global provider of unified IP (Internet Protocol) business communications solutions and the owners of the Customer Interaction Centre (CIC) has opened new offices in South Africa in order to expand their contact centre business on the African continent.
The company has set up new corporate offices in Fourways, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Interactive Intelligence has 90 corporate offices with about 15 000 agents across Africa. Some of its flagship clients are based in the financial services, telecommunications and local government sectors.
Interactive Intelligence has always had an indirect presence in Africa since 1998. The company has contact centre presence in Nigeria, DRC, Ghana and Malawi.
“In future Interactive Intelligence will concentrate in East Africa with Kenya being the ideal country,” said Fokion Natsis, Interactive Intelligence Territory Manager for South Africa and Africa.
Natsis said the company’s new move shows its commitment to Africa.
“Interactive Intelligence is using South Africa as a springboard into other potential African business hubs,” said Natsis.
Contact Centre innovation
Interactive Intelligence has introduced Real Time Speech Analytics Engine for Africa’s contact centres.
“The speech analytics engine enables quality contact centre managers to pick up certain words and phrases during a real-time contact centre interaction,” said Natsis.
“As the conversation is taking place, any words that are spoken will set an alert on the system and enable the contact centre manager to intercept the call,” said Natsis.
“This is a simple concept but can assist a business to reach its targets,” said Natsis.
Future Trends
“Voice has always been the key medium. Natsis said the self-service contact centre is not ideal for Africa, as most clients tend to put the phone down,” said Natsis.
“Customers want to speak to a human voice,” he said
In SA about 80% is voice and 20% traffic is data.
“This makes voice a real driver in the contact centre industry,” said Natsis.
“People still want to pick up the phone and speak, said Natsis.
“Voice is still the primary medium.”
Natsis also highlighted 4 key contact centre trends namely cloud computing, online management systems, remote working and the real time speech analytics engine.
Great news and about time I3 focuses seriously in Africa, the last frontier. I am extremely excited about this possibility. I worked for a I3 partner in the DC metro area and had numerous success with EIC, CIC, Dialer and Recorder implementations. David Saidel was my colleagues at Systems Integration Inc. (SII).
I have now relocated back home to Ghana and look forward to this new development. I have also interacted with Mannie at Atio. Well done I3 and welcome to Ghana!
Thank you Richard for your comment, looking forward to doing more business in Ghana