Adding Process Automation to a Cisco Environment

Organizations deploying contact center and business communications solutions often have to decide between a “best of breed” or single vendor solution. Often times companies have standardized on an IP PBX, but then opt for a different vendor’s contact center product because it provides some functionality and capabilities that the switch vendor does not provide. Interactive Intelligence suggests that companies with Cisco switches may turn to Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Center (CIC) for more advanced contact center solutions.

As Kevin Kieller pointed out his article, while Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Express and Unified Contact Center Enterprise are both solid products with many capabilities, enterprises may need some advanced contact center capabilities not offered on those platforms, and can integrate their existing Cisco switches with Interactive Intelligence’s CIC. And as Michael Finnerannoted, “Fortunately for organizations with Cisco UCM for core telephony functions, the Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Center (CIC) is designed to interoperate fully with the Cisco solution.”

One reason customers may choose this path is to leverage Interactive Intelligence’s Interaction Process Automation (IPA) product. Routing multi-channel interactions is only one of the functions with which contact centers are tasked. Increasingly important is the ability to treat the organization’s business processes – both inside and outside of the contact center – as equals with calls, chats, and emails in respect to routing/queuing/monitoring.

Tasks and work flow out of the contact center to many parts of the enterprise, and are generally handled manually. This can lead to delays and errors, and organizations could be more efficient and productive by automating many of these processes. For example, simply automating small, but high volume paper-intensive processes, can save time and resources in any contact center. IPA automates those processes, as well as embedding communications capabilities.

Here are some examples of how IPA can help businesses:

• A hospital that processes patient requests needed to efficiently handle prescription refills and requests for callbacks by the patient’s physician. Using CIC, a small contact center takes the incoming call from a patient, and the agent selects the appropriate process based on the nature of the patient request. IPA routes the “work” to “workgroups” of nurses, social services, or to individual entities or people, including pharmacies and physicians. The physicians receive notification of the work, or in this case the prescription refill or call back request, on their smartphones with a link to a web page displaying the callback request. 
  
   
• A security company that does alarm installation sales needed to be able to fulfill orders and install the alarm systems the same day the order comes in, as customers often call security companies as a result of recent break-ins. However, the company found that orders placed could not be serviced until the next day because the company was using a manual and inefficient way to process the orders. By using IPA, the company can now process orders more efficiently so that same-day installs can be coordinated among the appropriate service and installation workers. The time it took to complete the process was reduced from two hours down to 20 minutes, and the company was able to increase the number of homes that could be serviced from five per day to 40 per day - with no head count increase. This gave the company a competitive edge, while increasing customer satisfaction.
  
  
• A retail/”e-tail” company needed to improve its customer service in order to retain and gain customers. With 61 percent of the business coming from repeat or referred customers, the company found that lack of follow-up on service issues was one of the most common customer complaints. In addition, suppliers were concerned about the lack of conformity with their processes, which delayed responses to problems. The retailer had inconsistent processes across all 32 agents for follow-up with customers, with little management insight into problems related to individual follow-up until post-sale customer surveys were received. The company deployed CIC and IPA, implementing IPA for front and back office functions such as Customer Service and Accounting. The IPA Process Flows cover 50 percent of customer service request types, and the company also built 14 different processes on their own, with more on the way. The results were immediate – customer complaints on follow-ups have been nearly eliminated, and employee productivity improved on average by 25 percent for IPA-managed processes. The company found that only minimal training was required for new agents, due to IPA’s guided process flows. The suppliers were happy, as there was more consistency in adhering to best practices in customer and supplier follow-up, improving response times.

IPA enables enterprises to create process automation capabilities, as well as communications-enabling them. By using CIC throughout the organization, in conjunction with IPA for front and back office work flows and business processes, businesses can improve the effectiveness of their workers and processes. While IPA is currently only available to CIC customers, CIC can be implemented with third-party switches such as those from Cisco and others, giving users of these switches advanced functionality and capabilities.