Unified business communications solutions provider Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) has announced that several member companies of The Co-operators Group Ltd., a Canadian-owned, multi-product insurance company, have chosen Interactive Intelligence’s all-in-one IP communications software suite, Customer Interaction Center (CIC).

The Co-operators Life Insurance Company, HB Group Insurance Management Ltd., L’Union Canadienne, TIC Travel Insurance Coordinators, and Co-operators General Insurance Company picked Interactive Intelligence’s CIC, delivered via the communications-as-a-service (CaaS) model, to consolidate their multiple communications technology systems across several of their coast-to-coast locations, which are staffed by nearly 2,500 employees.

“Many of our existing systems were nearing their end of life,” said The Co-operators executive VP and CIO, Hugh Cumming. “In addition, these multi-vendor systems made it challenging for our physically disparate member companies to effectively communicate with one another and with clients across multiple lines of business.”

The Co-operators selected CIC over competitive products after it scored the highest overall based on an extensive set of evaluation criteria.

“CIC’s unique open, single-platform software architecture with a broad range of multichannel applications best met our requirements, particularly our need to simplify administration, reduce costs and enhance customer experiences,” said Cumming. “Having a common dialing plan and being able to do things like route, queue, and report on multichannel interactions across locations will also enable us to increase productivity and better integrate service channels for our clients.”

Customer Interaction Center (CIC), which was designed to help companies manage every step of the customer experience, is an all-in-one contact center solution that offers a single pre-integrated application suite supported on a single multichannel platform architected for SIP and voice over IP (VoIP).

It can be delivered via a customer’s method of choice: a complete premise-based solution, an equally complete cloud-based solution at a fixed monthly cost (also called “communications-as-a- service, or CaaS) or a managed service. In addition to CIC, The Co-operators chose to broaden their customer service operations by purchasing add-on applications Interactive Intelligence offer for multichannel recording and scoring, outbound dialing and customer feedback surveys.

As a result of its CIC deployment, The Co-operators expect they will be able to reduce costs by eliminating long distance charges, simplifying system management and consolidating technology redundancies across locations. They also expect to increase efficiencies by improving member-to-member communications, and improve service by being better able to monitor interactions, engage in proactive customer contact and obtain real-time customer feedback.

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