Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert), a global provider of unified IP business communications solutions, has announced the next major version of its all-in-one IP communications software suite, Customer Interaction Center (CIC).

CIC 4.0, targeted at mid-size to large contact centers and enterprises, is planned for general availability in English-speaking countries in the third quarter of this year.

According to the company, Interaction Analyzer, CIC 4.0’s real-time speech analytics application, provides real-time keyword- and phrase-spotting on the customer side, agent side, or both sides of a voice conversation.

“One of the challenges that every contact center faces is how do they know what to pay attention to,” explained Joe Staples, CMO at Interactive Intelligence, during an interview with TMC (News - Alert) at Interactive Intelligence’s Annual Users Conference in Indianapolis . “What Interaction Analyzer does is real-time speech analytics and it does keyword and phrase spotting. In real time, when those are spotted, alerts can be sent to supervisors or managers who can then intervene.”

Metrics associated with the significant scalability improvements include:

•         More than a double increase in the number of automatic call distribution (ACD)-enabled agents supported on a single server
•         A five-time increase in the number of simultaneous interactive voice response (IVR) sessions supported
•         A seven-time increase in the number of calls that can be recorded per hour

CIC 4.0 boasts the elimination of third-party call processing software from CIC and moving all media processing to the company’s Interaction Media Server. With these enhancements, the solution becomes a pure application server that can be located at a central data center with media servers at branch offices, thus creating a private cloud deployment model, according to Interactive Intelligence. This change increases scalability and enables customers to process media locally for improved business continuity and survivability.

“There’s a lot of speech analytics software still sitting on the shelf from some vendors,” said Staples (News - Alert). “We’ve really come at this thinking how do we make this simple, straightforward, easy-to-implement so that essentially any contact center can use it.”

CIC 4.0 includes the addition of Interaction Web Portal, a new application that enables contact center outsourcers to provide their clients with secure, branded access and real-time visibility. Additional enhancements include a new Web client, upgraded email handling, more efficient queries of call recordings, and expanded and improved reporting.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (News - Alert) (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.

 

John Lahtinen is Community Development Editor for TMCnet. He has more than 15 years of combined professional and educational experience involving news, education, and marketing. John holds a master's degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and a bachelor's degree in English from the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell