Contact center outsourcers know they absolutely must stay on top of the game where technology and business processes are concerned or risk losing customers to those that do. Unfortunately, even when they stay on trend and entrust their business to a hosted solutions provider, they may not achieve the desired results.

That was the case for EMS, an outsourced contact center provider with five locations in Omaha, Neb., and Steamboat, Colo. It was announced today that EMS has chosen Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) Inc.’s CaaS Contact Center, a cloud-based communications as a service (CaaS) solution, to replace a hosted solution it had been using from another provider.

The main reason given for dissatisfaction with the previous provider spanned business functions and frontline agents. Paul Staehlin, director of operations for EMS, said, “Our existing hosted solution made administration and agent monitoring difficult.”

When EMS decided to replace that provider, it didn’t automatically look just at other hosted providers. According to Staehlin, the company looked extensively at premise-based as well as hosted solutions before deciding to go with the Interactive Intelligence solution. He said of the CaaS Contact Center choice, “We chose the Interactive Intelligence CaaS Contact Center for its broad functionality, competitive price, maximum control, and ease-of-administration and integration.”

Specifically, CaaS Contact Center will be used as a statistics delivery engine for wallboard displays and for unified messaging, call recording, reporting, multichannel routing and queuing, and interactive voice response, according to the Interactive Intelligence. Plans are in place to integrate the Interactive Intelligence solution with EMS’s RightNow and salesforce.com applications screen-pop as well.

The solution will be deployed in a unique way, according to Staehlin. He said, “Interactive offered us a ‘local control VoIP’ model that will enable us to maintain all our voice traffic and call recordings on our network.”

He said the method offers EMS increased control and security and allows the company to migrate to a premise-based deployment without the need to rewrite applications, should they ever consider doing that.

Staehlin said the tools and the ability to easily add new users provided by Interactive Intelligence’s CaaS Contact Center will allow EMS to grow, something that would have been difficult with its previous hosted solution. “The tools it gives agents to deliver efficient yet personal multichannel service will really fast-forward our business in the coming months.” In fact, EMS says the Interactive Intelligence CaaS Contact Center will help it facilitate growth plans next year to add 100 agents.

In other news, TMCnet reported that Interactive Intelligence has been included among Software Magazine’s ranking of the world’s top 500 software and service providers.