Changing Everything, Again

The Future of the Cloud

Changing Everything, Again

By TMCnet Special Guest
Jason Alley, Solutions Marketing Manager, Interactive Intelligence
  |  December 09, 2014

Think back 20 years ago, when legacy hardware technology ruled the communications industry. With the aim to replace all that hardware, an all-in-one software platform hit the market — changing everything. Now move ahead 20 years. The cloud is in full view, and another platform is poised to change our industry again. Visionary? Or just a case of uncovering the cloud’s true capability? The answer is, it’s both. And the approach is pure.

Organizations get a suite of cloud services for communications, collaboration, and customer engagement that takes full advantage of the distributed nature of the cloud. It provides rapid deployment, industry leading reliability, and unlimited scalability. It connects customers and employees in new, more efficient ways. Companies can replace existing IT systems and applications like PBXs, ACDs, and IVRs, or deploy new services alongside them. They’ll have the flexibility to deploy application services together or independently. Application services such as a rich, social company directory, unified communications, contact center, and social customer service.

Companies will get a powerful organizational directory service they can synchronize with many other IT systems. It will let organizations collect valuable information, such as an employee’s skills, certifications, contact information, office location, their photo and other personal and professional details. The person’s rich profile will then be available to other employees via browsers and mobile apps on various devices running iOS, Android (News - Alert), and Windows8. The directory service also includes advanced search capabilities, company hierarchy navigation, dynamic groups, active contact buttons and more.

A corporate unified communications service encompasses presence, instant messaging, persistent group chat, IP PBX (News - Alert), auto-attendant, voicemail, fax, unified messaging and conferencing. And it’s enterprise grade. Even the largest corporations in the world will be able to use it as their complete communications system.

For the customer service experience, a contact center service offers new ways of matching customers with contact center agents via a first of-its-kind matching scheme. This scheme dynamically matches customer interactions with contact center agents based on multiple attributes and criteria, and allows for an unprecedented personalized customer experience. Other contact center capabilities include multichannel communication, social customer service, speech-enabled voice self-service (IVR), workforce optimization, automated outbound dialing and CRM integrations.

To address the needs of today’s empowered customer, a social approach to customer service will allow organizations to expose whatever information they like about available agents — photos, names, skills, languages, backgrounds, and so on. Customers can then choose the agent with whom they wish to interact, as well as their preferred channel of interaction.

And this is just the start. In the future, organizations will be able to access additional services such as document management, workflow and more.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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