Interactive Intelligence Upgrades Blended Dialer Software

Interactive Intelligence, a developer of customer interaction management software, released its upgraded Interaction Dialer software, version 2.2, now with enhanced work scheduling, campaign administration and new agent-less campaign features designed to help companies increase productivity and improve customer service and support.

Predictive dialer technology is an automated method of making outbound calls without people, and then passing answered calls to a person as the calls are answered. According to the Telecommunications Industry Association, predictive dialer technology can increase agent productivity by as much as 200 to 300 percent by eliminating manual tasks such as dialing the phone and leaving messages. Interactive Intelligence first released Interaction Dialer in 1999 as a predictive dialing add-on component to its interaction management software for contact centers, Customer Interaction Center (CIC).

CIC includes features such as digital PBX, multimedia routing and queuing, speech-enhanced interactive voice response, Web chat and more. Interaction Dialer features a patent-pending staging algorithm, multi-site campaign management, call blending, outbound IVR, graphical script development, reporting and supervision. Interaction Dialer 2.2 adds an enhanced work scheduling feature that enables companies to automatically transition the same group of agents from one campaign to another based on criteria such as sales quotas reached, percentage of customers polled and campaign duration.

According to president and CEO for Interactive Intelligence, Donald E. Brown, Interaction Dialer's enhanced work scheduling feature is unique because it can be applied to both outbound and inbound environments. "Unlike most other dialer products, Interaction Dialer 2.2 eliminates the need to re-create rules when applying the same outbound work scheduling features to inbound environments," Brown said.

"This type of blended capability gives our large teleservices customers a major competitive advantage." "Interaction Dialer's blended capabilities were a key criterion in our selection of the product back in early 2000," said Michael Van Scyoc, senior vice president of information technology for InfoCision Management, a top-20 outbound teleservices provider based in Akron, OH. "Today, we use Interaction Dialer to support 680 agents processing inbound and outbound interactions across nine of our 21 contact center sites. Interaction Dialer has cut wait time between calls nearly in half and reduced our callback percentage from 19.3 percent to 10 percent. These increases in productivity have not only helped us to reduce costs, but also significantly improved customer service."