Civil Air Patrol of Nebraska to Install Contact Center Software from Interactive Intelligence

INDIANAPOLIS and ASHLAND, Neb. - The Nebraska Wing of the Civil Air Patrol, a nonprofit civilian auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force, will install contact center software from Interactive Intelligence Inc. to provide customer service to CAP members and the general public.

Nebraska Wing CAP offers aerospace education, cadet programs, and emergency services, which include assisting the air force with search and rescue efforts. It will use the new software, called Customer Interaction Center® (CIC), to respond to customers by automating communications functions and providing new self-service options.

"We don't have funding to staff our facility 24x7, yet it's critical that we're able to respond quickly to emergencies such as when a plane goes down," said Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Jurek, Nebraska Wing CAP's chief of staff for mission support. "Using CIC, we'll be able to cut customer response time, especially during off-hours, without adding staff by using applications such as call forward/find-me, presence management, directory look-up, and interactive voice response.

"We already have plans to use CIC to provide callers with pre-recorded messages that give them safety briefings, such as how a current weather condition is affecting our aircraft, and other information that assists them with mission risk management," said Jurek. "By eliminating the need for members to take these calls, we can more effectively use resources, while providing faster, more convenient customer service."

Nebraska Wing CAP plans to complete its CIC deployment by the end of the second quarter. CIC will support about 35 employees in its search and rescue operations center located at its headquarters' campus at Camp Ashland Training Site, a Nebraska Army National Guard Post. An additional 30 members in Nebraska Wing CAP's remaining two buildings will be tied to CIC using fiber optics. The software will replace an ATandT Merlin phone system.

CIC is a bundled communications application suite that includes PBX and IP PBX switching capabilities, as well as interaction management features, such as skills-based routing, IVR with speech recognition, auto attendant, unified messaging, softphone, fax-on-demand, call recording, Web chat, and more.

"Our existing phone system requires up to three people to perform even simple management functions like moves, adds and changes, let alone any type of customization," said Jurek. "CIC's 'all-in-one' software-based architecture gives us a single point of administration and a built-in graphical application generator tool, so we can reduce the number of dedicated IT staff, and more quickly create and modify applications that better meet the needs of our customers."

Following the initial phase of deployment, Nebraska Wing CAP may also extend CIC to field personnel in Nebraska using voice over IP. There are about 600 CAP members throughout the state.

Nebraska Wing CAP is only one of two wings out of a total of 52 nationwide (including the District of Columbia and Commonwealth of Puerto Rico) that maintains an internal IT staff. It hopes that a successful CIC deployment will encourage roll-out within other CAP wings.

"We would love to model for the entire CAP organization numbering more than 60,000 members how innovative communications technology can be applied to more efficiently utilize resources, while improving our responsiveness and adding convenience to the customer experience," concluded Jurek.