TMCnews Featured Article

Consumers today generate a lot of content. From e-mails, social media, mobile communications and media sharing, such as video and photos, data coming into an organization continues to grow every day. Reports say the amount of content in a 1,000 user contact center is more than in the Library of Congress – which has more than 3 petabytes of digital collections and is constantly growing. The challenge is being able to pull this content and organize it in a unified way in order to serve today’s customers properly. Enter Interaction Content Manager (ICM).

I caught up with Rachel Wentink (News - Alert), senior director of Strategic Initiatives at Interactive Intelligence, to discuss the features of Interaction Content Manager, why it’s a critical tool for organizations today and how digital content is fueling the need for content management solutions like ICM.

Wentink explained the motivation behind ICM was driven by content and the demand for access to content. Up until today, solutions to access and manage content were highly fragmented, the integration methods were older, and they don’t easily scale or handle distributed organizations well. The proliferation of electronic media has caused the amount of content to explode. If organizations aren’t accessing content in a secure method and getting it to customers when they need it, they’re not able to provide the level of customer service a well-run organization would want to.

The customer experience is made up of four main factors: people, interactions, processes and content. The key to delivering on this experience is accessing the content that ties all of these factors together. ICM does this in six ways:

• Capture
• Index
• Store
• Search
• Access
• Manage

It provides organizations with real-time access, scalability and availability, ease of integration and greater control of content. Real-time access is critical to the customer experience today. If we know anything about today’s customers, it’s that they expect what they want when they want it. Not only does being able to deliver in real-time help improve customer satisfaction, but it also enables agent productivity.

Being able to scale across distributed environments is a key benefit of ICM. It can grow with an organization without loss of performance, and in turn, increase employee productivity and accuracy, and long-term success for an organization. It also prides itself on ease of integration with existing systems, such as Web services like AWS, to offer optimal integration for information stored in legacy and line-of-business systems.

ICM also offers control – users can pull up who accessed what information, when, who made changes and what those changes were on demand. This is especially helpful for highly regulated industries, such as insurance, financial, healthcare and government. Organizations in these industries can’t just adopt any technology or software, especially when it comes to customer content and data. They have to ensure they are using secure technology that is easy to use, safe and enables productivity, and that’s what ICM offers.

ICM can be deployed as a cloud, on-premises or hybrid solution, and will be generally available in Q4 2013. Learn more and view a demo here.