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Partners Mutual Insurance is the latest company to improve its operations using Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Center solution.

According to a press release, the company has been using insurance solutions from AcroSoft -- which Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) acquired in May -- since 2005. President and CEO Richard Ewert explained that this is what led the property and casualty insurance company to adopt the CIC platform.

'We liked the idea of being able to leverage both contact center automation and enterprise IP telephony features that would also easily integrate with our existing AcroSoft document management and workflow applications for insurance,' Ewert said in the release.

What’s more the CIC platform offered increased scalability and functionality over the company’s existing Siemens (News - Alert) system.

 

'With more than 200 insurance agencies selling our policies and calling into our claims department, we needed a system that could streamline our processes and improve communications with our customers and insurance agents,' Ewert said.

In addition to simplified integration with AcroSoft applications, “CIC ended up offering us more functionality than the competition, along with a unique open, all-software, single-platform architecture for easy administration and cost-effective growth,' he added.
 

Interactive Intelligence reseller Attalus Communications handled installation as well as integration with AcroSoft content management applications.
 

With the all-in-one, all-software-based CIC solution, Partners Mutual gains advanced capabilities including presence, which is the ability to view the availability status of other users on the network, multichannel routing and queuing, interactive voice response, auto-attendant, unified messaging, call recording, conferencing and more.
 

'We're looking forward to the enhanced customer service CIC will help us deliver,' Ewert said. 'For instance, we'll be able to record calls and then drag and drop the files into the correct claim or policy folder to give us more comprehensive information about a particular customer and our interaction history with them. We'll also be able to improve service levels by using CIC to automatically route calls to the correct department by matching the customer's caller ID with their policy or claim number.'

Interactive Intelligence’s acquisition of AcroSoft represents a critical building block in the development of its new business process automation product, Interaction Process Automation (IPA), which is due out in 1Q2010.

The new offering, a module that plugs into the CIC platform, facilitates what Interactive Intelligence is calling “communications-based process automation” (CBPA). Basically, IPA enables organizations to use the multimedia routing and presence capabilities of the CIC platform as a framework for carrying out routine, daily business processes – such as the processing of insurance claims. The new offering will include support for documents in a wide range of formats, in addition to the multimedia contacts the CIC platform supports currently.

According to company officials, AcroSoft's document management software, which was created for the insurance industry, will be integrated into the IPA product, and this is what will enable document sharing.

 

The acquisition also works out well for Interactive Intelligence because a large percentage of its customer base is insurance companies. Thus the acquisition will allow Interactive Intelligence to sell into AcroSoft’s base – and this most recent announcement is a prime example of that ongoing strategy.