TMCnews Featured Article

Unum, a provider of employee benefits products and services, has reportedly deployed Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Center to improve efficiencies for its distributed contact centers and home-based agents.

In a release, Randy Chapman, Unum’s vice president of IT communications services, said the company chose the CIC platform because of its all-in-one, all-software architecture. CIC delivers all core call center applications, including ACD, IVR, call monitoring/recording, workforce management, reporting, customer surveys and more, all tightly integrated on a single platform. The solution handles multimedia contacts including phone, email, Web chat and SMS via a single queue, and offers intelligent call routing enabling all types of contacts to be routed to any agent on the system based on their skills.

Prior to deploying the solution Unum was using an on-premises system comprised of different components from various “best-of-breed” vendors. By migrating to an all-in-one, all-software based system the company will save considerably on integration costs as well as ongoing maintenance and troubleshooting of separate systems. It has also improved system reliability by greatly reducing system complexity.

                                            
“The technology previously supporting our contact centers was largely dated and came from multiple vendors,” Chapman said in a release. “It could simply no longer effectively support our business goals, particularly with the expansion of our distributed contact centers and work-at-home service representatives.”

In addition to CIC, Unum purchased add-on applications for outbound/blended dialing and campaign management; multichannel recording and quality monitoring; workforce management; and automated customer feedback surveys.

“We anticipate numerous benefits as a result of deploying the CIC software suite, including improved service through real-time customer feedback data and consolidated reporting,” Chapman said. “We also expect increased service efficiencies through new features such as skills-based routing across multiple sites and blended dialing.”

Unum will use CIC to unify multiple contact centers onto a single system. CIC also ports Web-based administration which means contact center managers and supervisors can view key performance stats and KPIs for all centers, as a collective whole or by the individual center, in real time. They can even drill down further to see real time stats by agent group or even individual agents – including home-based agents.

 

The company will use CIC to link its contact centers located in Chattanooga, Tenn.; Columbia, S.C.; Portland, Maine; and Worcester, Mass. Once deployment is complete the solution will support more than 1,000 contact center agents, of which 40 percent are home based.

The company also plans to integrate CIC with its resident CRM applications, as well as other existing customized applications.