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Technology Marketing Corporation's Customer Interaction Solutions magazine has awarded a 2009 Product of the Year Award to Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) for its new business process automation solution, Interaction Process Automation (IPA).

Interactive Intelligence introduced IPA in June 2009 and, after numerous live trials, it became generally available in February. The solution is unique in the business process automation field in that it uses the corporate phone system as a framework for automating routine "people-centric" business processes.

More specifically, IPA uses Interactive Intelligence's IP-based unified communications platform, Customer Interaction Center (CIC), as a framework for automating routine tasks such as the on-boarding of employees, the processing of loans, the registering of college students and wide range of other "back-office" type operations. The solution, which offers support for documents in a wide range of formats, enables companies to find new operational efficiencies, increase employee productivity, and hold down operating costs by automating what has traditionally been "manual," paper-based processes. Interactive Intelligence calls this new approach to business process automation "communications-based process automation" (CBPA).

'With IPA, Interactive Intelligence has taken its proven contact center applications -- functions such as routing, presence and collaboration -- and used them to automate and move work through each step of a business process,' said TMC CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert). 'In effect, IPA has created a functional bridge between contact centers and the enterprises they serve, thus resulting in increased efficiencies and improved customer service.'

Interactive Intelligence developed IPA as an alternative to traditionally complex and costly process management systems, and to 'tool-kits' that simply embed communications into applications, which are limited to soft ROI.

IPA targets mid-size to large organizations across all industries that require the automation of multi-step, people-centric business processes. Other examples of processes which can be automated include lead management, insurance claims processing, requests for government services and order discount approvals.

For more information about IPA, visit http://www.inin.com/ipa.

For more information about Customer Interaction Solutions magazine's 2009 Product of the Year Awards, or any of the TMC (News - Alert) media properties, visit www.tmcnet.com.