Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) Inc., which sells business communications software, services for contact center automation and enterprise IP telephony, has announced enhancements to Interaction Director, the company's intelligent, network-based, pre- and post-call routing system for contact centers.

Designed to help distributed organizations create a "virtual" contact center by more effectively routing interactions across sites, these latest enhancements add the session initiation protocol -- the new standard for Voice over IP (VoIP) -- which, according to company officials, "eliminates the need for carriers in a pre-call routing configuration, thus reducing costs associated with complex set-up, ongoing third-party service, and per-call charges."

It also provides interoperability with SIP-compliant third-party products, such as PBXs, automatic call distributors and gateways.

Michael White, senior vice president of information technology infrastructure for InfoCision, the world's eighth largest outbound contact center, said Interaction Director automated routing rules to process between 40,000 and 50,000 inbound calls daily, distributed across our 28 contact centers. It allowed InfoCision officials to "re-allocate existing fail-over servers, which further increased operational efficiencies," he said.

Interaction Director works in conjunction with the Interactive Intelligence contact center automation software, Customer Interaction Center, which is part of the company's standards-based unified communications software suit. Routing rules can be flexibly pre-configured using ANI, DNIS, as well as real-time statistics, such as average hold time, occupancy, whatever.

Earlier this year Interactive Intelligence opened a new Eastern regional headquarters office in Herndon, Virginia. Located about 30 minutes west of Washington, D.C., the move is part of "an ongoing strategy to add education centers around the globe that supplement the company’s primary North American training facility at its global headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana," according to company officials.

In addition to its new Herndon office and a recently opened Western regional headquarters office in Irvine, California, Interactive Intelligence relocated its U.K. headquarters to a larger office near London last month, and the company has plans to expand its Amsterdam sales and support office later this year.

Recently Health Benefits Direct Corp., a vendor of direct marketing and health and life insurance products, announced it has customized IP-based contact center automation software by Interactive Intelligence to increase its customer contact rate by approximately 600 percent.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.

Internet Protocol (IP)	X
IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data in packets over the Internet. I...more

Voice over IP (VoIP)	X
A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more

Routing	X
There are many often too many explanation of routing. Here�s one: Hop-by-Hop Routing - IP Routing - Distributes routing to routers - Networks look/act like trees - Data can traverse many routers ...more