Canada-based restaurant chain Pizza Pizza has reportedly expanded its use of Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Center contact center platform across all of its corporate offices.

Many companies deploy Interactive Intelligence’s (News - Alert) all-in-one CIC platform in their contact centers first, but once they discover the advantages of the solution’s advanced call routing and unified communications capabilities, they typically abandon their multi-vendor legacy telephone systems and deploy it across the entire enterprise.

 

According to a company press release, Pizza Pizza started using the platform about 10 years ago as part of an effort to migrate to a fully virtualized contact center system capable of supporting remote or home-based agents. The company has reportedly had great success using the platform for this purpose: Not only has it improved hiring and retention rates by moving to a home-based agent model, it has also lowered its overhead costs.

“CIC has enabled us to process more than 30 million orders per year, with 85 percent of those orders taken over the phone by more than 350 work-at-home agents,” said Pizza Pizza’s network telecommunications and security manager, Amar Narain, in the release. “As a result, we’ve been able to attract and retain the highest quality agents for improved customer service, while decreasing overhead costs by more than 25 percent.”

In addition to supporting its remote agents, the platform also supports about 300 agents at Pizza Pizza’s main call centers in Ottawa, Hamilton, Ontario and Edmonton, Alberta.

This VoIP contact center solution, with its all-in-one architecture, enables remote agents to use a session initiation protocol headset or remote connectivity to a home phone or mobile phone without the need for ISDN lines or call routing limitations. It gives remote agents multichannel (including Web chat and e-mail) capabilities, and provides the same functionality as in-office agents, including call processing and recording, back-end database access, and presence management. CIC also enables supervisors to remotely monitor and coach agents in real-time.

According to the release, Pizza Pizza recently expanded its use of CIC to its main corporate office, as well as users at three new offices in Western Canada as a result of a recent pizza chain acquisition. The expansion took place when the company moved its headquarters from downtown Toronto to a new location on the city’s west side.

“By replacing our existing multi-vendor systems with CIC to consolidate all of our locations, we can further reduce costs and improve operational efficiencies,” Narain said. “In addition, we’ll be able to run more accurate reports so we can more effectively share resources across time zones and plan ahead for call spikes.”

Pizza Pizza, which has more than 600 locations across Canada, will also deploy a CIC add-on application called Interaction Recorder to improve agent training and quality assurance.

Interactive Intelligence made news earlier this week when it announced that American Advisors Group, which specializes in reverse mortgages for senior homeowners, is now using Customer Interaction Center, to improve its customer service.