Canadian-based outsourcer Nordia, received the Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) Inc. Innovators Award last month for its IP-based deployment of the vendor’s unified, “all-in-one” contact center automation software.
An Interactive Intelligence customer since 2000, Nordia deployed the vendor’s SIP-based Customer Interaction Center (CIC) software to support one of the largest IP
migration projects in Canada, involving five distributed contact centers and 2,200 agents handling 100 million customer contacts per year.
Of its 2,500 global customers, Interactive Intelligence gives the Innovators Award to one end-user annually, based on the most unique and extensive use of the company’s software, along with the ability to show tangible results.
According to Interactive Intelligence, Nordia best met these award criteria with a “virtualized” voice-over-IP network which reaped a return on investment in less than six months; reduced contact center services deployment time from several weeks to less than one week; and boosted annual revenue by 25% through improved operational efficiencies. It also decreased costs, including a reduction of 15% of its T1 lines – the equivalent of nearly $100,000 annually.
Nordia was also able to pass along a $500,000 annual reduction in toll charges to one of its clients, and the company eliminated the investment required to open a new site by improving remaining capacity utilization. Furthermore, a teleconferencing add-on module that the company integrated to CIC called the “Nordia Teleconferencing Solution,” which has generated revenue of $10,000 per month, realized a return on investment in just over a month.
“We selected the Interactive Intelligence software based on its end-to-end SIP support, its flexible, single-platform architecture, and its breadth and depth of applications,” said Nordia’s vice president of information technology, Pierre Grimard. “By fully exploiting these attributes we’ve been able to deploy a ‘future-proofed,’ cost-effective, and truly innovative IP-based solution that provides maximum benefit to our clients.”
Nordia uses CIC’s full breadth of applications to optimize agent productivity, including automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, conferencing, outbound dialing, multimedia recording and logging, and supervisory monitoring.
“Nordia’s deployment is not just impressive due to its size and extensive use of IP, but because of how the company has used CIC’s flexible customization options,” said Interactive Intelligence founder and CEO, Dr. Donald E. Brown. “For instance, Nordia uses CIC to route not just calls, but ‘generic objects,’ such as Web-based trouble tickets. It also uses TTY, a telecommunications device for the deaf, so CIC can process interactions from the hearing impaired. Through innovative uses of CIC such as these, Nordia has taken full advantage of the kind of customer empowerment we believe is the hallmark of our offering.”
Through CIC, Nordia has centralized its multi-site operations through functionality such as common agent queues, which links agents across multiple contact centers, making more agents available to handle interactions, and enabling them to request supervisor assistance regardless of location. This centralized functionality has also enabled Nordia to simplify IT administration and management, according to Grimard.
“In our world of multiple services and sites, it would’ve been incredibly expensive to integrate and upgrade duplicate systems,” Grimard said. “This is compounded by the complexity associated with maintaining things like duplicate call routing rules. Using CIC running on IP to ‘virtualize’ our network, we were able to eliminate this cost and complexity, which has directly resulted in reduced staffing requirements and shorter hold-times.”
Spencer Chin is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
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Transmission Level 1 (T1) | X |
| A T-1 is connected between a Class 5 Central Office and Customer Premise Equipment switching system such as a PBX or ACD or data communications system such as a router, Frame Relay Access Device, etc....more |
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) | X |
| SIP is the real-time communication protocol for VoIP. SIP is a signaling protocol for Internet conferencing, telephony, presence, events notification (emergency calling) and instant messaging.
SIP...more |
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 |
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) | X |
| A hardware- or software-based computer system that enables incoming callers to interact with voice prompts or verbal commands....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 |
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