This article originally appeared in the Aug. 2011 issue of Unified Communications Magazine

Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) has been a leader in promoting the importance of social media as it relates to business, and how organizations can and should respond to and interact with prospects and customers in this new world of social networking.

A key tenet of its strategy on this front is to educate businesses that they need to treat social media interactions as another communications channel. To enable that to happen, Interactive Intelligence has been working on ways to reformat social interactions, like Facebook (News - Alert) posts or tweets, into e-mails and send them its call center solutions. Users of Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Center, or CIC, solutions can then use keywords, sentiment scores or user-related information (such as how many followers/friends the user has) to route that e-mail to the most appropriate call center representative, who can then decide how to respond.

Interactive Intelligence has partnered with Buzzient, which handles the monitoring of Facebook, Twitter (News - Alert) and other social media sites, to enable that. Buzzient provides the Interactive Intelligence call center solutions with e-mails that are scored based on sentiment. Jennifer Wilson, product manager of social media, says that partnership has allowed Interactive Intelligence and its customers get their feet wet to get a sense of demand for these kinds of solutions, their deliverables and what other functionality is desirable.

Now, after having worked with various customers to do trials of this solution, Interactive Intelligence is considering adding other social media monitoring partners to the mix and also expanding its offerings on the CRN side, says Jennifer Wilson, Interactive Intelligence’s product manager of social media. Some customers are interested in having more analytics behind the scenes, she says, so Interactive Intelligence is looking to pull social media interactions, deliver reporting specific to those interactions and potentially even allow contact centers to respond back to social media sites. She adds that some of Interactive Intelligence’s customers have community pages for peer-to-peer discussions, and Interactive Intelligence can provide the tools to monitor those as well.