January 1999

Price: Cost for a typical business user runs between $1,000 and $2,000 per seat. Cost for a call center user runs between $3,000 to $5,000 per seat, depending on the number of incoming lines and users.

Anyone who has been to a CTI-related show lately has undoubtedly noticed crowds gathering around Interactive Intelligence's booth where they demonstrated their EIC (Enterprise Interaction Center) product. In fact, at CTI™ Expo in San Jose, California, the crowd was so thick, people were jostling each other for a better position to see the demonstration of the EIC system! With all this excitement, TMC™ Labs thought our readers would like to get a bit more insight into this product than what could be garnered from the exhibit booth demonstration (assuming you could see the demo through the crowd).

TMC™ Labs is quite familiar with Interactive Intelligence's product, which is a very powerful and feature-rich PC-based PBX system. This product turns a Windows NT server into a comprehensive communications system specifically targeted at call centers and other interaction-intensive organizations. The Enterprise Interaction Center is a complete package that features PBX, ACD, IVR, voice mail, fax server and CTI functionality all in one system.

Of course, we all know the trials and tribulations of trying to integrate multiple telephony systems from different vendors or even the same vendor. The beauty of the EIC system is that all of this functionality is integrated on one system from just one vendor. This reduces multivendor integration hassles and makes a single vendor the only source of contact for any issues that may arise. Thus, having all of this CTI functionality integrated onto a single platform will make VARs, interconnects, resellers and MIS folk extremely happy. One obvious advantage of a centralized platform is administration, including setting up mailboxes, ACD queues and the IVR all from the same GUI interface. In addition, having ACD, IVR, voice mail and other CTI functionality on a single platform gives you extremely powerful reporting functionality. For instance, you can report on how many calls a call center agent takes in a day or the average wait time (ACD-related), as well as report on DNIS or IVR menus traversed (IVR-related). Since very detailed data on each call is recorded, it's possible to cross-reference or aggregate data across different telephony subsystems to create very powerful and useful reports.

Road Trip!
Due to the complexity of the EIC system, both Interactive Intelligence and TMC™ Labs agreed it would be easiest for TMC™ Labs to travel to Interactive Intelligence's development lab in their Florida office to view and test the EIC system. In this particular instance, I (Tom Keating, executive technology editor of TMC™ Labs) volunteered to head down to sunny Florida, leaving the other technology editors behind to review other products. (I think I got the better deal!)

As part of this road trip, I also visited inbound teleservices agency NTS Marketing in Lynchburg, Virginia, which had replaced their existing phone system with Interactive Intelligence's EIC system. Since it is sometimes difficult to determine the full functionality of call center products in a lab setting, I felt a real-world look at the EIC system within a live call center was in order. Thus, you will notice that this onsite demo is complemented with an application story about NTS Marketing's implementation of the EIC system.

The Architecture
The EIC system is a multi-threaded, Java-based engine capable of processing thousands of telephone calls, e-mail messages, faxes, Internet chats, Web callback requests, Internet telephony calls and other interactions per hour. Unlike traditional ACDs (automatic call distributors), EIC can queue and distribute not only incoming telephone calls, but also e-mail, faxes, chat sessions and Internet telephony calls. Since each type of customer request is treated the same and put into EIC's queue, customers can receive the same level of service regardless of how they choose to interact with the organization.

One really nice feature of the EIC system is a built-in graphical application generator called Interaction Designer. This app-gen is the "core" of the EIC system, which helps make Interactive Intelligence's PC-based PBX system so powerful and flexible. The built-in app-gen provides the flexibility to customize dial plans, ACD routing rules, IVR paths, fax-on-demand applications, automated e-mail services and other functionality as well. Interaction Designer comes with hundreds of building blocks (drag and drop icons in the development environment) covering telephony, fax, e-mail, Internet, database access, string handling and others, which are used to create complex call center and CTI functionality.

Enterprise Interaction Center can support from 200 to 300 users on a single Windows NT server. Multiple servers can be connected together to support distributed organizations. EIC can also provide IVR, ACD, unified messaging, CTI and Web services in conjunction with legacy PBXs.

The Graphical User Interface
Managing incoming calls, viewing the queues, dialing, transferring and conferencing is accomplished with an application called Interaction Client. One important thing to note is that administrators have the capability to hide certain tabs from users, preventing them from accessing sensitive information. Sophisticated incoming call handling allows users to see who is calling in to them, even if they're already on the phone. Using the GUI, you can take the call, transfer it, send it to voice mail, etc.

Interaction Client communicates in real-time with the EIC server via TCP/IP, providing dynamic work-group and queue monitoring that can be easily displayed by clicking on the appropriate tab. Interaction Client also has the ability to perform screen pops of virtually any application, including help desk and customer service products from Software Artistry, Remedy, Vantive, Clarify and others. The new Java version of Interaction Client endows Java-based network computers (NCs), Java stations and NetPCs with these same capabilities. This may become more important in the future as "thin-client computing" starts to be more accepted. Certainly, the call center that has requirements for hundreds of PCs will be one of the first adopters of less expensive network computers or thin-client computers.

Usability
From an administrator's point of view, considering its complexity, the EIC system is pretty easy to manage, although setting up the system the first time can be quite a chore. For instance, setting up and designing customized handlers (the term Interactive Intelligence uses for call-flow routing programs) to accommodate your company's business rules may require a specialized VAR's assistance. However, once the system is set up, including all the handlers, the administrator can easily monitor, in real-time, statistics such as number of calls in queue and other vital information. One of the main screens for configuring and administering the EIC platform is performed from a very user-friendly and colorful Explorer/tree-like interface.

While I was visiting Interactive Intelligence's office in Florida, one of their engineers showed me some sample handlers, which were running in their development labs. The development lab contained several EIC systems. The main EIC system was running EIC v1.14, with five dual T1 spans, for a total of 240 channels and 144 extensions, contained in an equipment cabinet. The inside of the Alliance server featured Dialogic T1 cards interconnected by an SCSA bus cable.

On this monstrous EIC system, I played around in the Interactive Designer, which is the development environment, dragging tool steps (icons) from the palette of tools and interconnecting each tool step with lines. Basically, the development environment is a powerful application generator, allowing you to play prompts, get digits, perform conditional branching, perform database lookups and other telephony and CTI-related functions.

A corporation's business rules can also be coded from the Interactive Designer. For example, you can set up a rule in Interactive Designer to do the following: Suppose a customer traverses the IVR and ends up in a submenu titled "CTI Expo Conferences," and then requests to speak to an agent. This customer most likely wants to know about the conference speakers, tracks and pricing. You can set a rule in Interactive Designer to automatically fax or e-mail to this person the information while the customer is on the phone and even before the call is answered by an agent. To further expand upon this point, you would also be able to see if this customer is a VIP customer and play a specialized prompt, such as "Due to your high standing within our organization, we are offering you a 20 percent discount on the normal rate." Thus, using Interactive Designer, you can design your telephony equipment to be dictated by business rules, which is often a problem with traditional IVR, ACD and PBX equipment, especially since these systems are often not integrated with each other. This functionality is the beauty of the EIC system.

Within the development environment, configuring each icon required a double-click on the icon to bring up the properties for that icon, or right-clicking and choosing properties. Right-click functionality is a favorite tool of mine, especially in development environments, so I commend Interactive Intelligence for implementing right-click functionality throughout much of the product. The development area has a nice clean design and the tool steps are well-organized into tabs. One minor complaint is that when interconnecting icons using lines, the screen can get cluttered with lines, which cannot be manually adjusted. Overall, the development environment is surprisingly easy to use, considering the complexity of applications (and business rules) you can develop using Interactive Designer.

From a user's point of view (typically a call center agent), the graphical user interface used to handle calls (the Interaction client) will be well-liked. The first tab of the Interaction Client interface is where call center agents will typically spend the majority of their time, since most of the information they will need is contained on this screen. On each incoming call sent to an agent, information about the call is displayed, such as which queue this call is from, the name of the caller, phone number, duration, state of the call and more. Transferring or conferencing the call can also be done from this first tab. This user-friendly interface includes a "Company Directory" for transferring calls to another person within the organization. Changing current status from "available" to "unavailable" can be done from a simple drop-down box, as well.

Voice mail and faxes (unified messaging) are handled through the e-mail client, since EIC integrates with Exchange. Although EIC currently supports only Exchange, I am told that in version 2.0 they will be adding support for Notes/VIM.

Features
Advanced CTI functionality includes enhanced desktop call control via the Interaction Client. Interaction Client is an agent-side application that turns any PC running Windows 95/98 or Windows NT into a graphical communications console from which the user can interact with the world. Telephone actions such as dialing, transferring and conferencing become simple drag-and-drop operations. Sophisticated incoming call handling allows users to see who is calling in to them - even if they're already on the phone - and allows them to take the call, transfer it, send it to voice mail, etc.

With Interaction Client's standard features, you can:

• Mute calls when transferring,
• Record a call as a WAV file,
• Support 200 to 300 users on a single Windows NT server,
• Have unified messaging,
• Enjoy advanced CTI features, including Caller ID, ANI, DNIS, intelligent call-routing and more.

Options that are customizable via the Interaction Designer app-gen include:

• ACD routing rules,
• IVR,
• Fax-on-demand,
• Automated e-mail services,
• Hundreds of building blocks covering telephony, fax, e-mail, Internet, file I/O, database I/O, string handling and many others.

Some new features in EIC 2.0 over EIC 1.0 include:

• Support for H.323 VoIP standard and the ability to compress voice traffic down to as little as 2.4 kilobits per second,
• A Java-based supervisory console which provides a graphical "dashboard" view of any number of important operational parameters such as call abandon rates, queue sizes, line utilization and much more. As a Java application, this console can be run from anywhere in the world over a simple IP connection,
• The ability for a supervisor to not only listen to and record a call, but view, in real-time, the screen of the agent or user handling it.

Room For Improvement
Although right-clicking works quite extensively in the Interactive Client, I noticed that in the Administration application, right-clicking was not available. "Right-click junkies" like me would like the option available to use a right-click. In the Interactive Designer, I'd like to be able to manually adjust the lines to have a "cleaner" design. Also, in the Interactive Designer, I would like the ability to "jump" to any icon, using "CNTR-J" for instance, and then entering a number. This would "pan" the screen appropriately and center the icon I chose. Thus, if I spend hours developing an application in the Interactive Designer, I will know roughly which icon number I need to jump to since the icons are numbered sequentially in the order you place them on the screen. This "jump" feature would allow for quicker access to where I need to "pan" the screen, rather than using the mouse to pan around the screen to find the icon I am looking for.

There are a couple of ways to conference callers with EIC. One shortcut is when you drag and drop a caller to a third party, the caller is "transferred" to the third party. This is fine by itself, although intuitively I felt dragging and dropping a caller on top of a third party might mean you wish to conference the call. Perhaps Interactive Intelligence can borrow from Windows Explorer's bag of tricks and allow the user to hold the CTRL key to conference the call. In Windows Explorer, if you don't hold the CTRL key when dragging and dropping a file, it performs a "move." If you do hold the CTRL key down, it performs a "copy." Similarly, if a user drags and drops the caller with the CTRL key down, it will perform a "conference call" (similar to a "copy" function). Likewise, if you don't hold the CTRL key down, the call will be "transferred" (similar to a "move" function).

Conclusion
The bottom line in any call center is to assist customers in an efficient and cost-effective manner. A call center is a very complex entity, requiring complex telephony systems including ACDs, IVRs and voice-mail systems, along with CTI functionality to help reduce talk time and hold time and improve customer service. CTI certainly has helped the call center agent become more productive, and so we can expect more CTI systems implemented in call centers. Interactive Intelligence's CTI product, Enterprise Interaction Center, is one extremely nice solution for call centers looking for a feature-rich PC-based PBX system complete with full CTI functionality all in one box. TMC™ Labs has nothing but good things to say about this powerful CTI system. In fact, we were so impressed by it that it won Overall Product of the Year of 1998 in our sister publication, CTI� magazine. I feel this product is a great solution for any call center and hence Interactive Intelligence's EIC product merits a C@ll Center Solutions™ Editors' Choice Award.

NTS Marketing, an inbound teleservices agency, originally employed a Teloquent system with ISDN-BRI lines to handle incoming and outgoing calls. The Teloquent system met many of NTS Marketing's needs, however, NTS Marketing began to experience lost calls due to incompatible ISDN signaling with their local carrier (Centrex-based ISDN) and the Teloquent switch. Dropped calls and lack of results remedying the situation were main reasons NTS Marketing decided to look for another switch.

In their search for a new phone system, NTS Marketing had three important criteria. The new system would need to possess:

1. Absolute flexibility and control,
2. Plug-in technologies and enhancements/upgrades (no more "forklift upgrades"), and
3. Industry-standard parts and designs - no more closed boxes and "special cards."

Their search ended after seeing a demonstration of Interactive Intelligence's EIC product at a trade show. NTS personnel in attendance were very impressed with the functionality and flexibility Interactive Intelligence's EIC product possessed. They felt the EIC system met all three criteria, and then some. After returning from the trade show, the employees who saw the demo told some high-level NTS Marketing employees about what they saw. However, the people they told didn't believe that such an open and flexible PBX system existed. Even the employees who actually saw the demo were a bit skeptical about what they saw, so they scheduled a meeting with Interactive Intelligence to see the demo again. After seeing the demo a few times, NTS Marketing told me that it really "sunk in" that this was the solution they were seeking.

Several key features were needed before NTS Marketing decided to use the EIC system. They included: reliability, scalability and flexibility. NTS Marketing knows the value of customer service and the need to have 100 percent uptime if a call center is to be respected and successful. For "reliability," the EIC system features a fault-tolerant Alliance Systems server with inherent "reliability," which features RAID disk arrays, rackmount capabilities and dual redundant power supplies. For additional reliability and uptime, you can connect multiple EIC servers in case one server fails (automatic failover). Normally, "scalability" is scoffed at when people discuss PC-based PBXs (comm servers). However, the EIC system can handle multiple dual-span T1s and many extensions. NTS Marketing also wanted the ability to scale the system to handle 10,000+ calls per day. With their current EIC implementation, they are handling from 10,000 to 12,000 calls per day! How's that for a PC-based PBX solution? (Note: Interactive Intelligence claims they have tested 7,000 calls per hour in their testing facility in Indianapolis.) The final area NTS Marketing felt was extremely important was "flexibility," and certainly the EIC system had this covered with its application generator which allows you to easily create customized applications.

The actual implementation at NTS Marketing consists of seven T1s, which soon will be eight, along with 136 stations, all connecting to a single EIC system running on an Alliance Systems server. NTS Marketing also has a standby EIC system, which they use mostly for development work.

Since NTS Marketing had a legacy application developed in-house for the call center agents using FoxPro, they didn't use the Interactive Client directly for handling calls. Instead, there are open "hooks" into the Interactive Client, which NTS Marketing uses to perform call handling from their legacy application. Thus, NTS Marketing was able to protect their investment in their application while still retaining the capabilities of the EIC system. NTS Marketing does, however, make use of the Interactive Client for the call center managers to monitor and manage the call queues.

The EIC system has extensive security features. One interesting security feature is the ability to apply security rights on each queue such that only authorized personnel can listen in on any particular call in any given queue. NTS Marketing told me that this was an invaluable feature to have, since often their important clients visit their office and want to hear how their customers are being treated by NTS Marketing's call center agents. Since NTS Marketing services many clients, often from competing companies, granting a client access to just their queue with the ability to monitor calls is certainly a powerful feature.

NTS Marketing wrote an interesting handler (as Interactive Intelligence calls the EIC call flow routing programs) which helped reduce their billable telecommunications minutes. Essentially, a customer of NTS Marketing (for confidentiality's sake, we'll call them Acme Insurance) publishes a phone number that, when dialed, is serviced by NTS Marketing's PC-based PBX (the EIC system). Based on DNIS (dialed number identification service), the EIC system can determine how the call should be handled. If the DNIS number happens to match Acme Insurance's published phone number, then the Acme Insurance's auto-attendant greeting is played to the caller. Then, based on the account number entered or other information entered by the caller, the final stage of every call is to transfer the call to one of several 800 numbers owned and operated directly by Acme Insurance.

Now, if the call needs to be transferred to an AT&T 800 number, the handler does a flash hook, followed by DTMF digits "*8" and then the 800 number. The call is then released to AT&T's network. This is great for NTS Marketing since the phone charges then continue from the originating call to the final destination 800 number, and the middleman, NTS Marketing, is not billed for the rest of the call.

NTS Marketing told me they can do many things with the EIC system that they only dreamed about before. According to Charlie Judd, CEO of NTS Marketing, "The sky's the limit…if we wanted to do 'group fax' before - no way - integrated e-mail/voice mail/fax mail - got it now. Most important, before we were dependent on the local exchange carrier, now we have control." NTS Marketing has created several custom applications (handlers) that have improved productivity and customer service. Their handlers:

• Generate a "hotFAX" and "hotEMail" to the caller, while they are still on the phone, for things like directions to an event, order confirmations, etc.,
• Schedule reports to run automatically,
• Route calls based on not only the skill of the agent, but on proficiency and desire to use,
• Use least-cost routing for outbound, or as needed using specific client-owned trucks,
• Pass caller-entered information (in the IVR stage of the call) to the agent, eliminating the need to capture information again,
• Systematically record calls for QA and verification based on parameters for the project - example: every call for queue "A" and every 10th call on queue "B" and "on demand" for Agent "X,"
• Using lookup services, ANI information can be used to pull information to the agent screen as the call is ringing in,
• Filter out calls from phone numbers that have been tagged as obscene, and
• Play client/project-specific greetings or even music-on-hold, based on the day of the week and time of day.

According to NTS, support from Interactive Intelligence has been ongoing after the sale. "They don't sell you and forget you," said NTS Marketing's CIO, Christopher Judd. "We have, as do all EIC customers, the ability to send in ideas and suggestions via their Web site and know that people at Interactive Intelligence look at them and respond - that's important.

"Room for growth and not being locked into current technology was also very important. We wanted to be able to stay ahead of the curve and on the leading edge. We can expand into emerging integration of Web-chat, e-mail and voice calls in the same calling queues. And as new things appear on the scope, we can plug them in, either through EIC or through our own development system and integrate the two as one.

"Being NT-based gives us the ability to do things 'outside the box,' like multiple monitor displays, setting any station to record or listen to a call based on defined (and changeable) security settings, customizing reports with familiar tools we use and using sound editing tools to tweak and fine-tune the recordings used in IVR. With more and more enhancements and features in the upcoming versions, it's an impressive system for sure."

NTS Marketing has a very friendly, family-type atmosphere within their organization, which is probably due to the father-and-son team of Charles and Chris Judd, who are in charge of the company. So, if you are interested in hearing more about NTS Marketing's implementation of the Interactive Intelligence system, give NTS Marketing a call - I'm sure they'd be happy to tell you about it. And don't forget to tell them Tom Keating sent you!