VIPdesk, a national provider of virtual concierge services, received the Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) People’s Choice Award for its pioneering use of the vendor’s IP-based business communications software to support its work-at-home customer service reps, called Brand Ambassadors.
VIPdesk was selected for the People’s Choice Award by several hundred of its peers during the Interactive Intelligence annual User Forum held in May in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Using Interactive Intelligence’s software, VIPdesk created a 100-percent virtual workplace comprised of more than 300 home-based customer service representatives called “Brand Ambassadors,” which resulted in increased operational efficiencies and reduced cost, according to VIPdesk president and co-founder, Sally Hurley.
“The Interactive Intelligence software’s unique unified communications architecture gave our home-based Brand Ambassadors™ access to a wide variety of multi-channel applications via a single, intuitive user interface,” Hurley said. “This has resulted in decreased training time, increased productivity, and reduced team frustration by eliminating the need to manage a variety of applications. This ultimately enabled us to retain terrific people who are equipped to deliver an enhanced customer experience.”
VIPdesk deployed the Interactive Intelligence all-software, SIP-based contact center automation product called Customer Interaction Center (CIC), along with add-on outbound dialing and multimedia recording and quality monitoring modules. It also deployed the Interactive Intelligence Interaction Gateway (News - Alert) -- a device enabling connections between traditional telephone trunk lines and voice-over-IP
networks -- along with the vendor’s hosted disaster recovery services.
“Before CIC, our e-mail and Web chat applications were separate from the rest of our system, which made it challenging to route the right interactions to the right Brand Ambassadors,” Hurley said. “CIC’s universal queuing feature, which runs on the same platform as its multimedia recording, reporting and other applications, enables us to set routing rules across interaction types and then monitor them. The net result is that our work-at-home team is more productive, our customers are better served, and our quality standards are maintained. In addition, fewer devices to install, integrate, and manage have helped us lower costs.”
Hurley noted that CIC has met the company’s objectives since installing it in 2003 when VIPdesk replaced its existing hosted soft-switch that supported a partial virtual workforce. “We were driven to find a new solution based on the need for more control over customization of applications, and the speed with which we rolled out new programs for premium brands,” she said. “CIC has addressed these challenges with its unified, open, software-based architecture that empowers us to quickly create applications, and easily administer and manage the system remotely based on dynamic, high-end client requirements.”
CIC continues to have a positive effect, as VIPdesk plans to grow its home-based staff to several thousand by next January 2008.
Spencer Chin is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
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