Contact centres become a cloud architecture

Pulling together many of the components and service functions that are needed to ensure a business can provide its customers with a good experience of its contact centre services and capabilities is the goal Interactive Intelligence has set itself with the launch of PureCloud.

This is a a suite of cloud-based services for communications, collaboration and customer engagement that, together, form a new distributed cloud architecture built to run on Amazon Web Services. It is designed to provide rapid deployment, maximum reliability, and unlimited scalability, while connecting customers and employees in new, more efficient ways.

“Many of the current cloud-based communications offerings are far from enterprise-grade,” said Dr. Donald E. Brown, Interactive Intelligence founder and CEO. “Most of them leave their customers dead in the water if Internet connectivity is lost or the service itself is interrupted. PureCloud, however, was designed to handle the scalability, reliability and security needs of the largest global organisations.

“With PureCloud, organisations also have the option to deploy Edge devices within their networks that enable them to continue to operate even if the Internet is unavailable, and also to keep voice traffic on their networks rather than passing it over the public Internet.”

PureCloud services will encompass unified communications, contact centre automation, document management, and workflow. In addition, all PureCloud applications, interfaces and management tools were created using the latest Web design methods for maximum ease of use.

The service is created from a number of individual components, including  Interactive Intelligence PureMatch, which the company claims is a first of-its-kind matching scheme that dynamically matches customer interactions with contact centre agents based on multiple attributes and criteria.

It also offers a Social Customer Service, which enables customers to view agent profiles and performance – including their service ratings and wait time – then choose the agent best qualified to assist them, and a rich corporate directory that makes available deep user profile content (e.g. skills, work experience, location, etc.), and provides bi-directional synchronisation with popular systems such as Active Directory, Exchange, WorkDay, SharePoint, and Salesforce. This feature includes native mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 8 Phone.

PureCloud also offers IP PBX, unified messaging, instant messaging, presence management, conferencing, persistent group chat, fax, video, and other UC features that run across Web browsers, smartphones and tablets.

Its contact centre features include automatic call distribution, voice self-service/IVR, call recording, Web chat, workforce optimisation, automated outbound dialling, and integration with multiple customer relationship management systems.

PureCloud joins Interactive Intelligence’s on-premises communications software suite, Customer Interaction Center (CIC), and its single-tenant communications as a service offering, Interactive Intelligence CaaS. Several of the PureCloud services will be available as add-ons to both CIC and CaaS.

“We now offer customers a mature, premises-based solution, as well as both single-tenant and multi-tenant cloud services,” Brown said. “Our aim is to provide everything organisations need for communications, collaboration, and customer engagement, in whatever way they want it delivered.”

PureCloud is scheduled for general availability throughout the U.S. in Q4 2014. Service initiation in other geographies is scheduled to begin in 2015, along with availability of additional PureCloud application services.

PureCloud will be offered through the Interactive Intelligence channel of approximately 350 resellers worldwide, and through the company’s direct sales force.