“Interaction Gateway is unique because it provides advanced outbound call analysis -- such as distinction between answering machines versus live speakers, and wrong numbers versus network issues -- while taking full advantage of the open SIP standard,” said Yankee Group senior analyst, Ken Landoline. “Combined, these enhancements result in more effective dialing campaigns, simplified deployment and configuration, lower cost, better redundancy, and unbeatable flexibility compared to traditional outbound dialing solutions.”

According to Interactive Intelligence, the new SIP-based Interaction Dialer can lower costs by between 10 and 50 percent compared to traditional TDM-based dialers by reducing hardware requirements.

The company says Interaction Dialer can reduce costs further using Interaction Gateway at strategic locations to ensure it uses the most cost-effective call routing. To illustrate, in a typical configuration, ISDN PRI trunks from the public phone network are connected to Interaction Gateway. After that point, the entire configuration is voice over IP. This provides unmatched geographic independence. For example, the Interaction Dialer and Gateway servers can be in the U.S., while agents are in India.

“As an outsourced provider of CRM services, our clients drive our technology requirements, and a key requirement across the board is to offer highly customizable services at an affordable price,” said Chris Adomaitis, president of network and telecom services for Dialogue Marketing, an Interactive Intelligence customer since 1998. “Interaction Dialer’s new Gateway option lets us do just that by using a pure softswitch, thus dramatically reducing costs associated with hardware.”

Other Interaction Dialer enhancements include improvements to its patented pacing algorithm, which maintains the optimum balance between low abandon rates and maximum agent utilization; a single “Health View” interface that enables supervisors to monitor and analyze Dialer statistics from campaigns, workflows, and outbound calls; and a “Contact Import Wizard” that simplifies campaign management by providing a tool to import records into call list tables from a variety of commonly used sources, including CSV files, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, SQL Server, and Oracle.

Interaction Dialer was first released in 1999 as an add-on module to the company’s contact center automation software, Customer Interaction Center (CIC). By leveraging CIC’s multi-channel routing, recording, and interactive voice response, Interaction Dialer reduces costs and simplifies infrastructure compared to traditional, standalone dialers. Interaction Dialer, in conjunction with CIC, can also work with existing PBXs and IP PBXs.

In addition to power, preview, predictive, precise, and agent-less dialing, outbound campaign management, and inbound/outbound call blending, Interaction Dialer includes capabilities for telemarketing regulatory compliance, Web-based scripting, campaign staging, real-time supervision and reporting.

A single Interaction Dialer system, along with Interaction Gateway’s “rack and stack” architecture, can support up to 1,000 outbound agents -- more when deploying multiple systems -- while giving multi-site organizations maximum load-balance and fault tolerance capabilities.

Interaction Dialer 2.4 is available immediately and is offered through the Interactive Intelligence channel composed of approximately 250 value-added resellers, and through the company’s direct sales force.

Source: Interactive Intelligence