INDIANAPOLIS—At its Interactions user conference, Interactive Intelligence, a provider of collaboration, communications, and customer engagement software and cloud services, launched PureCloud Engage, a new customer engagement cloud service for contact centers.
PureCloud Engage offers multichannel and skills-based routing, interactive voice response, Web chat, outbound campaign management, multichannel recording and quality management, reporting, CRM integrations, and graphical scripting. It also builds on the features of Interactive Intelligence's Collaboration platform, which includes tools for directories, instant messaging, chat, video, screen sharing, and content management, among others; and its Communication platform, with phone, dialing, conferencing, fax, and voice mail functionality.
Features in development include advanced behavioral analytics to automatically match customers and agents based on personality profiles, geolocation, and automated learning; a feature that will enable customers to browse agent personality profiles to determine the best match and then connect via their preferred communications channels; and additional artificial intelligence, neural networking, and machine learning capabilities that will not only improve the speed and accuracy of speech recognition and analytics but also enable technologies to be more predictive and adaptive.
"Contact centers today are dealing with rapidly changing technology and priorities, budget constraints, aging infrastructure, and the always-on consumer expectation of an immediate response," said Jeff Platón, chief marketing officer at Interactive Intelligence. "PureCloud Engage addresses these challenges with its ability to quickly and cost-effectively deliver highly reliable, scalable, and innovative multichannel applications, while giving contact center managers deep insight into performance and processes."
According to Platón, PureCloud Engage is a continuation of Interactive Intelligence's push to the cloud, which has generated revenue growth of nearly 62 percent for the company in the past year alone. Its communications-as-a-service (CaaS) offering has grown from a $52.2 million business to an $84.2 billion business since the start of 2014.
Tom Fisher, chief services officer at Interactive Intelligence, noted that the company has plans to further expand the global reach of its CaaS offering, which is now being used in 31 countries. Current customers number 3,000, supporting more than 50,000 users and handling more than 17 million phone minutes and roughly 81,000 tickets per month. "We're getting to the point where CaaS is a really healthy area for us," Fisher stated.
In fact, the cloud is driving a shift across the company from a product-centric focus to one that is centered on services, he added. And as that transition happens, Interactive Intelligence is also moving upmarket, expanding beyond small and midsized firms to larger ones with thousands of contact center agents, according to Fisher.
Don Brown, founder and CEO of Interactive Intelligence, echoed that message, noting that though small and midsized firms have been its "sweet spot" for a long time, the company is increasingly winning larger deals. With that in mind, a stated goal for Interactive Intelligence is to "continue increases in scalability" to support large contact centers, Brown said. The ideal, he added, would be to allow 10,000 agents to work on one system.
This year, and moving into 2016 and 2017, the company also aims to expand globally, Brown and other company executives pointed out.
PureCloud Engage is delivered from the PureCloud platform, which runs on Amazon Web Services. The PureCloud user interface currently supports English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, and Mandarin Chinese.
PureCloud Engage will be generally available in North America, Australia, and New Zealand by June 30. General availability is planned for other locations later this year.