Contact center software gains SMS support

Interactive Intelligence feature enables businesses contacting customers and vice versa

Interactive Intelligence is adding Short Message Service support to its Customer Interaction Center call center platform so businesses can provide services to more mobile devices.

The company cites three possible uses for the feature. With the new capability, customers can push information to their clients, such as banks issuing warnings when balances get too low. (Learn more about IP contact centers.)

Second, customers of businesses using the call center platform can send SMS messages to the business, which can be routed to the appropriate agents for response. So travelers might message their travel agents for reminders about the addresses of their hotels. Via a key-word lookup, the message would be routed to an appropriate agent who could message back with the information.

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Interactive Intelligence is adding Short Message Service support to its Customer Interaction Center call center platform so businesses can provide services to more mobile devices.

The company cites three possible uses for the feature. With the new capability, customers can push information to their clients, such as banks issuing warnings when balances get too low. (Learn more about IP contact centers.)

Second, customers of businesses using the call center platform can send SMS messages to the business, which can be routed to the appropriate agents for response. So travelers might message their travel agents for reminders about the addresses of their hotels. Via a key-word lookup, the message would be routed to an appropriate agent who could message back with the information.

Third, customers could create their own SMS applications. Interactive Intelligence has written three that will be available before year-end. One lets users employ SMS to change their presence status. The second lets users query the presence of others via SMS. With the third application, users could use SMS to set up conference calls by messaging the conferencing system with the date, time, duration and participants. The system would reserve the conference ports and send notifications.

Interactive Intelligence says it plans to provide a tool customers can use to create other applications of their own.

The company licenses its technology by media type, so there is a fee for support of voice, e-mail and now SMS. The company doesn't release the price of licensing one media type, but the increase from one to two is $375 and the increase from two to unlimited is $350.

Next year, the company plans to release software to automate business processes within its communication platforms. For example, if a business had a process that involved five departments working on an insurance claim, the automated process would send the relevant documents to the first person. When they signed off on it, the software would automatically move the document along to the next person who needs to work on it and so forth.

Interactive Intelligence says it will provide wizards for customers to make their own workflow applications within its Interaction Center platform.

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