The Interactive Intelligence software suite, Customer Interaction Center (CIC), replaced CAPITAL's Mitel PBX, along with several other telephony products, and today supports the company's 200 contact center agents and an additional 100 business users.

"We had separate solutions for multiple functions, such as voice mail, IVR, dialing, recording and reporting," said CAPITAL's senior director of IT, Doug Scheid. "We needed to consolidate systems so we could more quickly and cost-effectively add functionality and agents as growth demanded."

"Having a multi-product telephony solution made it challenging to consolidate data and run meaningful reports," added CAPITAL's senior vice president of Card Services, Jill Point.

CAPITAL selected CIC over a Mitel upgrade, and instead of solutions from Aspect, Avaya, Cisco and Nortel.

"CIC from Interactive Intelligence proved to be the only solution that could offer interoperability and flexible growth options, along with all the features we needed running on a single platform," Scheid said. "In addition, CIC was the most cost-effective solution and our contract included upgrades -- something most other vendors weren't willing to offer."

Since deploying CIC, CAPITAL has reported improved operational performance -- from faster feature roll-out and better reporting, to improved training and client satisfaction.

"CIC's software-based, all-in-one architecture has enabled us to roll out new features to either or both of our contact center sites - and also add agents -- without integration or hardware headaches," Scheid said.

"Using CIC's single-platform architecture to centralize interaction processing, we can now generate cohesive, detailed reports for single or global site analysis," Point said.

In addition to helping supervisors more effectively coach agents, CIC's automated call recording and quality monitoring has resulted in improved client satisfaction, according to Scheid. "As a credit card outsourcer for large companies like Visa and MasterCard, it's important that our clients know how we're interacting with their customers," he said. "CIC's monitoring capability has helped us demonstrate first-hand that they're getting great service from us; it gives us a lot of credibility."

Currently, CAPITAL uses CIC's IP-based switching, automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, call recording, network-based call routing, outbound dialing, real-time supervision, and reporting. CIC processes about 500,000 inbound calls per month.

The company plans to add CIC's multichannel routing and recording later this year, according to Scheid.