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Benefits of Using Interaction Director

Interaction Director provides pre- and post-call routing for CIC-based call centers. Its sophisticated pre-call routing algorithm uses carrier-defined protocols to examine incoming calls while they are still in the telephone network, before incurring any connection charges. Director tracks queue depths, agent availabilities, and skill profiles of all connected call centers and analyzes this information to decide how to route incoming calls.

Director enhances existing CIC servers to define site-specific call handling rules. These rules determine when Interaction Director can intervene to post-route a call from one CIC server to another. Director is customizable. You can manage most settings in Interaction Administrator—CIC's central configuration program. Director also capitalizes on the full power of Interaction Designer—CIC's graphical application generator that allows handler designers to create arbitrarily complex routing rules.

For more information about Interaction Administrator, see the Interaction Administrator Help. For more information about Interaction Designer, see the Interaction Designer Help.

Interaction Director helps organizations meet service level and reliability goals across multiple call center locations—Director packs a lot of intelligent routing punch! Its routing rules ensure the most appropriate call handling for a wide variety of situations. The major benefits that Director provides to an organization are:

Benefit	Description
Director counters threats to service level adherence	Director enhances your response to system and site outages, while load-balancing calls across sites. It uses automatic switchover and dynamic audio processing to protect a system. Director never routes calls to a "down" system or site. It watches the status of sites; agents; and their skills, and uses this information to route calls intelligently. Director's dynamic pre-call routing load balances incoming traffic to comply with service level goals.
Consistent handling of interactions	When you define exactly how to route interactions in specific situations, Interaction Director helps you focus on your primary objectives, such as service levels. Director's multi-site routing improves agent availability and productivity, while minimizing the effect of weather, holidays, and situations that affect contact center operations adversely.
Reliability and disaster protection	Interaction Director helps you meet your up-time goals by allowing distribution of calls across your organization. Interaction Director knows which locations are operational and which aren't, and routes calls intelligently to avoid site and system outages.
Real-time monitoring and comprehensive reporting	Director monitors and logs interactions that it handles. Whether monitoring service levels in real-time or running reports, Interaction Director simplifies the process of managing distributed call center work. You can view Director statistics in real-time using Interaction Supervisor.
Balance customer interactions across multiple physical locations	This feature allows you to maintain customer service levels more effectively and allows distributed operations centers to take greater advantage of specific employee skills and available labor pools.
Scale your organization to greater size	Using multiple locations allows your organization to scale to a greater size without the usual physical or technological constraints.
Avoid problems with built-in fault tolerance and disaster recovery	Dispersed operations provide built-in fault tolerance and disaster recovery. For example, if one location goes offline because of electrical, telecommunications, or network outages, your other locations can receive the remaining interactions automatically without causing total catastrophic failure.
Route calls according to specific agent skills	Calls can route exclusively to locations where specific agent skills are present, allowing a group of smaller physical call center locations to respond in the same way as large contact centers. Skills-based routing sends calls to agents who have particular skills, such as the ability to speak an alternate language, or knowledge of a particular product line. Skill-based routing sends customers to the agent best qualified to process the call.