Introduction to Interaction Director Concepts

Interaction Director is a call routing solution for multi-site contact centers that provides scalable, reliable, and configurable pre- and post-call routing. Director's application-level tools monitor the current load, queue depth, and skill availabilities of call center sites connected by a wide area network. Interaction Director is a stand-alone server that works with Customer Interaction Center (CIC) servers to route each call to the location or agent that can best handle the call. The dedicated Interaction Director server communicates in real time with registered CIC servers in multiple locations, gathering data relevant to entities such as queues; users; workgroups; and skills, and storing the data for quick access when making routing decisions. Customer interactions process promptly and skillfully, no matter where a first available agent is working. 

Director handles both pre-call and post-call routing, using the SIP standard to allow for third-party SIP-based integration. Director's call routing intelligence is important to multi-site call center environments, since Director allows you to use call center agents across locations. Your organization needs intelligent call routing such as Director performs when:

• You want more control over the routing process.

• Downtime is not an option.

• You want to scale operations to meet customer service requirements.

• You want service-level goals to drive queue and site overflow routing.

• You want to optimize WAN bandwidth by deploying local call handling as the primary call handling method.

It is common for organizations to have multiple CIC servers around the world. Each site is a separate, autonomous entity that processes interactions, regardless of what is happening at another contact center. But, what if distributed agents could participate in a single, global contact center?

For example, suppose that a contact center in Chicago has an abundance of incoming customer calls while a sister site in London has idle agents. In this scenario, it is desirable to route surplus calls from Chicago to agents in London. Similarly, your organization can implement "follow the sun" call routing to provide 24-hour service. For example, you can route night calls in the U.S. to agents in Sydney. 

Installation

Once you understand the essential background concepts behind Interaction Director, its key features, benefits, and client/server components, you are ready to read the Interaction Director Installation and Configuration Guide. It explains how to install, configure, and administer an Interaction Director server and its monitored sites.