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CUSTOMER INTERACTION MANAGEMENT
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Experience Is Everything
The core of Customer Interaction Management (CIM) contains an advanced management engine that enables you to fully control a universal queue of customer interactions of all
types, including telephone and Interactive Voice Response (IVR), voice mail, email, web chat, web transactions, fax management and agent tasks.
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| Features of CIM |
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CONTACT CENTER
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This fully featured Contact Center Solution integrates seamlessly into your business environment and connects existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions, and other back-office applications, with your contact center, giving you and your agents a complete view of customer interactions. The platform delivers true site-independent universal queuing of all communication types across multiple contact centers, routing them to the most appropriate resource that is available.
Equipped with access to customers through multiple channels, complete interaction histories, comprehensive customer account information and quality service data, your agents can respond promptly and facilitate seamless escalation between qualified channels if necessary. Agents are provided with a consolidated view of all customer interactions, giving them the knowledge and tools to effectively handle any customer inquiry.
Along with traditional multi-channel interactions, CIM supports tasks – activities associated with, or independent of, standard interactions into or out of the contact center. Tasks can be generated by events within the platform or externally (e.g. CRM applications or workflow solutions) and placed in queue and prioritized along with other interactions, such as a call or voice mail. Tasks let the system accurately track the content and time of any agent activity, in a central location.
CIM provides web-based administration, real-time monitoring and a comprehensive decision management system, which allows you to create a complete, customizable picture of how your customer interactions are handled. This gives you the knowledge and tools to make necessary changes to optimize your contact center.
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| Key CIM Capabilities |
• Site-independent universal queuing
• Enterprise-class scalability
• Multi-node resiliency and failover capability
• Global system configuration administration
• Global queuing across all sites
• PBX/IP independence
• Full multi-media contact blending
• Tasks queuing
• Blended inbound and outbound voice
• iVault – complete interaction lifecycle history
• Push/pull interactions
• Customer, skills and proficiency based routing
• Customer segmentation and prioritization
• Open API
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For organizations looking for deeper integrations, Pulse Voice provides Software Development Kits (SDKs) and APIs to support embedded integrations with partner products,
and custom enhancements for customer deployments.
With the power of Customer Interaction Management platform, you will be able to optimize operational efficiency, continuously improve agent performance, reduce costs
associated with customer interactions, increase revenue, and ensure customer loyalty and branding.
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| VOICE |
Intelligent Management for Voice Communications
CIM manages every aspect of voice communications in your contact center and handles inbound calls, outbound calls, voice mail, and abandoned calls, and supports traditional PBX, Centrex, or VoIP environments. The solution uses your data to define customer value or request urgency, and prioritizes every inbound or outbound call based on your business rules.
CIM utilizes IVR, CTI, intelligent routing and management tools to provide cost savings through self-service and agent productivity, and increased customer satisfaction through lowered abandon rates and decreased time-to-resolution.
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| Key Voice Capabilities |
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) provides customer identification and self-service options for frequently
asked questions
• Intelligent Data-directed Routing increases first call resolution by directing the call to the right person
• Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) links to existing enterprise applications to optimize productivity with
real-time screen pops and other
productivity tools
• Queued Voice Mail routes messages to a skill group rather than an individual to decrease follow-up time
• Abandoned Call Management lowers abandon rates by offering self-service options and callback options
• Voice Recording and Quality Monitoring ensures rapid quality assurance or problem resolution via flexible
recording of calls
• Reporting and Performance Monitoring provides visibility to all levels of management and empowers rapid decision making
• Prioritization Rules and Visual Queuing enables timely response to the most important customers and agent empowerment to handle known customers
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| EMAIL |
Efficient and Accurate Rapid Response Application
The core of Customer Interaction Management (CIM) contains an advanced management engine that enables you to fully control a universal queue of customer interactions of all types, including telephone and Interactive Voice Response (IVR), voice mail, email, web chat, web transactions, fax and agent tasks.
The Customer Interaction Management (CIM) email component is an ergonomically designed, rapid-response application for the management of customer email communications. Integrated response libraries, hot-key phrase inserts and dynamically defined message templates all contribute to expediting the correct response to your customers' inquiries. Using the design benefits of CIM, the email component is built on an open, standards-based platform supporting the flexibility, reliability and scalability demanded for mission-critical business applications.
The solution uses the data contained within every inbound email to enable auto-response to frequently asked questions, to provide intelligent or skills-based routing to the right person the first time, and to ensure fast and accurate responses via email or callback.
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| Key CIM Email Capabilities |
• Full-featured email response management solution
• Complete, integrated response libraries, hot-key phrase inserts and dynamically defined message
templates
• Compatibility with all industry standard (SMTP, POP, etc.) mail servers
• Natural Language Processing capability to understand natural language communication and respond
automatically with the appropriate response
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| iVault Technology |
The CIM email component is fully supported by Interaction Vault (iVault), Pulse's dynamic data storage tool that archives contact center interactions of all media types in a single storage and retrieval source. iVault provides a complete history of interaction data for all media types and allows agents and supervisors to display detailed information ona customer's previous interactions including archived transcripts of the native interaction (e.g., recording of the particular interaction between the agent and customer such as voice recordings, email content, web chat content, etc.).
With iVault, customer communications are from a single database source with the ability for agents and supervisors to listen to past phone conversations, read past email and chat interactions or even review voice mail messages based on searchable criteria.
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| Agent Email Handler |
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The Agent Email Handler feature allows agents to receive inbound email interactions and to create and send email replies in response to customer requests of any type. An inbound email is received and classified to determine the procedure for the email, such as assigned to a queue, deleted or sent a reply. The email interaction is stored on the server until an agent takes it from the queue and is tracked using CRM driven business rules and information.
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| Communication Management |
| The inbound and outbound email management process includes intelligent classification or keyword classification, auto acknowledgement, auto-response, auto-suggestions for agents, multi-party email, multi-language email support and many email media productivity tools. |
| Business and Escalation Rules |
| Email interactions are handled according to your center's business and escalation rules. The CIM system ensures the email is responded to within the set time period and escalates the email to the top of the queue, announces it to other agents or sends an alarm to the Supervisor if the email has not been responded to in the designated period of time. |
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| WEB |
Real-time Web Communications
Live, interactive communications with your customers will benefit your business by improving overall contact center efficiency. Interactions increase customer retention and satisfaction, improve agent productivity and provide a more cost effective live communication channel alternative to the traditional phone call. Using new technology for web chat, interactive agent and customer web site browsing and web site requests will allow your customers the flexibility to contact you without hearing a busy signal.
The CIM Web component provides the best tools to facilitate customer exchange using two-way, real-time chat and web site browsing. For situations where human touch is necessary for clear explanations or problem resolutions, the CIM Web component incorporates these live handling tools to provide the highest level of customer satisfaction.
The web interaction component offers an advanced technology solution for live chat interaction, including web collaboration capabilities and telephone callbacks based on requests received through the web site. Using Web Collaboration, agents help guide web site visitors through a web form, complete a purchase or answer questions. Customers can also request an on demand telephone call back from an agent or schedule a time for a call.
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| Key CIM Web Interaction Capabilities |
• Multiple chats per agent
• Chat monitoring
• Barge, page push, page and form web collaboration
• Web requests and scheduled callbacks
• Web media productivity tools
• Secure web chat for private conversations
• Web site telephone on demand and scheduled call back
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| Web Request |
| Web Requests from customers are made through the company's web site and will include a name, phone number, email address and any additional relevant data you would like included. The customer can also enter a text message requesting any type of information, service or issue they may have. The request will have the customer's preferred contact method, such as a reply call or reply email. Customers can also request to delay the response or make the request valid for a limited time period. |
| Web Chat |
| The CIM Web Chat Handler provides the customer a way to communicate, or chat, with the contact center agent using a web browser. The customer-initiated web chat will be placed in the contact center queue until an agent has made contact. |
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| FAX |
Automate the Fax Management Process
CIM Fax enables you to eliminate the pain of handling and passing around paper faxes by completely automating the fax-handling process. The solution includes a software-based Fax Server (or works with your existing Fax Server) to receive multiple inbound faxes simultaneously and intelligently route them to appropriately skilled agents based on your business rules.
Outbound faxes may be sent from any application on the desktop, or may even be sent automatically from the CIM IVR in response to frequently asked questions. Every fax sent or received is tracked and archived to provide a complete picture of your call center as a fax handling environment and to guarantee the quality of your correspondence.
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| Key CIM Fax Capabilities |
• Inbound Fax Routing lowers cost and maximizes accuracy by getting faxes to the right desktop
• Outbound Fax on Demand increases agent productivity through fax automation from any application
• Customer-requested Faxback reduces cost and improves responsiveness through automated self-service fax of commonly requested information
• Fax Archival and History ensures rapid quality assurance or problem resolution via searchable transcripts
• Fax Productivity Tools enable faster, more accurate conversations, targeted to specific customer priorities and needs
• Reporting and Performance Monitoring provides visibility to all levels of management and empowers rapid decision making
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| TASK |
Effectively Track All Agent Activity
CIM Task allows you to prioritize and manage any asynchronous interactions (task activities, offline work, document management, etc.) that may be of business importance to you in your contact center. For example, a task may be created for an agent to start a CRM application, such as Computer Associates, J.D. Edwards, Kana, Onyx, PeopleSoft, Remedy, SAP or Siebel.
Another possible use is to create a task for training purposes. For instance, a difficult email interaction may have been well handled by an agent. As a result, a task may be created to bring up that interaction through the CIM Task Interaction Vault, CIM's dynamic data storage tool that archives contact center interactions of all media types in a single storage and retrieval source. This interaction can then be used in an agent's training class for other agents as an example of how to properly handle an email interaction.
Another use for CIM Task is for performing internal contact center work, such as scheduling a meeting, attending a training session, or completing a daily time report. These types of task interactions can serve as a reminder of things to be done and the time spent performing these tasks can be tracked.
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| Key CIM Task Capabilities |
• Keep tasks visible in the interaction queue
• Launch an external application
• Employ CIM reporting features for off-line interactions
• Apply escalation rules to off-line tasks |
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| REPORTING |
Reporting for Your Contact Center
CIM provides the tools you need to effectively track, monitor, and report on call center management data. CIM solutions for call centers contain powerful historical tools for effectively collecting and managing a wide range of relevant call center management data. Every interaction entering a contact center leaves a trail of data in its wake. CIM historical reporting tools capture and make sense of this data through reports, matrices and customizable parameters.
Engineered with a unique qualitative approach to contact center data, these tools enable businesses to run a contact center with consideration for both efficiency and effectiveness. These tools allow companies to measure performance across all media channels, thus enabling the evaluation of true resource productivity and customer handling. CIM's reporting tools are delivered with several pre-packaged decision support content views and can be customized to support unique business requirements. The system delivers information to all stakeholders inside or outside of the contact center through a web interface.
Used with our real-time management tools, CIM's historical reporting tools enable effective monitoring and control of call center operations because they are based upon rich, real-time and historical data. Pulse provides a solid, quantitative foundation for making call center management decisions and modifications in real-time or over a period of time.
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| Key CIM Reporting Capabilities |
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Collect and manipulate relevant data in historical reports
• Run custom reports or use pre-defined report templates
• Export CIM report data to other sources using Crystal Reports
• Evaluate contact center performance levels against predetermined benchmarks
• Unifies access to business data and contact center performance to assist with the daily operational needs of
a contact center
• Allows custom report development
• Provides start-to-finish reporting infrastructure for information on all aspects of the interaction process
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| SURVEY MANAGER |
Reporting for Your Contact Center
CIM provides the tools you need to effectively track, monitor, and report on call center management data. CIM solutions for call centers contain powerful historical tools for effectively collecting and managing a wide range of relevant call center management data. Every interaction entering a contact center leaves a trail of data in its wake. CIM historical reporting tools capture and make sense of this data through reports, matrices and customizable parameters.
Engineered with a unique qualitative approach to contact center data, these tools enable businesses to run a contact center with consideration for both efficiency and effectiveness. These tools allow companies to measure performance across all media channels, thus enabling the evaluation of true resource productivity and customer handling. CIM's reporting tools are delivered with several pre-packaged decision support content views and can be customized to support unique business requirements. The system delivers information to all stakeholders inside or outside of the contact center through a web interface.
Used with our real-time management tools, CIM's historical reporting tools enable effective monitoring and control of call center operations because they are based upon rich, real-time and historical data. Pulse provides a solid, quantitative foundation for making call center management decisions and modifications in real-time or over a period of time.
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| Survey Manager Features |
By tightly coupling Survey Manager to CIM, the survey becomes part of the customer interaction history in iVault. Close integration means that automated procedures can be invoked based on survey responses. System variables and interaction properties can become part of the survey. This integrated approach provides the best opportunity for soliciting real-time feedback, receiving immediate responses and enabling rapid follow-up. Features of Survey Manager include:
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• Browser-based administration and reports
• Create, test and deploy multiple IVR and Web surveys
• Deploy a single survey to both Web and IVR together
• Define the survey start and end date, or specify the number of responses to collect
• Select survey questions from a library or create your own
• Define actions based on survey responses such as escalation to a manager or schedule a callback
• Review and monitor survey results via Survey Manager or iVault
• Assign surveys to queues, queue groups, itypes or system values
• Define if the survey is to be conducted through agent initiation, callback or using e-mail
• Define custom scoring for each individual survey and question
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| CALL RECORDER |
Contact Center Call and Screen Recording
Your contact center is abundant with data. It comes from many sources—your employees, your customers, and your voice and data networks. By combining call recording technology with quality management tools, speech analytics, surveys, and other useful applications, Call Recorder helps you determine the issues that drive customers to contact you, and enables you to learn from those contacts.
Scalable to meet the need of the enterprise and the SMB, Call Recorder can record calls on a number of different telephone systems, including all those supported by CIM.
Call Recorder is capable of blending different methods of call recording in a single-server. The result is a scalable solution that can grow and evolve with your business. Call Recorder can be configured to record what you need, when you need it—including blended VoIP and TDM recording.
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| Customized Recording |
Call Recorder is a reliable tool for call logging and compliance recording (100% recording), quality monitoring, sales verifications, dispute resolution, and as a coaching and training aid. Beyond that, contact center managers can select what to record and what not to record, based on flexible rule creation. For example, managers can block recording of calls made to states with 2-party recording laws, or restrict playback on portions of recordings that contain sensitive credit card information to comply with PCI standards.
Call Recorder allows the archival period of calls to be defined. Based on your business needs, various subscriptions can be created that define retention periods.
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| Screen Recording |
While you are able to use Call Recorder's screen recording feature to ensure your agents are focused on their job, there are many other benefits desktop screen capture can bring to your business.
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| Identify workflow issues |
Find the people who are most efficient at using your CRM and other desktop applications. Identify your top performers, and use their recorded interactions to coach and train the rest of your staff to reach optimal performance levels. As you gain greater desktop efficiency, you will be able to improve your call handling times, increase First Call Resolution (FCR), and satisfy more customers.
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| Email and Chat Recording |
Call Recorder's screen recording feature can help you monitor and manage email and chat. You can set screen recording based on blocks of time, or you can send automated recording triggers based on activity in third-party applications. The result is an effective solution for monitoring performance of off-phone agents—both in the contact center and in the back office.
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| Augment your Training Curriculum |
With Call Recorder's screen recording feature you can provide greater consistency in your training without investing in a complete online university. Replace the on-the-job training and live monitoring sessions you use in training with recorded calls, pre-screened for content and quality. You will ensure your trainees all learn the same thing, the same way. Your net is higher levels of quality delivered on a more consistent basis.
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| Quality Monitoring |
The case for quality was proven long ago: quality drives customer satisfaction, and customer satisfaction drives repeat sales. With the Quality Monitor feature of Call Recorder managers can be assured that they are taking a critical step to maintain the highest levels of quality.
Every contact center is unique. It takes a thorough understanding of your business drivers to deliver a monitoring program that is appropriate for your company. We will work with you to design the right solution. We take several factors into consideration when we work with you: your existing technology, your performance measurements, your future goals—and, of course, your budget. The result is an effective way to monitor your quality and calibrate to your standards.
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| Custom Evaluation Forms |
Slice and dice your data. With the Composer feature of Call Recorder's Quality Management module you can build multiple evaluation forms. Get started right away building web-based evaluation forms, tests, or quizzes in a matter of minutes. No need to bother your IT staff; you can add questions, sections, or responses to your forms with a click of your mouse.
Build as many custom forms as you need. Each form can have an unlimited number of sections, each section can have an unlimited number of questions, and each question can have an unlimited number of responses.
Choose the weighting for each section, question, and response for dynamic scoring. Use our reporting engine to dive deep into your data, spotting trends at each level of your organization.
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| Integration with CIM |
Call Recorder is deeply integrated with Customer Interaction Management (CIM). Voice and screen recordings are linked to their respective CIM interaction IDs. In addition various interaction properties can be associated with a call for flexible search options. Within Interaction Vault are embedded links to the recording for each interaction. Invoking the link launches the recording for playback. Agents and workgroups are also synchronized between applications: Agent assignments and workgroup configurations made in the main CIM application are automatically reflected within Call Recorder.
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| ADDITIONAL CIM ENHANCEMENTS |
Experience Is Everything
The CIM solution is scalable to meet the needs of a contact center no matter how small or large. CIM is scalable with ability to enhance your solution with additional components to make a truly integrated contact center.
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| iVault |
Pulse understands that communications not only represent what's happening at the present time, they also represent a customer's history and provide a course for future action. As a component of CIM, the iVault module is a unique application for complete Interaction lifecycle history. The browser-based application provides a complete picture of your contact center as an email handling environment and assures the quality of the correspondence. Benefits of iVault include:
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• Record and archive all platform supported interaction types
• Retrieve valuable interaction data quickly and efficiently
• Cradle-to-grave data display including voice and text transcripts
• Displays available customer data during customer follow-up contact
• Review interaction histories as a text display or using an audio playback of interactions
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| Workforce Management |
CIM can integrate with workforce management (WFM) solutions to provide real-time adherence and historical reporting to WFM. Schedules can be created, and agent efficiency can be measured, through the information that CIM passes to the application.
Pulse has performed a deep integration with GMT Planet, a leading workforce management application, to tie CIM and Call Recorder to their award winning product. Workforce Management for Call Recorder provides a holistic view of agent performance by facilitating the integration GMT Planet with Call Recorder's interaction recording and quality monitoring capabilities.
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| Outbound Communicator for CIM |
The delicate balance between maintaining a profitable contact center while providing high levels of service is dependent upon well orchestrated processes and careful staff planning. Maximizing on the resources that are available is critical in achieving that balance and agent productivity is often the tipping point. Contact centers where a considerable number of outbound calls are part of the business process are challenged to sustain those agent productivity levels. All too often, time is spent on manual dialing that can lead to poor agent to live customer connectivity rates - this is a waste of the most valuable and costly resource contact centers have.
Outbound Communicator uses a well-proven predictive dialing technology that carefully monitors agent availability and throttles call pacing automatically as business activities shift either dynamically or based on your schedule. Accurate live voice answer detection eliminates time wasted by agents with false-positive calls to answering or fax machines as well as busy signals. When live contacts are made, service levels remain high as agents are provided with instant updated customer data to their desktop with every call.
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| Support Center |
Support Center is a Java-based program used to automatically apply Partial Release Cycles (PRC) software updates to Customer Interaction Management (CIM). This tool makes the application of PRCs easier and more reliable while eliminating the manual process of updating. Support Center provides a new level of assurance that updates and patches have been applied properly and decrease the overall risk of updating the solution.
Support Center will provide automation and confidence when updating CIM.
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| Key CIM Reporting Capabilities |
• Display release notes for the update
• Validate that the update is applied to the correct version of CIM
• Ensure that the server environment is ready for the update with sufficient disk space
• Perform a back-up of application files to be replaced prior to applying the update to the server
• Warn of customized files to be replaced, separately back them up, and remind to reapply the customizations to the new version of the file
• Perform a list of actions to be taken on a server for review before the update is applied
• Automatically stop CIM services prior to applying the update
• Apply the update and extensively log all actions and any errors
• Automatically roll back the update if it fails and report on the failure and reason for rollback
• Provide a separate history of all updates applied to the server
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Beginning with CIM version 6.6, Support Center is the method by which PRC updates are applied to the application. Additionally, PRC updates to client applications (Agent, Resource Monitor, Application Designer) in all versions are not performed by Support Center.
Support Center enables CIM users to control contact center costs by optimizing the use of resources. Since Support Center provides an automatic process, the application will allow contact centers to reallocate staff time normally reserved for updating. There will be no cost for Support Center to all current CIM clients.
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