Interactive Intelligence Reviews

This is an omnichannel contact center solution catering to different kinds of channels, whether they are emails, chats, calls, or generic objects, like web objects which can be routed as an interaction. I've worked with it in several sectors, including healthcare, banking, and retail businesses. From their mobile apps, we've worked with integrated group chats and custom menu-driven chat bot solutions in the healthcare sector. That included outbound dialing for appointment confirmation and on-call access to rostered doctors. It also includes confirmation calls for transactions. I'm CX team lead and we are partners with Interactive Intelligence. We are based in the Middle East. 

Being able to automate aspects such as outbound confirmation calls has saved us a lot of time and money. We've been able to develop patient relationship management systems so that when a patient calls we can see all appointments and stats including sick leave and recent doctors' appointments. It has increased customer satisfaction. The same applies to financials and integration with CRM Dynamics, Microsoft 365, and other products. We were able to incorporate all of these things into the workflow, making everything more intuitive and seamless. 

The best thing about this solution is the customizability because it can be integrated with pretty much anything. There are many solutions that are black boxes and we're unable to make any modifications to the call flows. With Interactive Intelligence, we can utilize APIs and variables. With the REST call, you can send a request and response. Elements can be incorporated into the workflow based on the response. This is the go-to thing with Interactive Intelligence.

The Interactive Intelligence is quite user friendly. And Avaya, in that case, is not that great solution, on user friendliness. Basically, yeah, the same purpose I've used, but you need more expertise to manage the product.

And Interactive Intelligence is one box. It contains a lot of features and we don't need to have much resources. But Avaya and others have many servers to be maintained with a single solution. It has a CN. You have to go for session manager and lots of other product servers. So, for a single solution, you need to maintain a lot of servers. This is more or less an easy environment to manage, but Avaya is very complex on the architectural level.

The problem with this current system is that the support is not great. It's likely that the product will be discontinued by the end of 2025 which is probably why it's not sufficiently supported. There are some market restrictions in the Middle East due to security issues so the cloud-based solution is not appropriate for us. I'd like to see better reporting and a proper dashboard. The CS Insights dashboard is a total failure and actually affected the company's reputation.

I've been using this solution for eight years. 

As a product, it's very stable but you have to take care of the environment. You need to ensure that the NIC or the DCPU IDs don't change while rebooting. Some precautions are required but they generally relate to the network because this is software that runs on top of either a VM or a physical machine.

The solution is pretty scalable. I don't think there is any limitation as long as you have the right resources and you allocate appropriately for your VMs. I've been running anywhere from five agents up to 800 agents and it does quite well as long as you have enough media service to handle the calls.

Because they're phasing the product out, Genesys is not putting anything into support. The expertise isn't there.

Neutral

The initial setup is very quick. If everything is in order, we can implement in a day or two. Customization can take longer depending on the business requirements. Deploying can be done by one person as long as they are familiar with implementing the product. The same applies to maintenance. We're likely to expand our usage of Interactive Intelligence. It's a vital, core system, both as a customer point contact center solution, CX solution, and also as part of a financial banking solution.

It saved us a lot of money in the healthcare sector but the main ROI is in customer satisfaction. 

Licensing is subscription-based licenses and I'm unaware of the cost. There are other solutions, such as Avaya, that are more expensive and Genesis, which is cheaper. If you buy the basic products, there are add-ons such as dialers that cost extra. If you plan to use analyzers for word spotting that will also affect the cost. 

We looked at Avaya and 3CX but the products were not sufficiently mature and didn't have sufficient features or flexibility. I have used Avaya on-prem. There are some pros and many cons. It's a stable product. It's a stable product for contact center. But there are not much customizations that could be done.

My advice is to integrate the solution with the activity directory and use the infrastructure as much as possible because you don't need to know the specs for the project servers which you don't own. Try to be optimal. Most people don't utilize the capability of the service because it's expected that there'll be more load and resources are piled up on the service, which will never be utilized most of the time. It's better to calculate it properly and then allocate the resources to optimal need. Even if you initially provision it, check your logs or your statistics and whether it is underperforming or performing based on your resources, scale up or down as needed. Don't over-provision to the server.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

It is for integration, an omnichannel solution, that you can get interactions with Voice, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, social media integrations, chat integrations, and email integrations. That's the feature of the solution.

The social media integration is excellent. Nowadays, people communicate just with WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, and most of the campaigns that you get are via social media. Only the old people, like 60 years or 50 years are still using a lot the phone as it's easier for them. That was their life. Nowadays, the new generations, younger people, are using more social media and they are communicating with this, not just with the phone.

The solution is stable.

It's a scalable product.

The initial setup can be a bit difficult. It is complex for a regular person, however, for an engineer, it's easier.

The programmability is not so good. The programmability with the dependencies can be challenging. For example, you don't have all the features like Python, for example, or Node.js. The development with the deployment is a bit harder and you must ask Genesys for assistance. It would be good if the programmability of the platform would be more dynamic. We'd also like to get more features.

I've been using the solution for one to two months. 

The stability is really good and it's a really powerful platform that is more powerful than Avaya or other kinds of vendors for contact centers. Genesys's Interactive Intelligence at this time is better than the other solutions. It doesn't crash or freeze. Its performance is good. 

The scalability is good. Of course, you must request new development, however, you can get it integrated with many CRM items.

We are not happy with the technical support. They take too long to answer. I know it's due to the fact that one person is working here in Latin America. There's only one person to look at all the cases. That's why the response is really, really, really low.

Neutral

The deployment is a bit harder as you sometimes need help. For us, we have experience. It is not so hard, however, we have a dependency on the operative system, such as Microsoft with Windows Server 2019 or 2016. You must get that kind of system. Also, you need to get this updated and you have many dependencies that you have to work with.

The deployment is easy, however, when you want to get the IDR or you want to get the integrations as you want them, you need to deal with so many dependencies with other platforms that it can get hard. That's what's hard with the solution. The solution itself is, of course, it's easy for us, for an engineer, however, for untrained people, that is hard.

For the deployment, if the contact center is a large contact center, you must get four engineers or five engineers to do the deployment. Most of them will make the integration and the others will configure the IDR. Another will deploy the integration, and that's all. Of course, then, there will be the documentation you need to deal with.

We are partners.

I'd advise new users to read all the release features and the common issues.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten as for the most part it is easy to use as opposed to other options.