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.