Snow and outage face ARC IT's shovel

INDIANAPOLIS, US: Airlines Reporting Corp. (ARC), a provider of sales and settlement solutions for the travel and hospitality industry, has been deploying the all-in-one IP communications software suite from Interactive Intelligence.

The Interactive Intelligence software suite, Customer Interaction Center (CIC), has helped ARC improve customer service by adding multichannel functionality and remote agent support.

“CIC has given our customers the ability to contact our agents via voice, e-mail, an automated call-back feature and very soon using Web chat as well,” said ARC’s manager of network services, Tim Henley. “CIC queues these interactions in the same priority they were received regardless of the communications channel for optimal consistency and faster response times.”

ARC’s CIC deployment replaced a Nortel system, which the company said was outdated. “We needed to streamline our communications system without sacrificing sophisticated applications,” Henley said.

In addition to reviewing CIC by Interactive Intelligence, ARC reviewed systems from Cisco, Nortel, ShoreTel, and Siemens.

“We ultimately selected CIC based on its all-in-one platform and ease-of-use,” Henley said. “This meant we could eliminate ‘bolt-on’ third-party products, thus simplifying management and lowering costs — and all while adding more advanced features.”

Today, CIC supports a total of more than 250 ARC employees, including agents at its Arlington, Virginia-based contact center, along with remote agents. About half of ARC’s agents work from home. CIC also supports ARC’s business users at its headquarters in Arlington and at a remote office in Puerto Rico, which staffs Spanish-speaking agents.

ARC also deployed a CIC add-on application for call recording and agent scoring. The company now records and scores calls to help train agents and give them feedback for improved call handling. In addition, ARC will be integrating CIC to its Microsoft Dynamics CRM package, which will give agents a screen “pop” containing caller and account history information simultaneous with the call.

“Last year we had more than 50 inches of snow in Arlington and we experienced power outages throughout the city,” Henley said. “By using CIC’s disaster recovery capabilities we will be able to effectively route calls to employees at any location, thus eliminating lost calls and better serving our customers.”