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Unified IP business communications solutions provider, Interactive Intelligence, has acknowledged the efforts of reseller Elite Partner EDCi with its annual Vision Award.

The award was given to EDCi for deploying the Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) all-in-one IP communications software suite, Customer Interaction Center (CIC), within the Digi-Key Corp. environment and enabling the company to improve customer service and increase agent productivity through automated e-mail queuing and management.

“EDCi used CIC to create a number of customized e-mail queuing and management applications that helped Digi-Key increase customer response time and reduce production delays,” said Interactive Intelligence vice president of sales for North America, Paul Weber, in a statement.

“The benefits of this visionary solution include a decrease in average e-mail response time of several hours, a 30 percent increase in agent productivity, and a 22 percent decrease in costs based on projected payroll expense.”

Digi-Key, before the CIC deployment, was facing increasing difficulty in its attempts to efficiently process the more than 2.3 million interactions the company would receive by e-mail each year. The company was also facing a record sales forecast and was struggling with an e-mail solution that had already reached its capacity. It was time to search for a new e-mail solution that could easily scale to meet its rapidly expanding needs.

“Before our CIC deployment, agents in a shared e-mail group ‘pulled’ their work from an inbox,” said Digi-Key’s director of sales and customer service, Linda Johnson. “This created a perfect environment for ‘cherry-picking’ and was not an efficient way to handle interactions. Agents decided when they had time to do the work instead of the system directing it. Reporting capabilities were also deficient and we had limited access to real-time supervisory information.  Disjointed workflow from department to department further compounded our inefficiencies.”

EDCi used CIC to address these issues. The company was able to create a customized solution for e-mail queuing and management.

The new solution also included skills-based routing, new workflow processes, a 360 degree search capability and a feature for conversation threading.

“Among our key customizations for Digi-Key was the 360-degree search engine capability, which enabled agents to quickly find pre-queue, in-queue, pending, picked-up, processed, and stored e-mails,” said EDCi’s vice president, Nick Tseffos. “We also deployed conversational threading, which enabled Digi-Key customers to receive service from the same agent.”

EDCi also benefitted from the integration of the CIC solution with its document management platform, FileNet, as all e-mails and attachments are easily uploaded following the completion of an interaction. Tseffos noted the company relies on the CIC solution to queue and route interactions across contact centers in the U.S., Korea, Hong Kong and Europe.

“EDCi’s customized CIC solution has helped us absorb record sales this year with minimal staff additions in our core sales areas,” Johnson said. “With the ability to set multiple skills and move agents in and out of skills based on workload, we’ve been able to lend resources to other areas of the sales and customer service organization. This has enabled us to better use our existing staff in order to maintain service goals.”

One reseller is selected each year for the Interactive Intelligence Vision Award. EDCi was honored with the award during Interactive Intelligence’s 12^th annual Partner Conference.

In other Interactive Intelligence news, TMCnet recently reported that the newly released Lync Server from Microsoft (News - Alert) will be leveraged by a release of the company’s call center solution designed to make full use of the server’s new features. Interactive Intelligence’s solution will offer tools that have not previously been made available to enterprise level communication clients.