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Capital Card Services is a servicer of MasterCard and Visa accounts for financial and non-financial institutions nationwide, serving about 500,000 cardholders and managing more than $145 million in outstanding card receivables for its clients.

The company provides turnkey account acquisition services, underwriting strategies, marketing, customer service, collections, and portfolio management services. Established in 1998, it’s headquartered in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

The company wanted a reliable, flexible and full-featured contact center telephony system – not only for its own business, company officials said, “but for the financial institutions that are accustomed to the high level of service provided to their cardholders.”

The company’s managers recognized the opportunity to enhance their contact center systems to enable future growth and the addition of contact channels, such as email and Web chat.

Capital had 200 contact center agents at its two South Dakota sites handling about half a million inbound calls each month, as well as self-service interactive voice response, and some agents were making outbound collection calls – all using different telephony systems.

To say it was a challenge to upgrade or expand, or get detailed reports on agent performance, is putting it mildly.

“We had telephony in place, but we wanted one that was fully integrated instead of several separate products,” said Jill Point, senior vice president of Card Services at Capital Card Services. “Separate products required more effort to get them working together. It was also a challenge to pull data and reports.”

After reviewing various options, Capital officials said they realized only Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) could offer them the IP-based contact center they wanted, which Scheid described as a unified product with single platform software architecture.

Doug Scheid, senior director of IT for Capital, said “to expand we needed an easier way to manage our contact center operations. We had separate products for every function, and we needed to consolidate them.”

Besides needing an integrated contact center solution, the company also required certain telephony features that their current vendors couldn’t provide on a single platform, Point said: “The old system also made it difficult to listen in on calls, and prospective clients increasingly required recording capability for validation purposes.”

So they decided on Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Center, an all-in-one communications software suite with multichannel contact center automation and enterprise IP telephony functionality for mid-size to large organizations.

“In addition to having everything on our list of requirements, CIC was the most cost-effective product,” Schied said. “The Interactive Intelligence contract included upgrades, which is something most companies didn’t want to include.”

To download a free customer case study and learn more about how Interactive Intelligence’s CIC platform improved Capital Card Services’ operations, click here.