Professional Services

Inteletry is in a unique position as one of the few consulting firms which also provide professional services for the Interactive Intelligence Inc. (ININ) product line. Our programming skill set compliments our analysis and design work and helps us avoid designing something that can’t be built or that doesn’t take full advantage of the platform and features.

Reporting

Inteletry LLC is best known for our focus on reporting. We believe that, after dial tone, the most important thing your system can deliver is comprehensive reporting. We have long championed the need to design for reporting. Our services include custom Crystal reports and contact center data analysis. We can show you how to get the most out of your system, really see what is happening, and how it impacts your business.

Development

We really enjoy designing and programming ININ systems. Nothing beats CIC for its ability to deliver solutions to telephony challenges. It’s often said that, “if you can imagine it, you can build it with handlers.” Of course you might not want to spend a fortune at the same time so it helps to have some experience knowing how to take those big white board ideas and turn them into an actual application with a real life budget.

The initial design phase of any ININ roll out is the most critical phase in our experience and bringing in a high level system architect to review your project plan can really pay off down the road. As we have mentioned, reporting is often not adequately considered up front and it can be difficult to make changes later to queue structures and handlers to support reporting. We are often requested to come on-site to teach classes on reporting since this topic is not really covered thoroughly in the ININ training courses. The most common outcome of the training is regret that reporting was not brought up earlier in the design process when it is easier to implement. Multiple site/server configurations, ACD queue structures, skills based routing, and Attendant vs. Handlers are other areas that require a lot of foresight and experience to properly implement.

Our first step in any development project is to get ideas down in a form that allows you to flesh out all the important details. Project plans, business requirements docs, functional requirements are all ways to get the application nailed down and they may have an important role depending on the size of your project. But the method we prefer over all others is the use of graphical call/interaction flow diagrams. They are easy to produce and simple to understand and they have a great feature in that they quickly show you the missing pieces and paths not taken.

We have developed a set of simple Visio shapes and a methodology for representing the path that a call (or interaction) takes through the system. A PDF version of this document is available here. It is important to point out that these are not programmatic diagrams of the coding involved. They illustrate what a caller experiences when in your system and it is this perspective which is the most revealing. It’s a great tool to use with a business representative such as the call center manager or advocate.

The process while easy can be time consuming since it may take many revisions to get everything fleshed out. It’s not unusual to go through 4 or 5 revisions. As the project evolves and deadlines shorten it can be a real challenge to document every last minute change and/or fix so there will also often be a final as-built call flow revision as well. But this points out another advantage of the call flow in that it can become the primary documentation for the system. Once the design is finalized (sometimes even before) the actual development begins. Here the most important thing is to create a realistic development and testing environment that very closely matches your production environment.