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Interactive Intelligence Wants To Feel Your Pain

RCPU had a visit this week with Interactive Intelligence, a vendor pretty much in the unified communications space, over Brazilian cuisine (read: meat) here in Framingham.

Interactive Intelligence has some useful stuff out, including an IP communications software platform that combines a bunch of capabilities normally addressed with separate boxes (think PBX, ACD, IVR, WFM and some other acronyms we're not totally sure we understand) into one software-based platform running on a single server. Two of the products based on that platform are now integrated with Microsoft's Office Communications Server.

What really struck us, though, was the news this week that Interactive Intelligence is developing a Customer Feedback Management product that can gauge call-center customers' emotions in real time, so that call-center employees can react accordingly.

OK, so some emotions, such as anger and rage, probably don't need much measurement. Still, this idea seems incredibly useful and actually sort of fun. It kind of reminds us of the "Simpsons" episode where Springfield Elementary has a science fair and Martin Prince creates a "surprise detector" to measure people's level of, well, surprise. Anyway, just about anything that reminds us of the "Simpsons" gets a "thumbs up" at RCPU.

Posted by Lee Pender on May 15, 2008


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