Happy PureCloud Customers Make Inflow Happy!

By Travis Dillard, President of Inflow Communications

Earlier this year, Interactive Intelligence officially declared PureCloud as its primary offering for the customer engagement market in 2016. Inflow has been following their lead.

PureCloud is built as a set of stateless, independently load-balanced microservices running atop Amazon Web Services. These services include enterprise collaboration and business communications capabilities all with rich omnichannel customer engagement functionality.

Here are the main reasons why Inflow customers are happy and therefore, Inflow is happy!

• It’s a platform: Interactive Intelligence built PureCloud as a platform, as opposed to a packaged bundle of products. The PureCloud “platform” is a state-of-the art, infinitely scalable, resilient Contact Center and collaboration platform.

That said, Interactive Intelligence realized that they can’t be the expert in all communication technologies, verticals, and business needs. As such, they couldn’t address every one of their customers’ requirements, especially as it pertains to Contact Center. To that end, the platform was built to encourage a community of specialists and software developers (like Inflow) to customize the solution by developing and integrating applications ON their platform.

Plug and play applications are the future. Complex, one-off “customization” projects are the past.

A great example is Salesforce.com, a pioneer in the cloud space. They built and continually refine their core CRM platform (which is their core competency). But the platform is open and easily developed on for niche players and specialists. Examples include quoting and commission specialists, marketing automation specialists, and helpdesk and service specialists.

In our opinion, PureCloud is the FIRST Unified Communications and Contact Center “platform”. We’re excited to be a part of it!

• Interactive Intelligence understands the value and role of a partner ecosystem: Interactive focuses on making a solid, available, open, next-generation collaboration and Contact Center platform. They let partners like Inflow focus on being the subject matter experts as it pertains to consultation, deployment, support, custom software development, and other premium value-add services on that platform.

This is the future of the technology integrator.

• Architecture: We believe that PureCloud is at least two years ahead of the competition with their AWS-based architecture.

Interactive Intelligence built PureCloud on a fully geo-redundant global public cloud – and then went further. As opposed to simply hosting instances in AWS, PureCloud was built using a leading-edge micro services architecture. Instead of using a number of tightly coupled components, PureCloud divides its functionality up into services, each of which handles requests of a given type.

Each PureCloud service uses elastic load balancers (ELBs) to distribute work; each grouping contains multiple servers, which dynamically scale based on load. What does that all mean? Basically, it means this is a true “cloud” service. It’s infinitely scalable, fully survivable, always available, innovates rapidly, and doesn’t incorporate legacy language like “upgrade windows”, “downtime”, “rollback”, and “clusters”.

• Open REST API: The PureCloud℠ Platform exposes its capabilities via a REST API that can be used for CTI and agent screen pop functionality. This is completely software-based without the use of additional servers. An optional software component called PureCloud℠ Bridge Server can be installed on a physical server or as a virtual machine on a customer’s network, allowing for additional integration functionality to a variety of common systems and applications.

The PureCloud Ecosystem is an online marketplace where you can find plugins, components, and even entire application services built by third parties. Your organization can embed PureCloud services into its own applications and integrate PureCloud with existing IT systems.

• PureCloud is Certifiably Secure: Amazon data centers and the AWS cloud have achieved the following certifications – SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3, SSAE‐16, ISAE 3402, HIPAA, PCI, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, DIACAP, FISMA, ITAR, FIPS 140‐2, CSA, MPAA.

• Single Application: Unlike most Unified Communications and Contact software providers who “innovate though acquisition,” the administration and user applications for all aspects of PureCloud are the same interface. Users, agents, supervisors, and administers work within the same application in their PureCloud Organization for collaboration, telephony, Contact Center, Workforce Management, Call Recording, IVR, etc.

The adaption, efficiency, and cost savings benefits are easy to realize with PureCloud.

• Interactive Intelligence knows Contact Center: With the global demand for an improved customer experience, the current lack of a customer experience, and the opportunities for companies to dominate by innovating their customer experience through their Contact Center operation, we see cloud Contact Centers being in high demand.

There are a number of organizations scrambling to offer a Contact Center solution. Most don’t “get” Contact Center though. Interactive Intelligence does. They’ve been delivering Contact Center and ancillary Contact Center technologies like speech analytics, workforce automation, reporting, and call recording for over TWO decades.

It’s evident that this deep understanding of Contact Center is alive and well in PureCloud.

• No Upgrades: PureCloud is the Facebook of Unified Communications and Contact Center. When is the last time Facebook had to communicate a “maintenance window” to you? Never. That’s because of its micro service architecture: they can upgrade subcomponents of the solution at any time.

For example, you might log into your interface and see an additional button or feature that wasn’t there an hour ago.

Perfect, it’s about time.

• Affordable: For the time being, the pricing is industry-leading. Interactive Intelligence has made rich Unified Communications, Collaboration, and Enterprise Contact Center features affordable for all businesses.

• No Contracts: Everything is billed monthly “as consumed”. There are no contracts.

• Cloud and Hybrid Options: With PureCloud, you have the ability to leverage local dial tone using a Telephony Gateway while consuming the communication, collaboration, and Contact Center applications in the cloud. Not only does this provide local survivability should you lose your Internet connection, it allows you to move your UC / Contact Center environment to the cloud even if you have carrier contractual commitments.

Using the PureCloud Data Bridge, you can also securely integrate to local databases, Active Director, and other on premises data.

Ready for PureCloud? Contact us for your free assessment to find out if PureCloud is the right fit for you.

About Inflow

Founded in 1997, Inflow is one of the nation’s top Unified Communications and Contact Center consultants in today’s market. Pioneers in cloud unified communications and cloud contact center success, Inflow is the first company to provide contact center consulting and training focused solely on helping you elevate your customer experience.

With over 200,000 endpoints supported under Inflow’s innovative success programs around the world, Inflow built its brand and reputation around providing unrivaled customer support. Inflow is in Mitel/ShoreTel’s top 2% in global customer satisfaction, and quickly acquiring a top spot with RingCentral, Genesys PureCloud and NICE inContact.

By partnering with Inflow, you can expect the highest level of strategic consultation, execution, and optimization available in the industry.