Senior Housing Assistance Group (SHAG) Community Life Foundation, an affordable senior housing provider in Washington, has deployed the omnichannel customer engagement cloud solution, PureCloud Engage℠, from Interactive Intelligence Group Inc. (Nasdaq: ININ).

SHAG uses PureCloud Engage to support its customer service department, which staffs four agents who receive more than 7,000 calls per month.

The PureCloud Engage deployment has resulted in more effective marketing campaigns, improved service and increased productivity, according to Chris Brooks, SHAG’s customer service manager.

“PureCloud Engage has enabled us to quickly and easily customize call flows so we can modify them based on each marketing campaign,” Brooks said. “This has helped us track the performance of each campaign so we can make changes to improve them.”

In addition, the remote support capabilities of PureCloud Engage have enhanced service. “If our contact center shuts down, our employees can work remotely,” Brooks said. “Engage accommodates these employees as if they were in our office so customers get uninterrupted service, as well as a consistent experience regardless of where the agent is located.”

The PureCloud Engage collaboration functionality has further improved SHAG’s service, while increasing productivity. “We love that we can use Engage to collaborate internally and share documents without ever placing the caller on hold,” Brooks said. “If a caller has a question, the agent can quickly IM another employee to help field the caller’s question faster.”

SHAG also values the scalability and flexibility of the solution. "PureCloud Engage easily and cost-effectively scales up and down,” Brooks said. “Its workforce management tool can even forecast an optimized schedule based on historical data from a previous provider, which is a capability we never had."

SHAG is forecasting significant cost savings from PureCloud Engage as well. “When we complete our deployment plans for Engage, we project savings of 80 percent by eliminating all prior hardware and outsourced management requirements,” Brooks said. “We’ve already outsourced less because our contact center managers can make changes themselves.”

PureCloud Engage replaced an on-premises telephony system. “Initially we wanted to stick with an on-premises solution,” Brooks said. “Once we demoed Engage though, we knew that in order to get ahead of the curve we needed to transition to the cloud. We especially liked that Engage included workforce management, reporting and analytics all running on a single platform, which is something other vendors didn’t offer.”

Brooks and his team also appreciated the fast and easy deployment. “The Interactive Intelligence engineers and support teams were great,” he said. “We were set up and completely deployed within three days. Interactive’s online resource center has also proven instrumental in quickly getting our managers and agents operational. I personally visit the site at least once a day. The videos are very easy to follow.”

According to Brooks, PureCloud Engage has met the company’s expectations, and it plans to invest in additional features. “In 2017, our goal is to create a more centralized contact center and reduce operational costs by eliminating our current telecom solution, Nortel, and migrating all employees across 26 offices to Engage. We also want to explore ways to implement the chat and social media functionality, and integrate Engage with our Yardi CRM system.”

Interactive Intelligence built PureCloud Engage to give contact centers an omnichannel cloud solution that could be up and running in days, while offering ease of management and continuous deployment of the most innovative features. Its microservice architecture built atop Amazon Web Services offers maximum reliability, scalability and security. Month-to-month, pay-as-you-go subscription terms give contact centers a low-risk, high-value cloud solution.

For more information about PureCloud Engage, visit https://www.inin.com/customer-engagement/cloud-contact-center.

About SHAG Community Life Foundation

Senior Housing Assistance Group (SHAG) Community Life Foundation is a 501(c) (3) non-profit organization based in Seattle, Wash. Since 1988, SHAG has been enhancing and enriching the lives of people through affordable housing. For more information, visit www.shag.org.

About Interactive Intelligence

Interactive Intelligence Group Inc. (Nasdaq: ININ) is a global leader of software and cloud services for customer engagement, communications and collaboration designed to help businesses worldwide improve service, increase productivity and reduce costs. Backed by a 20-plus year history of industry firsts, 150-plus pending patent applications, and more than 6,000 global customer deployments, Interactive offers customers fast return on investment, along with robust reliability, scalability and security. It's also the only company recognized by the top global industry analyst firm as a leader in both the cloud and on-premises customer engagement markets. The company is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana and has more than 2,000 employees worldwide. For more information, visit www.inin.com.

Interactive Intelligence is the owner of, and holds certain registrations for, the marks INTERACTIVE INTELLIGENCE, its associated LOGO, PURECLOUD and numerous other trademarks and service marks in the United States and various other jurisdictions around the world. All third-party trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.

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