Helping answer questions like: How will agents be defined in the system? How easily can I make changes? What will calls sound like? How different will screens look to the agents?

Cloud-based solutions are hot, hot, hot this year and nowhere hotter than for the contact center. Interactive Intelligence has been aggressively positioning its Communications as a Service (CaaS) solution for over two years and has seen sales success. While lots of companies are intrigued by the thought of moving to hosted applications, there’s often a fair bit of reticence as well, based on uncertainty. How will agents be defined in the system? How easily can I make changes? What will calls sound like? How different will screens look to the agents?

Interactive Intelligence has designed Quick Spin for that space in the sales cycle between demo and proof of concept. While there are obviously operational components to the program, Quick Spin is marketing at its finest. First the name. It is so evocative of going into an automobile showroom, talking to the sales person and getting to the point with a particular vehicle where the question is asked, "Do you want to take it for a quick spin?"

Let's build the analogy. If you don't look like a serious buyer, if the sales person doesn't think you're really in the showroom to buy, you won’t be handed the keys. Same here. Quick Spin is not a "go to the website and sign up for a free trial" program. It's for qualified prospects who are working with an Interactive Intelligence partner or sales person. The "key" here is a registration code for the Quick Spin site, offered only to serious prospects.

A dealer won’t let you keep a car for more than a specified amount of time. Same with Quick Spin. The free trial period lasts just 14 days, and is limited to 10 users and 5 skills. You don't have to buy gas for your quick spin. In the CaaS version of Quick Spin, Interactive Intelligence is offering 2,500 minutes of calls and is picking up the toll charges back to its data center.

If the car salesperson is smart, some of the latest bells and whistles--not available on the car you likely have in your garage--will be pointed out. While not every feature of CaaS will be available in Quick Spin (e.g., predictive dialing, workforce management) the last step in the set-up process is creating five positive and fire negative phrases for use with the speech analytics feature of CaaS, Interaction Analyzer.

Quick Spin is based on the latest version of Customer Interaction Center (4.0) and scheduled to be available in the fourth quarter. It's being described as available in the U.S. and "select countries," which the company explained means where there is interest and they have a CaaS presence (e.g., Germany, Australia, New Zealand).