IR, or Integrated Research Limited, is one of the leading global providers of experience management services for IT companies, UC brands, and contact centre ecosystems. This makes them a natural partner for Avaya, who have always had a strong focus on the contact centre and the communication endpoint world.
To learn more about IR, and what they’re currently offering the Unified Communications and CC space, I spoke to the Chief Marketing Officer, Kevin Ryder, and the Vice President of Marketing for America, Tim Poindexter about their innovative brand.
What is IR?
The IR company has been in the marketplace for about 29 years now, and its focus is on making sure that customers have incredible experiences, regardless of whether they’re end-customers or users of UC and contact centre technology. The claim to fame for IR is making sure that customers can get a complete end-to-end secure experience with their technology.
IR work with more than 1,000 organisations in a host of countries around the world, including some of the biggest telecommunications companies, banks, and airlines. According to Kevin:
“About 80% of the Gartner top Quadrant service providers use IR Prognosis.”
What makes IR different is the fact that they do active testing for their customers from the outside in. In other words, they can generate real traffic for the contact centre, conduct stress testing processes, and more, to make sure that it’s possible to identify issues in the system before the customer even notices problems. “Our ultimate end-goal is to create a self-healing system.”
IR is also using digital transformation (DX) technology like AI and machine learning to find out more about what they can do to help their customers become more competitive.
How Does Your Machine Learning System Work?
I was interested to learn more about how IR was using AI and machine learning in their product portfolio. Kevin told me that there are two aspects to how their business works. The first thing they focus on is giving the customers the technology they need to ensure that they can figure out what’s going on in their business processes as quickly as possible. The second thing is machine learning and AI.
“Our machine learning solution helps to bring a new level to the thresholds that people place on their contact centres. When people set thresholds, they do so with an idea of their known issues, but what they really need is a dynamic threshold because the environment and situation are constantly changing. Our learning system gets to know the network to ensure you don’t get countless false positives.”
Dynamic thresholds are just one place where the machine learning aspect comes in, however. Kevin also told me that IR has a call recording assurance system that makes sure that the recordings their customers have are compliant.
“With GDPR, HIPAA and everything else coming, it’s important to make sure that you not only have the recordings you need but that they’re audible too.”
With machine learning, IR can make sure that the quality of the data is right, and as Tim noted, it also gives companies some security. For instance, you’ll be able to show that there’s an audible conversation in a recording, which will stand up in an audit situation.
How Are You Adapting to Changes in the Marketplace?
While IR is clearly an innovative company, I was interested to find out what they were doing to respond to the changes in the current UC marketplace. After all, most companies aren’t just dealing with a desk phone anymore when it comes to managing their communications. With WebRTC and countless new forms of cloud-based software, I asked Kevin how they accommodate a growing range of end-points.
“We’re actually the only vendor in the marketplace right now that’s up to date and current for all the certifications required for Cisco, Microsoft, Avaya, and the like. You can deploy our system quickly, and we keep our customers current with vendor deliveries so that you can still monitor and manage cloud conversations too.”
In fact, IR recently launched their Skype for Business Online monitoring system to help their customers looking at the cloud to do more with their communications. “It’s about making sure our customers have constant visibility as they connect to the cloud and find new ways of communicating.”
What Have You been Showing at Engage?
Finally, I asked Tim and Kevin to tell me more about the services they’ve had on show at Engage. Tim told me that they were introducing the latest version of their Prognosis system, “11.4”, which comes with enhancements on the reporting side as IR attempts to make their products more simple and innovative out of the box.
“We’re looking at our Avaya solutions right now, and options to help with managing the contact centre. The contact centre directory, for instance, can be very complex, but customers can use our system to see where there are dead ends or where things might be broken.”
Kevin also noted that a recent announcement for the brand had come from the fact that they’re now appearing on the Cisco product list. The IR solution is sold by Avaya, and they’re the only performance system that Avaya currently sells. However, now the same thing is true for Cisco.
