Wendy Mikkelsen, Director of Customer Contact Solutions Nortel

In this tough economy, businesses are looking for new ways of reducing costs and getting the most out of their existing tools and infrastructure.  The contact center is the focal point of customer interaction and business transactions and by optimizing the day-to-day contact center operations businesses can realize significant cost savings. But can this be accomplished without impacting customer satisfaction?

Actually, it is quite the opposite. We’re talking about maintaining existing agent-head count to offer the same or additional services while gaining higher customer satisfaction.  By optimizing the contact center using open interfaces, businesses can actually improve the customer experience, as well as reduce costs.

Let’s look at an example of a customer interaction scenario that could be optimized using open interfaces.  A loyal customer contacts a business to make a late payment. Using the self-service solution, the payment is made and the transaction is completed.  Later that day, contact center agents are making outbound collection calls to customers who are late on their payments. In a typical business environment, the collections department would not know that the customer has made a payment earlier in the day so the outbound call would be queued and sent to an agent.  The result?  The customer would be upset, since they are normally on-time with their payments and had just made a payment earlier in the day.  In addition, the agent’s time has been wasted and unnecessary costs were incurred on a call that should have never been made.

With open interfaces, this scenario would play out differently.  When the customer makes their payment, the information would automatically be sent to the outbound campaigns application removing the call from the queue. 

So how is this accomplished? By using a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) where contact center Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) are exposed as Web services.  Formerly, the contact center application would use scripts to do a search of the applicable database and return the data to the contact center but this process is not dynamic – it’s time consuming, inflexible, and often error prone.  With open interfaces, the business application begins the process by invoking a contact center or IVR Web service.  In this case the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system automatically sends the updated customer account information to the contact center via the outbound campaigns Web service and the call is removed from the outbound queue. 

By using open Web services based on a SOA environment, deployment of business workflows is faster, easier, and less expensive.  Open interfaces allow a business to adapt quickly to changing market conditions and better meet the needs of both internal and external customers.

By blending unified communications with open interfaces, businesses can automate services and process while at the same time provide multiple channels of communication to their customers.  Optimizing the contact center through open interfaces and unified communications will not only save businesses time and money, but also increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.