All of the major contact center providers such as Avaya, Nortel, Siemens, Genesys, Cisco, Alcatel plus NEC and Huawei in Asia Pacific are addressing short and long term challenges and opportunities in their contact center offerings. In the short term, most are providing incremental functions and features such as SIP, presence, mobility, reporting, etc. What differentiates these players are their market share and long term vision. The ones who embrace web services and SOA, enabling IT developers to mold, shape and inject communications deeply into business process, will be the winners. For IT departments are starting to view contact centers as one of the leverage points for IP telephony to deliver on its productivity promise.

Beyond Screen Pops

Contact centers have always been tightly linked to business process in the most critical of functions, the interface to customers. Ten to twenty years ago screen popping was the huge break-through allowing integration between telephony and computing, delivering customer information to agents, and allowing those agents to either respond quickly to issues or cross/up sell a customer. Contact centers have come a long way from the early days of screen pops and are being equipped to literally transform business process.

Most if not all contact center managers are focused on three primary short-term challenges. First is achieving operational goals of productivity and efficiency, customer satisfaction and service level targets. These are day to day operational management challenges. Second is ensuring that customer interfaces are powerful and highly usable while empowering agents with tools and information they need to resolve customer issues or transactions quickly. Third is a focus on return on investment usually meaning minimizing project risk and total cost of ownership while ensuring investment protection.

Next Generation Contact Centers

Next generation contact centers are increasing an agent´s access to knowledge workers, linking deeper into the back-end of enterprise applications while offering customers a wide range of options to contact to the enterprise. On this last point, many contact center providers are adding multi-modal that is multiple ways for customers to connect into a contact center, be it by a phone, web, IM, chat, desktop video cam, etc., to address the styles in which a customers chooses to communicate.

Some developers may have the view that today´s telephony technology allows for a great deal of flexibility. For example, developers can write programs that turn calls into e-mail and/or audio files. Developers can offer contact center agents the ability to communicate with customers via interactive desktops too. But to enable these communication services requires developers to cross communication silos of e-mail, v-mail, chat, instant messaging, etc., all with their own set of complexities. IP converges application silos onto one network, but the application integration is still too complex and brittle. To cross these silos developers often find themselves with an ?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ??¨n-squared?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ¬¨?? problem to write to and most importantly to maintain. The ?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ??¨n-squared?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ¬¨?? problem is unsuitable for use as a foundation for business-critical processes.

Contact center provider´s short term product improvements should enable a longer term goal of communications enabled business process. One foot note, long term here is twelve to eighteen months. Many of the above mentioned vendors are either offering or are planning to offer development platforms which abstract the complexities of their proprietary protocols as well as telephony specific APIs such as JTAPI, TAPI, CTI I and CTI II, SIP for web services/SOA. As web services are embraced, IT departments will then have the tools to add communications to business process reliably.

Business Process Modeling and Communications

Firms as such as M1 Global and SpanLink offer business process modeling as a front-end to contact center technology through web services allowing IT departments or developers to quickly describe a business process and generate xml code to automate that process. In this environment, there is no difference between a data base query or a click-to-call or click-to-conference subtask.

Communications software as a web service that can be massively consumed at a business level without the heavy burden of CTI-style integration, provided that web service is underpinned by an SOA, offers enormous opportunities for developers and enterprises. IT departments will be empowered to link communications to corporate databases, workflow and knowledge management software and other resources to support business decision-making. IT departments will increasingly contribute to a discussion on how to improve and transform what a business does and how it does it. IT, system integrators and even independent software vendors will be able to look at a business´s current applications and determine, based on business process demands, what elements need to be re-factored into discrete intelligent communication services. Gone are the days of writing communication applications without the knowledge, rules and assumptions of the business process.

IT developers will have no other choice but to embrace web services and SIP. IT developers will have to embrace this software-only platform to move forward. An increasing number of new services will emerge on the web services platform, driven mainly by enterprise demand. The platform will be increasingly more reliable, scalable, and secure as platform suppliers compete and increase their investments. Programmer improvements such as drop and drag services on a developer palette in commercially accepted service creation environments will speed development time by the rapid use of re-usable code.

The world of IT and telecommunications service creation is pushing everything in the direction of a SOA-based platform. For developers if you´re reluctant or slow to change, unfortunately your business will become increasingly diminished. The enterprise developer has already started to move in this direction and is the early adopter. IT management is increasingly the decision maker in telecom.

Customer-Facing Enterprise

Perhaps one of the best examples of how communications-enabled web services can transform a business is by creating a customer-facing organization. As mentioned above, the evolution of the contact center is both expanding the agent pool to include knowledge workers and linking agent interactions with business applications and process. Agents are increasingly requiring more access to enterprise resources thanks to web services providing the programming interface into business process. Agents have been building ad hoc ways of reaching back into the enterprise. Many leverage public IM services to find experts within their own enterprise to address customer issues. This has opened up security issues, is not measurable and does not provide journaling. The effectiveness of the agent reaching into the enterprise for assistance is situational upon the agent´s experience and the size of their professional network. Enterprises can systematize this and measure it so knowledge workers can be part of an agent´s network.

Web services will tighten the linkage between agents and their enterprise back office systems. After an agent´s interaction with a customer and transaction is completed, the enterprise needs to know what occurred and take action upon it. This linking of agents to back office systems and enabling a more structured way in which they can reach into the enterprise are opportunities that IT departments are seizing.

IT developers can write communications-enabled web services business applications, which allow agents to communicate via web chat session with customers and knowledge workers.Currently, no one is managing knowledge workers as they are increasingly being included in the agent pool. What is the impact to the enterprise when knowledge workers are part of a customer-facing organization? If the agents can reach a knowledge worker, what does that do to their productivity? Manage and control are key areas where vendors can add value. Also, adding value to administrator reporting tools in a web services-enhanced contact center is another market need and opportunity for vendors.

Web services interfaces into management functions are another key value add for IT developers. There are opportunities to develop management tools that build and integrate across the enterprise. Enterprises continue to have a lot of legacy, which will not change any time soon. Integrating legacy IT systems into an SOA context with management tools offers tremendous areas of vendor opportunity.

So which vendors are best positioned? The ones who embrace web services and SOA enabling IT developers to mold, shape and inject communications deeply into business process. Also the ones with a plan that can show you how their short term product improvements lead to a web services/SOA world.

Posted 6 May 2006 at 7:39 am under Lippis Report, Enterprise Mobility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.