Composite Applications for Customer Service Teams

The contact center often provides the best opportunity for a company to create a favorable impression. This is, in turn, dependent on the ability of contact center agents to deliver an excellent customer experience based on their access to information about customers and the applications used to meet customer needs.

Traditional contact center technologies have only been partially successful in giving agents the access they need to be truly effective. Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) has been the primary tool for integrating agent desktops with systems that house customer information; however, CTI applications typically involve long, cost-intensive development efforts, and the net result still falls short of the ideal customer experience.

There is a way that contact centers can supplement their existing investments in CTI to provide a far superior customer experience. By using composite applications as the basis for integrating CTI software, CRM packages and other legacy systems, companies can provide their agents with a single, transactional, interface into all the key customer interactions with the company. This will allow them to provide the best possible service to their users. This unified, role-based desktop has many benefits:

	Greater customer satisfaction as agents are able to immediately respond to customer inquiries without needing to deal with "swivel-chair" integration
	Lower agent attrition rates as agents are able to truly affect change and improve contact center efficiency and effectiveness
	Opportunities to cross- and up-sell based on specific customer information that is gleaned through the unified desktop

To learn more about how composite applications can reshape the fundamental economics of contact centers, download this independent white paper by contact center consultant, Karen Hardy. She discusses how contact centers can become more effective and efficient via the use of composite applications. In addition, we have pages dedicated to our partnerships with salesforce.com and Siebel that highlight collateral, white papers, customer wins, and joint press releases.