Building the next-generation customer contact center

Picture this: Instead of having to operate an expensive call center tied to a physical location, you've created a virtual, multimedia contact center staffed by agents working from home or in distant offices, connected through a voice-over-IP network.

You've launched money-saving, self-service customer applications based on standards such as XML and VoiceXML that reduce the load on your agents. You've integrated your CRM  software with computer-telephone integration (CTI) so that back-end database information on customers is available to agents in the form of screen pops.

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Picture this: Instead of having to operate an expensive call center tied to a physical location, you've created a virtual, multimedia contact center staffed by agents working from home or in distant offices, connected through a voice-over-IP network.

You've launched money-saving, self-service customer applications based on standards such as XML and VoiceXML that reduce the load on your agents. You've integrated your CRM  software with computer-telephone integration (CTI) so that back-end database information on customers is available to agents in the form of screen pops.

Customers reach your contact center any way they wish - voice call, e-mail,chat and real-time collaboration over the Web. The customer experience is consistent across all media, and each interaction is immediately reported so updated information is available right away. The contact center blends resources, and manages and reports on all contacts via a common application suite.

Is this vision hype or reality? The answer is a little of both. This contact center is possible with today's technologies, but full-blown implementations are still few and far between. However, experts are confident that VoIP-based, multichannel contact centers are the future of customer relations, so it's important to start planning.

The next-generation contact center requires two fundamental architectural shifts. In the network infrastructure you need to shift from the TDM/PBX world to VoIP. And in the applications infrastructure you need to migrate call routing and reporting, traditionally handled by automatic call distributors (ACD), from closed switching systems to open, industry-standard servers.

Open architecture

Open architecture offers the promise of infrastructure-agnostic applications. Routing, reporting and management functions can run on a server that talks to the switching infrastructure. Open applications can seamlessly route voice calls, e-mail and Web-based contacts, and they can connect online customers with contact center agents via chat, escorted browsing or collaborative form completion. Switch vendors offering open architecture contact-center products include Aspect, Avaya, Cisco and Nortel .

The idea is that once contact-center applications are freed from single-vendor proprietary systems, customers would be able to select best-of-breed products. This open architecture would attract a larger pool of application developers, leading to new capabilities, lower costs and improved integration.

For example, Nordea, a Swedish financial services company servicing 3 million customers and handling 44 million calls per year (85% of them automated), has deployed Genesys'  Framework to transform its contact-center operation, improve the customer experience, and save more than $1.5 million per year.

Nordea migrated from the ACD applications on its Nortel switch to Genesys server-based software to manage not only phone calls, but also other media. The Genesys IP Contact Center routes contacts and integrates with Nordea's information systems and databases. And rolling the system out to additional sites was relatively quick once the initial infrastructure was in place.