WHITE PAPER COMPOSITE CONTACT CENTER SOLUTIONS

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1 WHITE PAPER COMPOSITE CONTACT CENTER SOLUTIONS How companies are reducing costs and improving customer service by streamliningcall centers processes, consolidating agent desktops, and creating multi-channel, customer-friendly contact centers all with the technology they already have.

2 Introduction Faced with the daunting challenge of improving customer service quality while reducing costs, many companies are increasingly turning to new technology solutions to streamline call center processes and optimize customer interactions. The rapid maturity of services-oriented architecture (SOA) is enabling organizations to extend and integrate corporate applications without the need to replace their existing systems. In the process, many internal use only applications are being extended to the Web, allowing customer self service, access to agent desktops by home workers, and seamlessconsolidation of previously disparate applications. The SOA wave has continued the decades-long trend to push information out of the back office and get it closer to where business transactions actually take place with salespersons, service representatives and directly with customers. Today, established companies are realizing tremendous benefits by enhancing their existing information systems with Web-enabling technology, making previously isolated systems work with each other to create processoptimized integrated business solutions. As a discipline, IT has shifted from thinking of corporate applications as only automating tedious back-office data processing to a new understanding of corporate information as a powerful competitive weapon that can swiftly transform both companies and industries. Embracing SOA as an architectural strategy is improving not only the speed at which IT can deliver business-driven solutions but also provide greater agility for future change. The next major transformation is coming from companies that are thinking beyond the limitations of the wired network and its access to information metaphor. The new metaphor of SOA and Webaccessible computing is one of consolidated information delivery and optimized processes, delivering applications to users, wherever they are. Today s Call Center Challenges Your company sells a product or service that people use. To service those customers you provide a call center and it costs you money to staff and run that center. For a large number of companies, the evolution of the call center has likely built up multiple databases and applications to store information about customers, products and services. When someone calls the call center, an employee must access this information often using multiple applications to service a single customer. Frequently, this data is stored in core applications that are not easily accessed. Often as a result, many of the following issues arise: Call center agents are required to access multiple applications to service a single call Training agents can take weeks Duplicate re-keying of data is required Processes are inefficient This, in turn, increases call handling times and costs and often leads to customer dissatisfaction. In addition, many other methods are employed to communicate with customers the Web, , fax, text, VoIP, even old-fashioned mail. Therefore, a call center can interact with customers using more than just the telephone. That s why some companies refer to their call centers as contact centers. Some of the challenges associated with these other channels include: Difficulty enabling self-service applications due to difficulty in accessing data stored in core systems Enabling transfer between channels as applications cannot communicate with one another Inability to intelligently route calls Inability to effectively cross sell and upsell Benefits of a Composite Contact Center Whether you call it a composite contact center or a Web-based call center, it doesn t matter. What does matter is getting the benefits of using Web-enabling technologies. The key reason to change is that everyone benefits. By changing to a composite contact center: The company realizes cost savings The company can provide higher-quality contact with the customer The customer receives better information and better service Every organization differs in how it services its customers and their technology infrastructures vary greatly. The main benefit of composite contact center solutions is the capability to leverage existing technology to create the exact solutions each organization needs. For some, this means a consolidated agent desktop. For others, enhancements to or delivery of new Web-based self-service applications. For IT, it means a common infrastructure to enable any contact center channel. Not only can composite contact centers deliver solutions to meet today s needs, they deliver the flexibility needed to take a phased approach and facilitate continuous change. Agent Desktop Consolidation Today, the average number of applications that call center agents access is three (3). Many are accessing as many as six (6) applications

3 to service a single customer call. The goal may be to consolidate multiple applications or deliver agent applications over the Web. Either or both can be accommodated with composite contact center solutions. Delivering Web-Based Customer Self-Service Applications (Portals) Using Web-enabling technology, it is possible to give customers access to the information they want over the Internet. Customers can find their own answers to most questions and only need to call when they have an unusual query. Then, trained staff can allocate the time needed to solve the problem. This technology can be extended to multiple delivery channels. Migrating to a contact center means a consolidated infrastructure for multi-channel delivery. Figure 1: Micro Focus OnWeb consolidates agent applications Stakeholder CSRs (Call Center Agents) Managers IT Company Benefits Through agent desktop consolidation and Web-enablement, composite contact center solutions deliver: A simplified agent desktop Web-accessible applications 100% elimination of data re-keying 100% elimination of call wrap-up work Reduce call handling times by 50% or more Provide better service Eliminate errors Improved CSR productivity Process efficiency Reduced training time from weeks to days or hours Ability to leverage at home workers, anywhere Reduce call handling costs by 50% or more Meet SLAs Leverage existing systems without service disruption Speed of deployment and ongoing change management Eliminate PC/desktop maintenance Improved customer retention Improved customer loyalty Reduced costs Figure 2: Micro Focus composite call center architecture Stakeholder Customers Agents IT Company Benefits Anytime, anywhere access Quality of service satisfaction Reduced call volumes Improved ability to service each customer Call prioritization Leverage existing skills through standards-based tools Speed of development and deployment Leverage components across delivery channels Leverage existing systems without disruption Iterative and rapid change Reduce development and maintenance costs Improve cross-sell and upsell Expand product offerings/market reach Reduce costs and improve service quality Reduce training costs Improve customer loyalty Improve customer retention

4 A Standards-Based Approach Creating today s composite call centers requires solutions that are built on standards, enabling the ability to leverage existing technology and skills while ensuring future agility. Micro Focus delivers a Web-based framework to: Enable database and file access Most applications use a combination of databases. They may be core, JDBC, or ODBCbased databases. Data in any database must be able to be accessed and updated while maintaining data integrity and consistency. A lot of historical information is in flat files or proprietary formats that must be mapped to structures and objects. Provide application access There are dozens of application environments with which the framework must be able to interact. In a large number of cases, the applications are core and host-based without any API. In other cases, they are packaged commercial applications such as CRM and ERP. And yet others are proprietary and built inhouse. A key requirement is to be able to represent both application functionality and application information inside the framework. Flexible information delivery Information only has value if it can be delivered in a way that makes it useful. Micro Focus delivers solutions that allow for multiple information delivery methods. Browser-based Web browsers have proven themselves as a very effective way to deliver enterprise information of all kinds (text, graphics, etc.) to customers and consumers of all kinds. XML Computer-to-computer interactions are enabled by describing the customer information using XML. This, for example, would allow a retail chain to retrieve information directly from a manufacturer in response to a query from a customer at the dealer s Web site..net Enterprises utilizing Microsoft tools and technologies can make the information available to their applications. J2EE Information is readily available for Java-based applications and J2EE based environments. Isolate dependencies The applications depend on the format and interfaces of the back-end enterprise databases and applications. In order to minimize the impact of changes in the back-end systems, the Web-enabled application must be able to carefully isolate those dependencies so that if something changes, the corresponding change in the application needs to be done only once, in one place. This minimizes the ripple effects of changes that can be very costly to propagate throughout every application that is affected. Standardize This frees the developer from having to know all the details about the corresponding back-end systems. Business logic What you don t want to do is modify the format of the enterprise data. What you want to do is to be able to break up the application data into small parts. That way, you ll see that many results will make use of these same small parts. And, the small parts can be joined together in a number of different ways to create any number of different applications in a very simple way. This atomic methodology allows the output from one small part to be used as the input to another. Hence, the flexibility and simplicity of the system. Ideally, the non-programmers, such as business analysts and managers, should be able to participate in defining their applications. They don t need to know anything about the underlying code, just how to put together these small parts. Micro Focus provides visual tools to assist in laying out the information processes and showing the relationships between the data and functional components. Figure 3: Flexible information delivery Service-Oriented Architecture Support Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the use of standard technologies to allow you to break down your existing applications and systems into small reusable components or services with well-defined behaviors. Then, assemble these services into useful composite services or applications. SOA enables a flexible construction of business applications, allowing changes to be made quickly as business processes change or become more complex. Hence, it allows you to adapt quickly to changing business needs. It makes use of standards, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and XML.

5 A Web service is essentially mini application that includes a description of what the application does, how to accesses it, and what data it requires. Web services are often utilized in integration projects where disparate systems may have difficulty interacting with each other without the use of the common standards. One common use is when applications being created need to be reused within other projects or business initiatives. Under the broader umbrella of SOA, Web services are gaining momentum because they are written and communicated with through open standards. Finally, Web services lower the learning curve for users of the new business applications because common standards promote use of a standard user interface. As mentioned earlier, a considerable percentage of customer and product data in enterprises resides in host-based applications that may lack APIs and may require special access and integration techniques. For SOA to work, IT managers need a solution that supports the full range of choices they face when designing and implementing host-based business initiatives. Examples of these choices include: The delivery channel(s) for an application (including desktop, PDA, or other client types) The full spectrum of host systems a company possesses (IBM mainframes, IBM and Unix-based mid-range computers, and ODBC or JDBC-based databases) Managers should also look for a solution that addresses host access and integration with a complete product offering. Customers are able to select the products they need to implement host-based applications today, knowing that these products will support changing needs over time. This is in contrast to the approach of purchasing individual point solutions that can support only a single publishing method. The other imperative in creating a Web-based contact center is fast deployment. A solution designed with flexibility in mind will support the rapid execution of new host-based initiatives because all the components will be designed to work together. As many enterprise managers have discovered, host-based business initiatives often grow more complex over time. Many enterprises first utilized host-based applications in the form of green screen emulation. Those same enterprises may now need to extract transactions and functionalities from the hostbased applications in the form of services that can be used and reused within a serviceoriented architecture. With the opportunity to implement business initiatives of varying degrees of complexity, managers are making decisions based on their budgets, timeframes for completion, and the resources they have available. A platform-based approach that manages a full range of host-based business initiatives would greatly simplify these decisions. What companies have done it already? Established successful organizations do not typically want to be the first to try an unproven technology. They have mission critical operations that must run smoothly 7x24 and cannot afford any glitches or downtime. They want proven solutions with proven ROI, not bleeding-edge technologies. But solutions providers like Micro Focus have a large number of customers who have used their solutions successfully and have realized significant business value. These include: Blue Cross Blue Shield, Palace Resorts, Seat Pagine Gialle, CartaSi, Antargaz, and others. What do I need to do next? Contact Micro Focus Micro Focus offers a set of products and shared services that give customers unprecedented flexibility and speed of deployment when pursuing call center, contact center and other business initiatives. Micro Focus provides an end-to-end solution that enables customers to select the products for their immediate host-based applications needs. And, they know their investments will be preserved and leveraged from one publishing and integration method to the next, while they are moving towards an SOA-based architecture. In addition, Micro Focus offers technology that enables the integration of a wide variety of other contemporary systems, such as CRM, ERP and databases. For more information Micro Focus is an industry leader in helping companies transform host-based or core applications into systems that are easily and readily accessible via the Internet. Now, for the first time, companies can leverage the breadth and depth of their host applications through a complete range of deployment options from desktop, thin client, browser-access and host publishing to complex application integration and development. Micro Focus is a global company with local representation in every major market in the world. The company has helped more than 10,000 customers provide reliable access to corporate information and transform that information into distinct business advantages. Solutions are what Micro Focus is all about. The Micro Focus team can provides years of expertise and experience in rapidly building effective Web-based applications using proven application framework technology. The company s experts can analyze and define requirements, help design applications to meet those requirements, and work with customers enterprise IT teams (or third parties) to develop and deploy effective contact center applications. If your enterprise utilizes host assets, then you need a partner that can manage the full spectrum of host-based solutions. Micro Focus provides this flexibility.

6 To see how your organization could benefit from a contact center, visit us at or call at (US) to have our team conduct a contact center solution workshop with your organization. In Europe and outside the USA, please contact your nearest Micro Focus office. See the worldwide sites page on our web site for detailed contact information. About Micro Focus Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization and Management software enables customers business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information please visit: Copyright Micro Focus (IP) Limited All rights reserved. The software and information contained here in are proprietary to, and comprise valuable trade secrets of, Micro Focus (IP) Limited, which intends to preserve as trade secrets such software and information. This software is an unpublished copyright of Micro Focus and may not be used, copied, transmitted, or stored in any manner. This software and information or any other copies thereof may not be provided or otherwise made available to any other person.. s DSAPMG1109