Trend 2: From seamless integration with business processes to the Customer Engagement Center
When implementing new enterprise applications, their successful integration into the existing ICT environment is always one of the main challenges. For contact center applications, this is doubly true. To ensure high customer satisfaction, contact center agents are required to access a range of internal information systems and business applications. However, simply making all these separate applications available to agents does not address the problem satisfactorily. Many business systems are so complex that the agent is unable to locate satisfactory answers to specific customer questions quickly enough, despite having relevant access to these internal resources.
Without the close integration of contact center tools with the internal information systems and business applications, the productivity of the contact center is reduced. This can lead to organisations losing valuable data and opportunities. The interconnection between marketing activities, customer-driven communications from the contact center, and related business processes creates data that can be used to analyze the interrelationship between these areas. This provides organisations with valuable insight and the ability to manage customer relationships more smartly.
It can therefore be seen that the contact center should be linked to both enterprise systems and business process applications, as well as tools that are closely related to the Omni-Channel marketing strategy. A successful relationship with customers is based on three pillars complementing each other: marketing, customer care and business processes. A possible solution would be to ensure the close integration of contact center tools such as a CRM or any other customer-oriented applications that the enterprise uses in order to capture line-of-business (LoB) requests, create marketing activities or track business processes, and the precise monitoring of the interconnections between them.
However, the trend in this area is the seamless integration of individual customer-oriented business processes directly into the agent interface of the contact center client application. This can allow the agent interface to be context specific, adapting to the content and nature of the customer interaction. Thus, based on the knowledge of the agent and the context of the request, the agent automatically sees all the relevant information from all the linked information systems, resources, and applications. If the agent is unable to handle the request by themselves, they can initiate an automatic workflow for this "case" - a workflow that directs the "case" to another agent, specialist or department that addresses requests like this one. The "case" therefore remains open until it is closed by a specific person. Thus, none of the customer’s "cases" end prematurely, due to system constraints or processes.
The goal of integrating customer-oriented business processes directly into a contact center application is not a replacement for the CRM. The aim is to provide the agent with information and resources that are relevant at the time, in the context of the specific call, to meet the customer’s requirements. At the same time, the whole intereaction process should facilitate the gathering, tracking and analysis of customer raltionshps, behaviors and expectations. For organisations who have not implemented all of the follow-up business processes and applications, this contact center component can bridge the gap between absent business applications or can prevent any missing steps from interrupting the entire business process. In addition, a specific application can be created within the contact center solution in order to compensate for any deficient processes or components (modules) of an organisation’s information systems.
In the future, the contact center will break away from its boundaries within the customer care department and will permeate through the entire company: starting from the desktops of all administrators, through marketing, sales, technical support, finance and other specialist departments, up to the management of the company. They will all be part of the new customer-oriented business process and will have access to the contact center application, which in turn will develop into a new dimension: the Customer Engagement Center (CEC).