Get Back Office Integration Right

Sonia Rabone reveals the 5 things you need to consider to successfully integrate the back office into the contact centre.

1. Be clear on what you’re trying to achieve

It sounds obvious but there is no point doing any kind of integration if there is no tangible benefit, or if it does not suit your business processes from both the back office and operational perspective, as well as your agent workflows.

Integration should work for your business to save time and money while streamlining your processes, so choose system integrations that will help you do that.

This will likely include a combination of features that address the end-to-end business processes, drawn from both contact centre and back office technology to provide optimal efficiency.

2. Ensure you have buy-in and communication across departments

You need to ensure plans are well communicated and ideally that staff and departments have been consulted. Don’t underestimate the feedback you might get.

Get buy-in from the top level and ensure you communicate clearly across departments and educate and manage the expectations of all team members.

3. It needs to be easy

Wherever possible, consider ‘out-of-box’ integration as this will be pre-built, tried and tested and a lot less painful in terms of time and resource.

A cloud contact centre will often have off the shelf integration into popular CRM systems, resulting in a seamless cloud to cloud operation.

Typically the back office will be using the CRM just as much the front office; a shared communications platform makes life a lot easier than disjointed systems. (Where out of the box integration is not available, look for open XML APIs, ensuring they are secure, published and free to use.)

4. Use the right technology

This may mean cloud PBX features like instant messaging and presence, Microsoft Lync integration, easy call transfers and shared screen-pops.

Or a good example of contact centre technology would be an advanced scripting tool, allowing customers to seamlessly blend their operational processes with their multi-channel communications workflows.

Another example might be to have the caller line ID to trigger intelligent call routing based on database information such as ‘out for delivery’ or ‘complaint currently open’.

That way the call can be presented to the agent best equipped to handle the query based on their status resulting in a much more streamlined experience for the customer and saving agent time by connecting to the right person first time.

5. It needs to be secure

Ensuring secure and resilient connections is an absolute must. When integrating any new systems you need to ensure the data is safe.

Consider ISO27001 along with other security and compliance standards. Look at failover and resilience, and what would happen in the event of a disaster.

With thanks to Sonia Rabone at Magnetic North