Sabio focuses on Application Integration to help contact centres
Sabio the innovative contact centre services and solutions company, has launched a new initiative aimed at helping contact centres to ‘Detox their Desktops’. *Recent UK research suggests that 66 per cent of contact centre agents already use three or more separate IT applications when fielding customer calls. This can place an unreasonable pressure on agents, and is proving anincreasing barrier for organisations in delivering better service to customers.
Typical UK contact centres can require their agents to use anything up to ten different IT applications either during or after a customer call, ranging from customer management systems, credit card payment and CRM applications to accounts, CTI, incident ticketing and complaints handling. This is in addition to standard applications such as e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and web browsers. According to Sabio’s Consulting Director, Kenneth Hitchen: "this sheer variety of applications means that organisations are spending too much of their valuable training time on teaching agents to use all these different systems, and that often doesn’t leave enough time to concentrate on essential customer service skills and techniques.
"For organisations this is proving to be an increasing challenge, as most of these applications are essential for the effective running of their customer contact centres. So the question we’re now facing is not one of application reduction, but more how we can actually help our agents to use these different applications more effectively by ‘detoxing their desktops’," he continued.
By Helping the agent to see what’s important for many organisations this complexity has intensified with the addition of self-service and Web-based channels. Most of these organisations have a strong investment in legacy applications, and increasingly don’t have the same flexibility as those newer
Internet-based businesses that have been able to build customer service infrastructures from the ground-up.
To address this challenge, Sabio is adopting the latest Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) techniques to help bring together disparate business applications and present them in a far more agent-friendly interface. Sabio’s new partnership with Corizon, developers of the innovative User Process Management (UPM) software, will enable the company to create simplified agent desktops that are more role-specific and feature processes whose functionality directly reflects the needs of the customers who are calling. This SOA-based approach would, for example, integrate all the necessary data and functionality from existing applications and combine this information and the relevant processes in a single, composite user interface.
Adding value with Sabio’s contact centre expertise "At Sabio we’ve always encouraged organisations to implement user-centred contact centre processes, and believe that should extend to the actual agents who have to make those processes work," added Kenneth. "We’ll be adding value to our Service Oriented Architecture approach by building a whole series of Sabio Connectors to integrate key data from leading contact centre software vendors such as Avaya, Genesys Telecommunications and Witness Systems into the data. We’ll also be extending this with functionally-specific applications which will address core contact centre processes such as ID&V (Identification and Verification), Customer Contact History and Compliance Support."
