Comments on: What exactly is a “360-degree view of the customer”? http://www.callcentrehelper.com/what-exactly-is-a-360-degree-view-of-the-customer-7894.htm The UK's most popular call centre magazine Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:45:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Francis Carden http://www.callcentrehelper.com/what-exactly-is-a-360-degree-view-of-the-customer-7894.htm/comment-page-1#comment-28750 Francis Carden Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:38:26 +0000 http://www.callcentrehelper.com/?p=7894#comment-28750 A "360 degree view" is just a high level definition used by the business (Contact Center) to define a set of goals (unattainable until fairly recently). Often, the same goals can be lumped together with other inconsistent terminologies such as Unified Desktop, Composite Application, Unified communications or Mash-Up to name just a few. However, I think few disagree that the solution sought to the problem these terminologies are intended to articulate is a simple one. Too many applications running on the desktop that require significant manual user interaction to manage a call or work flow. To prove this problem is big, I have only met one company that claimed to have solved it. It was a bank and in their words they solved it by "spending 100m dollars and taking 10 years to do it". If you have that time and budget, then you really probably don't need to be reading this post! So, whilst the terminology might be "last century", all of the other terminologies it describes clearly, the same frustrations found in Contact Centers for years. However, Guy is spot on; "Give agents the necessary intelligent, context-sensitive view of the customer". This is what business is looking to solve. So it doesn't matter what the terminology is, just give me the solution. Finally, after all these years there are products that can do so and Contact Centers are finding them and deploying in their 10's of 1000's. A “360 degree view” is just a high level definition used by the business (Contact Center) to define a set of goals (unattainable until fairly recently). Often, the same goals can be lumped together with other inconsistent terminologies such as Unified Desktop, Composite Application, Unified communications or Mash-Up to name just a few.

However, I think few disagree that the solution sought to the problem these terminologies are intended to articulate is a simple one. Too many applications running on the desktop that require significant manual user interaction to manage a call or work flow. To prove this problem is big, I have only met one company that claimed to have solved it. It was a bank and in their words they solved it by “spending 100m dollars and taking 10 years to do it”. If you have that time and budget, then you really probably don’t need to be reading this post!

So, whilst the terminology might be “last century”, all of the other terminologies it describes clearly, the same frustrations found in Contact Centers for years. However, Guy is spot on; “Give agents the necessary intelligent, context-sensitive view of the customer”. This is what business is looking to solve. So it doesn’t matter what the terminology is, just give me the solution. Finally, after all these years there are products that can do so and Contact Centers are finding them and deploying in their 10’s of 1000’s.

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