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Fighting Call Center Blues with CCF

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

The entire service industry thrives on one important aspect -the customer

service. It has become quite imperative for the service industry today to serve

the customer with greater agility and flexibility. Service providers

continuously try to cater to this requirement by being more creative with the

ways in which they can communicate or interact with their customers. These

include the call centers that have been around for a couple of years now. Apart

from these, there are other media like the Web based self-service portals, email

support, Web-based chats or even smart devices that are being used to serve the

customers with better efficiency. Technological advancements are consistently

offering newer and newer service delivery mechanisms to facilitate the

customers. Keeping abreast of these changes and delivering effective and focused

information to the customers as fast as possible is now the key to face the

competition head-on.

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Call center blues



Today, with customer service, the companies are looking mainly at ease and
efficiency. The focus is on delivering the correct information to the customer

based on the current context and past experiences. The end users are looking out

for agile systems that would adapt to their service needs. This includes various

channels for customer support providing them with a great deal of flexibility in

consuming the services. For instance, adding a self-service portal allows the

customers to get the required information themselves and, hence, reduces the

burden on the call centers. Such auxiliary channels do augment the call centers

by providing any time, anywhere information to the customers. However, call

centers still remain the most important and reliable point of contact for the

customers.

Direct

Hit!
Applies

to:
Customer care centers
USP:

CCF helps alleviate typical call-center pains by alleviating service orientation along with MS Windows Server System
Links:

www.microsoft.com/ccf 
Google

keywords:
MS Customer Care Framework 2005

Today, the agility of the call centers is critically hampered by what is

known as the swivel-seat problem. All the customer interaction channels,

including the call centers, rely on a number of systems. This includes the LOB

(Line of Business) applications like CRM and order management or the OSS/BSS

(Operational & Business Support Systems) like provisioning systems, billing

systems or any other legacy systems. These systems store the customer data and

perform relevant processing on it. As a result, the CSA (Customer Service Agent)

has to deal with multiple applications when he is servicing a client request.

The CSA has several physical or logical user interfaces or terminals to

different applications. Furthermore, these applications can be separated on

completely different platforms, thus, making them more complex. The CSA has to

switch between these applications to get a holistic view of the customer's

data and to serve the customer efficiently. At several instances, he also needs

to key in redundant information in these disparate applications to retrieve

relevant information. This makes it an even more time consuming and error prone.

As a result, the CSA spends a lot more time with the customer on call for every

task. As a byproduct, due to the non-availability of the holistic data of the

customer, it becomes very difficult for organizations to introduce cross-selling

policies that can further boost sales. Therefore, a potential revenue gain is

curbed. Also, this brings in limitations in segmenting the customers based on

priorities and promptly attending high-priority customers. Enabling this would

definitely mean attracting trust from the high priority customers towards the

service providers. Apart from all these issues, practically, the call centers

face very high employee turnover. This means that each and every CSA who is

recruited needs to be trained on using the applications. With all the

complexities involved, the training periods are much longer and expensive.

Obviously, to increase the productivity, call centers today look for reducing

the call times and improving the productivity of a typical CSA. In the long run,

maintenance costs take away a huge chunk of the budgets so reducing costs is

also a top priority.

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The Agent Desktop helps integrate various app front ends while providing features like Workflows, Customer Sessions and Context Sharing

The CCF way



With its first few steps in the Communications Sector, Microsoft has introduced
the Customer Care Framework that helps leverage the Service Oriented

Architecture and alleviates call-center issues. This framework is primararily

based on the .NET Web services and SQL Server. However, it can also leverage

other Windows Server system products including the BizTalk Server, Sharepoint

portal and the Host Integration Server to provide an efficient way to shape up

the customer service.

One of the very prominent and crucial elements of the CCF is the Agent

Desktop. The Agent Desktop, as the name would suggest, lives on the desktop of a

customer service agent and addresses the most crucial issue-the swivel-seat

problem. The Agent Desktop is a smart client with a built-in presentation

integration framework that can reuse and integrate new and existing UI

applications. In effect, it integrates all LOB and OSS/BSS application

front-ends under one umbrella, giving the CSA a 360 degrees view of the customer

data. Essentially, the front ends here can be Web based or client applications

or even Windows Controls. For CCF, it is one of the Hosted Applications-the

CCF term for an application that is hosted within the Agent Desktop. These

hosted applications are displayed in a tabbed interface within the Agent

Desktop. The MMC based CCF Admin Console allows configuring these applications

for CCF with simple to use wizards. For complex applications-like for example

a Java based CRM system, CCF allows developing Adapters that would form a bridge

between the application and the Agent Desktop.

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The hosting for web applications is obviously independent of the technology

being used for the development. It can be an ASP.NETapplication, a JSP web site,

a Sharepoint portal or even a PHP application. However, CCF APIs provide the Web

Adapters interfaces that allow customizing how these applications are hosted.

For example, a PHP web site would probably need the agent to login before being

able to use the Web-based system. A Web Adapter can actually fetch the

credentials corresponding to the logged in agent from the Single Sign on system

and can automate the task of entering them in the web page and pressing the

Login button.

Along with the hosted applications, the Agent Desktop also provides context

sharing, session management and single sign-on for the hosted applications,

thus, maintaining sessions for each customer. For each user session, the user

information, being stored as the context data can be shared by the hosted

applications. Effectively, it reduces redundant data entry to a great extent and

eases the management of user information. Using Single Sign-On, Agent Desktop

can map the agent credentials on the LOB systems with the current Windows

credentials. This avoids the need to login individually to each system.

Statistically, the introduction of the Agent Desktop, by itself reduces the call

handling time to over 40%. So, whenever a call comes to the CSA, the Agent

Desktop can be configured to automatically fetch the customer details. It opens

all the LOB and OSS/BSS applications with the login credentials corresponding to

the logged in Agent. The customer's data is shared in the context so that all

these applications can leverage this data and open the related sections in the

application.

As call centers face a huge employee turnover, a slight reduction in training

costs goes a big way in increasing the profit margins. The Agent Desktop

provides the workflow functionality that defines the execution steps a CSA is

supposed to follow for each scenario. When a customer calls up to say that he

wants to have international roaming enabled on his cellphone. The Agent Desktop

can actually define a workflow here that the agent can follow. The workflow

might shift between various hosted applications. In this case, it will prompt

the customer service agent to update the provisioning system to enable roaming

and then mark the billing system for the activation charges. At the end of it,

the workflow can also direct the agent to some related promotional offers that

might be of interest of the customer. These workflows can be custom defined for

each scenario and can span across multiple applications that are integrated in

the Agent Desktop. With the workflows, the agent need not remember the



entire process in detail. In effect, the workflow can be used as a guideline for
any customer service process.

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Another striking feature of CCF is the ability to use RTC (Real Time

Communication). A CSA can communicate with a domain or process specialist in

real time using features like instant messaging. The process specialist can, in

turn, leverage the remote desktop assistance to guide the CSA to complete the

process. The RTC leverages the MS Live Communications Server to achieve this

effectively.

The CCF Agent Desktop can be further integrated with the voice infrastructure

using the built-in Computer-Telephony Integration features. The implementation

supports CTI systems complaint with TAPI/TSAPI, AVAYA or other industry standard

telephony systems.

Bundled with the CCF is the MMC based Administration Console that provides an

easy to use interface to configure various elements of the CCF. Apart from the

Hosted Applications, it allows configuring of the workflows, mapping of the

applications to the agents, mapping the credentials with Single Sign on,

integrating with the CTI, configuring of the Adapters for each hosted

applications and a lot of other features that make working with CCF a breeze.

Sanket Bakshi

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