Fighting Call Center Blues with CCF

As one of its starter products for the Communications Sector, MS has introduced the Customer Care Framework 2005 that helps leverage SOA to alleviate typical call center pains

Sunday, July 16, 2006

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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