Aspect Contact Center: Unplugged Blog » Blog Archive » Why Can’t Your Contact Center Infrastructure And The Rest Of Your Enterprise Just Get Along?

11 Jun08

Why Can’t Your Contact Center Infrastructure And The Rest Of Your Enterprise Just Get Along?

Author: Roger Sumner

For as long as I can remember, most companies have maintained two separate and distinct technology architectures – one for the contact center and the other for the rest of the enterprise. While that statement is probably somewhat exaggerated, until now, maintaining disparate infrastructures has been an inconvenient truth, but there hasn’t been a compelling reason to bring two diametrically opposed systems together. Enter unified communications. In order to extend contact center capabilities out to the enterprise, you really need to start thinking about how you can get your contact center infrastructure to easily interoperate with what’s already serving the rest of your company.

Why are we faced with this conundrum?

Since the beginning, contact centers have focused on customer-facing business processes – customer service, sales and telemarketing, or collections. One of their primary goals has always been to implement technologies that improve these processes while reducing associated costs and/or increasing revenue. To achieve these objectives, contact centers have historically been forced to integrate their architectures together using a variety of proprietary solutions from a myriad of vendors. Sometimes these solutions work in harmony and sometimes they don’t. As a result, it is often difficult for contact centers to pinpoint the place of failure when one occurs and just as challenging to add and integrate new (proprietary) capabilities.

Now consider the enterprise architectures – placid by comparison. This infrastructure, always a work in progress, is being carefully crafted from standard protocols and interfaces. All the components work together well enough to allow the corporate IT staff to support multiple business units, enable new products, partners and channels, respond to changing competition, manage additional regulation and oversight, support a 7 x 24 x 365 business and protect corporate assets … all while keeping costs to a minimum. IT is building this infrastructure for extreme scalability, flexibility, agility, security, and reliability.

Do you think it’s possible for your IT department to synchronize your loosely integrated contact center infrastructure with the enterprise superhighway? You probably said no (I’ve painted a pretty bleak picture above), but the answer is actually yes. Regardless of whether your IT group is trying to drive your business through technology or using technology to react to situations, two things can help them align these vastly different architectures – consolidation and standardization.

Right now, while you’re reading this blog, your IT staff is probably working on implementing standards across five key elements of your technology architecture – physical footprint, network/telephony, application integration, reporting, and management. They are doing this so they can increase the re-use of your enterprise’s current technology investments, enhance IT productivity, consolidate redundant platforms and applications, and employ technology innovation as an agent for change. It’s time for you to help your IT staff fit your contact center applications neatly into the above-mentioned stack of elements so that the contact center and the rest of the enterprise can learn to talk to one another.

Is your contact center technology playing nicely with the rest of the enterprise? If not, keep an eye out for Gary’s upcoming blog about how you can make your contact center IT-ready.