Contact Center: Unplugged

Winning Over IT With Application Integration

Author:  Roger Sumner

A while ago, I wrote about the importance of synchronizing your contact center infrastructure with the overall enterprise infrastructure. Application integration is a key component in this equation.  But, it’s not reasonable to think that your IT department is going to spend an inordinate amount of time customizing proprietary products with proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) to make them work with each other.

Like you, your IT guys have a lot going on and your contact center is just only one of the many critical areas they must support. If you have a poorly integrated contact center system or an extremely siloed set-up, your IT staff is most likely already spending way too much time and money – both of which are generally in short supply these days – on new integrations and maintenance of existing integrations. This is obviously a big challenge right now in a “do more with less” economic environment, but it will become even more of a concern as your company works to implement its unified communications (UC) strategy, which will rely heavily on integration within the contact center and many other areas within the business. 

By making your contact center IT-Ready, you can certainly help simplify life for your IT staff and your enterprise as a whole. You can do this by selecting and deploying contact center solutions that have the right integration points, implement the appropriate business rules and call flows, and work well with the network.

A very important part of this process is choosing software that uses industry standards for integration, such as SOAP, XML and open Web services APIs. Solutions that leverage these standards can be deployed significantly faster as no proprietary skills are required. Plus, if your contact center applications are IT-Ready, you’ll see that your contact center personnel has more control over its applications and performance, and your IT department has more bandwidth to focus on other enterprise-wide initiatives. Certainly, this is a win-win for everyone.

Are your contact center technologies IT Ready? If they do not fit neatly into your physical footprint, network, and reporting and management tools, what are you doing to rectify the problem?

Author: Roger Sumner
Catergories: Contact Center Technology, Standards, Unified Communications

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