Microsoft® Contact Center Framework

Microsoft® Contact Center Framework A Technical White Paper Published: April 2003 Abstract This white paper presents an overview of the Microsoft® Contact Center Framework, a bundle of Microsoft products configured in accordance with a prescriptive architecture, along with custom- developed components that enable network service providers to operate contact centers more cost-effectively while improving customer satisfaction and business agility. By increasing the efficiency with which contact center agents interact with customers and with back-end information systems, the Microsoft Contact Center Framework enables service providers to decrease the cost of operating their contact centers and increase the satisfaction of customers. That, in turn, helps service providers to increase bottom-line profits, decrease customer churn, and respond aggressively to new business and technology opportunities. This white paper is intended for information technology managers who want to understand the Microsoft Contact Center Framework. The overview presents the components of the Framework and examples of the kinds of benefits that may be realized through its deployment. This document is best viewed on-screen in Microsoft Word 2000 or Word 2002 in Print Layout or Web Layout view. The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication. This white paper is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. 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Microsoft, Active Directory, ActiveX, BizTalk, the .NET logo, Windows, Windows NT, and Windows Server are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. 0403 Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1 Overview: Reducing Costs, Improving Service, Easing Integration ........................................ 2 A High-Level View of the Microsoft Contact Center Framework ................................................. 3 Bottom-Line Benefits of Integration.............................................................................................. 5 Integrated Front-End System ....................................................................................................... 6 Linking to Existing CTI Systems .................................................................................................. 7 Use of Existing Back-End Systems ............................................................................................. 8 Enhancing Agent Performance with Real-Time Communications Technologies ................. 10 Scalable, Cost-Effective Architecture ....................................................................................... 11 Evolving the Contact Center to Meet New Opportunities .......................................................... 12 Summary ...................................................................................................................................... 13 Microsoft Contact Center Framework Technical White Paper 1 Introduction Contact centers lie at the heart of a network service provider’s operations. They handle the majority of your customer interactions—from service provisioning to providing technical assistance, from answering billing questions to up-selling new products to existing customers. They are complex, expensive, and invariably challenging. The Microsoft® Contact Center Framework is designed to help you to operate and manage a contact center environment in a way that both increases customer satisfaction and reduces operating costs. It delivers these benefits through the use of:  An integrated front-end system for contact center agents and managers. The integrated desktop optimizes agent and manager productivity by presenting the agent with access to all the applications that he or she needs through one interface. Caching technologies streamline the reuse of data among all the applications available on the desktop, so common information such as a customer account number never needs to be reentered as the agent moves from one line-of- business (LOB) application to another, even if those applications are running on different back-end systems.  Microsoft Windows® XP Professional real-time technologies—including instant messaging and Remote Desktop. These technologies help agents to interact with specialists and managers faster and more efficiently than in the past, which reduces call duration and improves customer satisfaction.  A flexible, scalable, cost-effective infrastructure architecture. The Microsoft Contact Center Framework avoids the ―rip-and-replace‖ approach to contact center upgrades by integrating existing back-end systems through the use of XML Web services and data abstraction layers. It can scale and incorporate new functionality through the use of cost-effective industry-standard hardware. The Microsoft Contact Center Framework has been designed for scalable deployment in a fraction of the time—and at a fraction of the capital—needed for traditional back-end integration projects. The Framework has also been designed for flexibility and long-term investment protection. With support for enterprise application integration and Web services, you can integrate any applications you care to use—and that helps you to make decisions about which applications will best meet your business needs and best serve your customers. The net result is a new approach to contact centers that decreases operational costs and customer churn while increasing agent effectiveness and customer satisfaction. Microsoft Contact Center Framework Technical White Paper 2 Overview: Reducing Costs, Improving Service, Easing Integration The Microsoft Contact Center Framework is a bundle of Microsoft products configured in accordance with a prescriptive architecture, along with custom-developed components that help you to reduce the cost of operating contact centers and to improve customer service and personnel productivity. The Framework facilitates the integration of applications and information in a way that supports both reduced cost and improved customer service, and it helps you to move from planning to implementation—and on to reduced cost and increased revenue—faster than ever before. Historically, the contact center environment often has taken shape around system limitations rather than business requirements. The Microsoft Contact Center Framework breaks down those limitations and enables you to deploy your resources around your business needs rather than around technology roadblocks. While this may sound like the promise of traditional back-end integration efforts, the Framework approaches integration in a different way. The Microsoft Contact Center Framework:  Integrates customer-facing systems on the agent’s desktop, eliminating the ―swivel seat‖ phenomenon that inserts unnecessary time and complexity into routine contact center tasks.  Works with your existing investments, precluding the need to ―rip and replace‖ existing systems.  Offers investment protection for future integration through the use of an open-standard, multiprotocol approach that makes use of XML Web services, the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), enterprise application integration (EAI), and other technologies—ensuring that you can ―plug and play‖ with whatever applications you want to integrate into your contact center.  Can make use of consistent business rules across interaction channels, when used in combination with Microsoft BizTalk® Server orchestration.  Simplifies and centralizes desktop system administration, even as it supports roaming agents and eliminates the need to touch the desktop after deployment. Developing an integrated solution in this way brings immediate relief to the cost of providing service to customers. This approach can shave seconds from every call, and those seconds can translate into millions of dollars of operational savings every year. This approach also improves customer satisfaction by reducing the time it takes to address customer concerns. For example:  Web services automate access to customer databases and back-office systems—such as billing, trouble ticketing, and order management—so agents can resolve customer concerns and requests quickly, even when those requests involve using multiple back-end systems.  Context caching services reduce on-call time and potential errors by fulfilling redundant data requests (for example, requests for customer name and address, billing telephone number, and so on from separate back-end applications) with cached information. These services ensure that different back-end systems can reuse customer data. They also provide a mechanism whereby contextual information can be transferred along with a call (for example, from an interactive voice response system to an agent, or from a tier-one agent to a tier-two agent), which eliminates the need to recapture and/or rekey information when moving calls. Microsoft Contact Center Framework Technical White Paper 3  Improved real-time communications technologies enable agents to connect with managers and other agents without transfers or hand-offs. With the Instant Messenger feature of the Windows XP Professional operating system, an agent can communicate directly with a specialist who can solve a customer’s problem. The Remote Desktop feature of Windows XP Professional enables a specialist or a manager to take control—literally—of an agent’s desktop and perform actions remotely to resolve a customer issue. Because the agent does not have to spend time tracking down a specialist or manager, or hand off as many calls to resolve a customer call, calls are shorter, which both managers and customers appreciate. Finally, the Microsoft Contact Center Framework is designed with flexibility and scalability in mind. Microsoft server products and the Microsoft .NET Framework, an integral component of Windows, enable you to expand the Framework as your business demands—quickly and cost-effectively. A High-Level View of the Microsoft Contact Center Framework The Microsoft Contact Center Framework (Figure 1) provides contact center agents and managers with integrated access to a range of applications and services within the contact center infrastructure. Calls are routed to the agent’s workstation using the existing telephony infrastructure. A computer-telephony integration (CTI) abstraction layer enables the existing CTI infrastructure to pick up the fact that the call was transferred and present relevant customer data to the agent desktop. The integrated agent desktop provides access to the real-time communications features in Windows XP Professional, including instant messaging and Remote Desktop, as well as a skills-based routing mechanism (based on an Web service) that enables agents to find available support resources instantly. An agent or manager can use these communications technologies to escalate concerns and interact with experts—without putting the customer on hold to do so. Additionally, the integrated agent desktop interacts with an Application Integration Framework (AIF) that enables access to current and future line-of-business applications—such as billing, service provisioning, customer relationship management (CRM), and other business support system (BSS) and operations support system (OSS) applications. A data abstraction and caching layer facilitates the interaction with these back-end systems. This layer isolates the particulars of interacting with different computers, operating systems, and applications from the agent workstation itself. Microsoft Contact Center Framework Technical White Paper 4 Figure 1: A high-level view of the Microsoft Contact Center Framework architecture Integration is not limited to the front end of the Microsoft Contact Center Framework. The flexibility of the Framework is such that you can also integrate your OSS and BSS infrastructures through the use of .NET-based Web services. Just where you choose to start depends on your particular pain points. In contact centers where agents already are using six different devices, the consolidated agent desktop is frequently the more pressing place to begin. Other integration efforts can take place later. With the Microsoft Contact Center Framework, you can integrate any application into the consolidated infrastructure. You can choose the applications you want to use to support your business; the Framework provides you with a way to optimize the integration of those applications into a streamlined service delivery system. Application Integration Framework Active Directory and User Profile Real-Time Communication (RTC) and Skills Based Routing for RTC Context and Application Integration Services Hosted Application 1 Configuration Services Color Codes: CCF core component or reference implementation provided CCF custom component 3rd Party TAPI Implementation 3rd Party TSAPI Implementation 3rd Party Telephony (other) Implementation External Component D at a A b st ra ct io n a n d C ac h in g L ay er LOB Application 1 LOB Application N LOB Application 3 LOB Application 2 Hosted Application N Application Host CTI Abstraction Layer TAPI TSAPI Other Agent Desktop Microsoft Contact Center Framework Technical White Paper 5 Bottom-Line Benefits of Integration The Microsoft Contact Center Framework is a bundle of Microsoft products configured in accordance with a prescriptive architecture, along with custom-developed components designed to meet your individual needs for agent desktop, CTI, and back-end integration. The Framework can reduce the amount of time required to provide customer service. The potential benefits of deployment can be seen in the projections in Table 1. Step Original Duration (in seconds) Projected Duration with the Framework Savings Analysis Welcome / Caller ID 30 30 During the early portions of the call, the Microsoft Contact Center Framework works behind the scenes to gather key customer information from existing customer databases. The Framework reduces call time during the problem resolution phase by streamlining data entry and then cutting post-call work in half. Problem Identification 90 45 Problem Resolution 120 60 Wrap-up 30 30 Post-Call Activities 30 15 Total 300 180 Table 1: Projected timesavings through the use of the Microsoft Contact Center Framework The timesavings gained through the use of the Microsoft Contact Center Framework can translate into significant dollar savings. In a 250-agent contact center fielding 20,000 five-minute billing calls per day, a reduction of two minutes per call frees up 40,000 minutes per day. At a rate of U.S.$0.60 per minute for labor and overhead, that savings amounts to more than $7.2 million per year (assuming 300 work days per year). And these savings are in a relatively small contact center. Depending on the size of your contact center, the number of calls it handles, how and where you choose to integrate, and other factors, your savings could be more or less than those in this projection. A common assumption in the marketplace is that the ability to reduce average call duration by even one second in a very large contact center could create a savings equivalent of $1 million annually. With agents able to serve customers more efficiently, you can apply these savings in several different ways:  Reduce the number of contact center agents required to handle a given volume of contacts. In the projections above, the contact center could conceivably shrink by 100 agents and still support the same number of calls.  Increase the number of contacts that agents can support in a given period. With 40,000 extra minutes each day, the existing pool of 250 agents could handle more than 13,300 additional calls each day.  Enable inbound contact center agents to spend more time on sales activities such as up- selling or cross-selling efforts. The bottom line? The Microsoft Contact Center Framework helps you to lower the costs of delivering service, improve efficiency and customer service, and gain greater agility to respond rapidly to changes in the business or regulatory environments. Microsoft Contact Center Framework Technical White Paper 6 Integrated Front-End System The Microsoft Contact Center Framework provides contact center agents and managers with a single front-end system, one that integrates the back-end applications and services that currently require separate devices and interfaces. Precisely which applications and services are available to any individual depends on the Microsoft Windows Active Directory® group profile to which the individual belongs. When an agent logs on to the contact center network, the appropriate desktop configuration appears on the screen. Figure 2: The integrated agent desktop (FPO while we decide what screenshot to use) Built on Microsoft Windows XP Professional and relying on XML Web services and the Microsoft .NET Framework, the integrated agent desktop provides a flexible, fully customizable interface to applications throughout the contact center infrastructure. Customer information from an account database, for example, might appear across the top of the window, as in Figure 2. Information from auxiliary applications, such as alerts or promotions, might appear automatically in a left pane. In the right pane, the integrated agent desktop might provide access to key LOB systems such as billing, trouble ticket, provisioning, or other systems. The Microsoft Contact Center Framework does not include any applications out of the box, but it does provide guidance and Web services for integrating the agent Microsoft Contact Center Framework Technical White Paper 7 desktop with existing applications and databases through the use of Web services and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000. Linking to