Terry Murphy
CEO
Rockwell FirstPoint Contact
terry.murphy@rockwellfirstpoint.com
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The Future is Open
Across the corporate landscape, stories of failed CRM programs litter the land. Quite rightly, many in Corporate America - CEOs and IT managers -- are questioning whether the promise of customer relationship management is proving more of an illusion than a reality.
Lost amid the bad news is the fact that many companies have found success in CRM implementation. Examining how these companies have found success demonstrates the difference between success and failure is often based on the implementation itself, and the essential need for more open architecture.
As many IT managers can attest, individual proprietary technologies and systems have created a virtual IT Babylon, and far too often dooms otherwise well-conceived and intentioned CRM implementations.
What is the solution to this dilemma that many companies face? Open and integrateable architecture systems solve the dilemma of proprietary issues and allow IT and contact center managers
to maximize their existing systems while allowing direct customer and productivity benefits. Open contact center environments are quickly becoming the solution to an otherwise overwhelming problem.
The good news for companies is that the need for systems that allow all types of customer collaboration regardless of method is a trend that's on the rise. For contact centers, escalating customer demands and new technologies are reshaping market dynamics, opening new opportunities and re-shuffling the competitive landscape. Open platforms, interfaces and protocols allow for scalable components and systems that can accommodate long-term growth and protect existing investments while substantially decreasing the time and cost required to bring new services to the market.
For contact centers to meet the growing demands of their customers, it is essential that they adopt more open, distributed, standards- based systems including XML (extensible Markup Language). They
should away from computer telephony integration (CTI) middleware solutions, which result in more integration complications instead of allowing unified reporting and greater efficiencies across all systems.
Delay in moving to open architecture will likely transform IT headaches to migraines. With the proliferation of customer contact points -- e-mail, text chat, voice-over the Web, Web call-back - and other methods or technologies not yet imagined, managers need to be prepared with a platform that is flexible enough for all future implementations. Increasingly, IT managers are discovering that they need an open-architecture platform to create an efficient contact-management infrastructure that can handle multi-channel interactions.
Instead of sinking further into the "CRM quicksand," there are several critical questions IT managers must ask themselves prior to moving forward with a CRM implementation:
- "Can I integrate my various existing systems
as I grow my contact center?"
- "Will this platform integrate well with different media types?"
- "Will it easily integrate with other applications?"
- "What kind of changes do I have to make to my core components to allow easy integration?"
Unfortunately, the CRM landscape still remains treacherous. The answers to these questions are not as simple as they may appear on the surface. Many contact centers today incorporate a mix of proprietary systems that are integrated or interfaced with CTI middleware. With the investment in legacy systems made, IT managers are constantly searching to extend the lifecycle of their existing equipment, making it more efficient and robust, while finding ways to open and run additional applications.
With open-server platforms, industry-standard hardware and operating systems provide a significant advantage when time-to-market and cost issues are a factor. Additionally, call-control standards are the foundation
for distributed and interoperable telephony environments, bringing attention to IP-based applications need for flexibility, again, created by open-standard interfaces like Extensible Markup Language (XML), Java Telephony Applications Programming Interface (JTAPI) and Computer Supported Telecommunication Applications (CSTA).
XML, especially, is the new standard "glue" that allows application developers to more effectively create business applications. XML will enable the exchange of data, such as customer buying and service preferences, to provide order fulfillment and possibly (in the future) personalized media catalogs. Essentially the data backbone of the next generation of Internet applications will be XML-based.
The road to CRM success clearly has become a road diverged: gluing together legacy systems in an environment of proliferating contact points is a recipe for disaster. On the other hand, open contact system platforms provide the flexibility
and deep risk mitigation to produce the core functionality IT managers need to fulfill the broken promise of CRM and begin to return the value such customer-focused strategies can bring. It's up to IT managers to choose the path they intend to take; but based on the successful track records of others who have traveled the road before them, the choice has become abundantly clear.
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