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Using SOA To Build Intelligent Communications Solutions |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Thursday, 31 May 2007 |
Speaking at Avaya's fourth
annual Australian customer event, Avaya Connect 2007, Zack Taylor, the
company's VP of Global Strategic Solutions harkened back in time to see how societal
transformations driven by leaps ahead in communications technology have brought
us to this point.
Certain communications inventions,
he suggests, have transformed society and cultures.
Today, says Taylor, we are at an historic junction or inflection point
equivalent to that created by the invention of the telephone, the telegraph or even
the stock ticker.
These advances reduced the
time to complete a task, increased the efficiency of workers, or eliminated
latency and delay from business processes to create more efficient processes
and more productive workers to that customers can be better served.
Taylor described how unified communications were beginning
to transform the way the enterprise works. In the future, he said, the walls of
the traditional contact centre will progressively disappear as organizations
spread the customer contact responsibility to a wider set of workers within the
organization.
From a global point of view,
there are 9 million contact centre workers in the world, these are only the
front line another 100 million workers service customers in other roles. These customer
specialists can be included in the contact centre function to provide direct
customer service via a variety of communications channels.
Taylor described how a bank, which has call centre peaks at
10.00 am and 2.00 pm, but the peak for walk in customers in its
physical branches at midday can leverage customer interfacing customers
from the
branches into a distributed call centre in the morning and afternoon.
Extending this concept even more,
there are another 400 million enterprise workers who might be subject matter
specialists that are not traditionally in customer facing jobs. These employees
can provide specialized knowledge and skills. If they can be identified and
accessed in a timely fashion these workers can actively participate in the delivery
of customer communications as part of the core function of the organisation.
Taylor also addressed the area of what Avaya is calling Intelligent
Communications and showed how data can be converted into information which can
be transformed into action by an intelligent communications system linked with
business processes.
Taylor described how whitegoods manufacturer, Whirlpool,
has implemented Avaya intelligent communications which can be embedded within
critical business processes.
In this way when critical
business metrics need attention the system can automatically notify decision
makers via their chosen method of communications. Taking it further, where
there are several decision makers were required they can be automatically
linked into a conference regardless of their location.
The system can also be used
in such a way that the system automatically takes further action based on the
response from the decision maker.
Using this type of solution Whirlpool
has eliminated 98 percent of its communications-induced latency in the
manufacturing process.
Taylor described how the existing IP Telephony
infrastructure built by large enterprise can now form the core of an
Intelligent Communications framework.
By layering Communications
Applications, Unified Communications solutions and Contact Centre technology on
top of this IP network infrastructure the Avaya Communications Process Manager
with its ability to leverage information from CRM, ERP and SCM systems can be
used to build this type of solution he said.
Avaya SOA (Service Oriented
Architecture) and Event Driven Architecture (EDA) have been built into tallows
you to put a layer over existing infrastructure to address the needs of
innovation and drive value in the enterprise, said Taylor.
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