The Integrated SOA Cockpit
How is an integrated SOA cockpit possible? Simply answered, it's possible through the componentized nature of the SOA on which these solutions are built. Code is designed to be reusable. An IT staff can design new ways to link services that deliver innovative approaches to business process problems. Solutions built from the ground up using the SOA architecture (and the open standards associated with it) assume that integration into other applications is desirable. This is the opposite of the proprietary code of the 20th century.

For example, the familiar graphical user interface (GUI) of the agent desktop application can serve as a single, highly intuitive user interface into which corporate directory access is fully blended and available at the agents' fingertips. Similarly, an audio conferencing service and real-time availability information can also be easily integrated, turning the SOA-based agent desktop into a more powerful customer interaction cockpit. With such an integrated solution, agents can easily collaborate with subject matter experts when a customer escalates an issue even if the agent is sitting in a remote office and the expert is working from home.

When a contact center is virtualized in this fashion and knowledge can truly flow from anywhere quickly and more accurately to address the customer's questions, FCR rates can suddenly go from mysterious and unquantifiable to being the competitive advantage that meets strategic corporate goals of world class service, revenue protection and growth.

Seeing the Future Today
Rick Tillotson, assistant information technology director of telecommunications for the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB), has seen this future and has thought about how this new level of integration would benefit his organization. Four years ago, the TASB installed a Siemens contact center solution (HiPath ProCenter) to better serve its 7,000 school board members and administrative staff in all 1,036 school districts in the state.

TASB (www.tasb.org), one of the strongest school board associations in the country, manages a healthy investment pool, runs an online purchasing cooperative that sells everything from pencils to big yellow school buses and publishes school policy manuals online for its membership.

Its biggest undertaking, however, is risk management. TASB offers members property-casualty, unemployment, and workers' compensation coverage. This line of business also gets the most calls at TASB - fielding around 165,000 of the 190,000 calls into the organization's contact centers each year.

TASB's existing solution provides real-time availability status of agents to supervisors and managers in the various centers at their headquarters. They also have home-based agents around the Austin area and spread throughout Texas. At one site many small call centers act as autonomous groups. TASB's highly specialized agents have knowledge of legal rulings and regulations and are very one-to-one member focused.

Yet even with this excellent operation in the contact center, Tillotson said, "We continue to be challenged by the fact that agents need access to managers and experts who sit outside the center. Unless those experts are logged into the call center system, agents have no way to know who's available to help, or how to reach them when a call comes in that requires their expertise."

He continues, "A lot of our callers are educators, like my wife and sister-in-law, and they are hoping to make a quick call and get back to the classroom before havoc breaks out. And, you can't just call a teacher back in the middle of a class. First-call resolution is very important to us and that means getting all the resources fast, including subject matter experts when needed. With training, hearings, meetings, and travel, we can't keep our experts tied to a desk anymore."

When the expert is outside the contact center, the agent is forced to play a guessing game - similar to what enterprise employees experience daily when trying to locate team members without any real-time display of who is available and through which media or device. This is not a productive use of a TASB agent's time nor does it help serve the TASB member. Since more employees are mobile and increasingly located outside the confines of traditional call center settings, this is a challenge that Tillotson is actively addressing.

Tillotson also wants to support agents and claims processors who are demanding flexible work arrangements. Because their contact center is located in a highly competitive market, TASB utilizes work-at-home options as a benefit to retain their best talent.

So what exactly did Tillotson see? What value could it provide to his organization?

In an unprecedented move that uniquely bridges the contact center and the enterprise, Siemens Enterprise Communications professional services staff used the SOA components of its OpenScape UC Application (open, enterprise-class unified communications software for enterprises) to make subject matter experts, wherever they may be (remote offices, home offices, hotels, etc.), available through the OpenScape Contact Center agents' desktops (see Figure 1).

Simply stated, an agent using an integrated desktop, with embedded UC capabilities, will now be able to focus on delivering an excellent customer interaction. The agent will not be burdened with navigating a complicated desktop of customer data, while also juggling disparate communications systems to attempt to reach an expert immediately. Available through the agent desktop application, are instant messaging, audio and Web conferencing, and the ability to track the availability status of subject matter experts who are currently unavailable.

Kevin Voth is the Siemens engineer who was directly involved in integrating the two SOA applications from the OpenScape UC Suite. He explained, "I simply took the open APIs from the OpenScape Contact Center SDK and the OpenSOA SDK for the UC Application, and combined them to solve a common business process problem in the contact center. I used DHTML and JavasScript to create a thin client that connects back to aggregated presence and availability Web Services that can run on any workstation in your network."

Customer Perspective: The Value of Reusable SOA Components
When Tillotson saw this integration demonstration, he recognized that the value of this virtualized contact center will come at three different levels.

First, measurably higher FCR rates, shorter call handling times, and higher customer satisfaction ratings become immediately possible. Tillotson said, "Now, you've made it simple. With this level of integration, it will be just as easy to contact managers and experts (who might be brought into a conversation but aren't logged into the call center software) as it is to reach agents within the call center. Our agents would be able to connect with experts using these new capabilities embedded in our call center software like instant messaging and conferencing and know they're available."