I just came back from 3 days of training in Singapore on the Microsoft Customer Care Framework, and I must say that I'm pretty damn impressed with its ability to address agent pain within the call centre. What I like about it is:-

  • The best non-disruptive technology that I've seen.
    It works with what you have, so your existing customer care applications don't require modification; you can just host them within the CCF agent desktop.
  • Easy to develop.
    Essentially the CCF desktop application is a .NET Application with all the source code (shared source) supplied. It comes ready-to-go, whilst, at the same time, it's super-straight forward to modify. Lovely.
  • Supports our existing integration technologies.
    If you want to do back-end integration and build a portal-type application on CCF then this is also supported using our existing technologoes (eg. Windows Server, BizTalk Server, SQL Server etc.). So it's your choice; integration at the agent's desktop, integration at the back-end with BizTalk etc., or a combination of front-end or back-end integration. Flexibility; lovely once again. :-)

If you haven't already, check out the flash presentation on our CCF site. You'll get a look at the agent desktop and see how the CCF can bring all these applications together.

Since coming back to Malaysia, everyone that I've showed this to has been super-impressed at how it addresses the "enternal non-integrated helpdesk applications" problem that agents face everyday, and I am too. If any of you have played with this or have any additional thoughts, drop me a comment. I'd love to hear your feedback.