Today many Service providers are considering Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
SOA is all about application consolidation and crossing boundaries with reusable and extensible services

In order to be effective, this technology independent blueprint has to be aligned with the business strategy:
• Increase revenue
• Decrease costs
• Improve Loyalty

To meet these goals, the way you manage the flow of information to the CSR desktops is critical: this is not necessary solved by SOA and this is where composite applications solutions like Microsoft Customer Care Framework (CCF) can bring many benefits.

Also moving to an SOA means 2 to 3 years of implementation effort.

Using a 3 steps approach, CCF can provide a smooth path to SOA, meet the business strategy goals and provide a fast ROI.

Step 1 is about leveraging and integrating existing IT investments and focusing on smaller projects with an iterative approach

Service providers have hundreds of legacy applications (3270 screens, Win32…), it’s impossible to remove all these UIs in one “big” project.
CCF can integrate what the customer has with a non intrusive approach. CCF can automate front end applications (win 32, Web based applications…) and generate quick benefits and fast ROI by improving the flow of information between applications.

After Step 1, customers can easily expect to have 15 to 25% Average Handling Time reduction (AHT), more than 25% training time reduction and revenue increase.


Step 2:  introduction of new Services provided by the SOA
 
CCF is a smart client and is designed to consume services, aggregate data, manage the flow between information and provide a UI for Web services... Smart clients are easily deployed and managed client applications that provide an adaptive and interactive experience by leveraging local resources and intelligently connecting to distributed data sources.

2 important Smart Clients benefits in a Contact Center scenario:
• one touch deployment (deploy once then automatic updates): http://msdn.microsoft.com/smartclient/understanding/definition/default.aspx
• 20% less code than thin client (http://www.microsoft.com/resources/casestudies/casestudy.asp?CaseStudyID=16276)

During phase 2, you can decide to host front end applications and/or create a new UI connected to web services. As many web services are asynchronous (Web services on top of an EAI layer for example), CCF provides the solution to mix synchronous and asynchronous requests.


Step 3:  SOA deployed and backend systems abstracted through services

CCF is the UI for this SOA and is but the choice of the UI is very dependant of the scenario. All Microsoft desktop’s line of product like Excel or InfoPath can also be considered as smart clients: they are able to consume and aggregate services for some typical scenarios (http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/ibframework/default.aspx ).

Why different UIs? Because End-User adoption is key. Each tool can provide specific features and are used for specific scenarios.

In a contact center, CCF is the end user client application for the “One view of the customer” scenario.

With SOA, all the logic is in the middle tier. This allows service providers to easily add new interactions channels with end customers: email, web chat, Fax, Self Service.

CCF can provide one view to the customer through synchronized interaction channels. Adding a new channel does not require a big effort as all the logic is managed by the CCF Middle tier layer.

If you add on this architecture a CRM solution (getting value from your customer) and a Business Intelligence solution (Analytics for customer segmentation and loyalty programs) you can transform your contact center into a profit center.

Service providers can expect substantial benefits:
• Revenue increase through cross sell, up sell and better marketing campaign.
• Customer satisfaction: cross channels experiences, agent effectiveness
• Employee satisfaction: CCF can automate more than 60% of manual tasks and as a result data quality is improved.


As a conclusion, CCF is the ideal companion for SOA, it:
• Leverages existing IT investment
• Secure the SOA implementation
• Provides quick ROI

Yves Pitsch