Application Integration for Legacy Contact Centers

If you’re not an IT specialist, then integrating your enterprise software applications can be like trying to learn a new language with no dictionary. You wouldn’t even try it, right? However, periodically upgrading your enterprise infrastructure is crucial to making sure that you’re able to continue providing customers with the service and solutions they need.

Your contact center software is one of the most integral parts of your enterprise infrastructure, as it’s how you provide support to your customers. The integration of new and better technologies is key to ensuring the functionality of your system, optimizing workflow, and enhancing the customer experience. If you’re a small business owner but not an application integration expert, then you may want to continue reading.

Why is application integration important?

If you haven’t noticed, technology changes at the speed of light. Advancements that were revolutionary a few years ago are obsolete today. You may have upgraded your enterprise infrastructure a decade ago, but you didn’t expect your system to be current forever, did you?

There are always aspects of the customer experience that you can improve on, and integrating the right enterprise applications into your contact center software is key to enhancing your customer service. The great thing about Bright Pattern’s contact centers is that they’re designed to make integration easy.

You can enhance your Bright Pattern contact center with a multitude of customer relationship management (CRM) softwares to allow your support team to have easy access to important customer data. They also offer an interactive voice response (IVR) system to make it easier to send customers to the right agent sooner, and ease the placement of incoming calls.

If you don’t have an on-premise call center, then cloud technology is integral to your customer support infrastructure. You need to be able to manage your support team from a centralized location, and cloud technology offers that in the form of virtual work desks and offices. Your supervisors and quality assurance personnel can monitor your support teams from anywhere and ensure that your customer interactions remain positive and productive.

How do you integrate cloud technology into your contact center?

If you already have a cloud-based contact center, then your legacy system doesn’t need to go, it just needs some enhancements. You can transform it to give your support teams and sales teams the tools they need to provide excellent customer service, as well as boost sales.

It used to be the case that you would have to hire an IT specialist, or team, to manage your enterprise infrastructure. However, cloud technology has made application integration much easier for small business owners. The main issue that small businesses have is CRM integration.

CRM is one of the most crucial elements of upgrading your software infrastructure, and you cannot afford to lose that crucial data. The best thing you can do if you’re not an IT expert is to let an experienced firm like TIBCO handle your application integration needs.

Standalone apps tend to operate in silos, meaning they run independently and unaware of each other. Getting them to communicate and work together is the job of a software whisperer. You may need a different type of whisperer for your own sanity if you attempt application integration yourself!

How can application integration improve your contact center?

The main goal of application integration is to increase the ease with which your team members are able to access important data and perform integral functions. When customer service reps have to search for answers, they end up putting your customers on hold, and people tend to hate that. Integrating your customer relationship management software into your customer support infrastructure will cut down on dropped calls and hold times as well as coming up with solutions much easier for your team members.

By integrating objectives and key results software into your contact center, you can monitor the efficacy of calls as well as the productivity of specific team members. OKR software can also help you set specific customer support goals, like handling a certain amount of calls per day, as well as help you to track your company’s progress toward those goals.