There are two basic concepts on how to build a contact center. For simplicity, these two concepts can be called Technology-Based, and Business-Process-Based. The chosen concept has a substantial impact on the resulting IT and contact center strategy.

Based on our experience, the prevailing number of contact centers is Technology-Based. Our experiences from projects based on SAP CRM (onPrem) or SAP C4C (Cloud) show that moving from a Technology-Based Strategy to a Business-Process-Based strategy brings benefits – it saves costs and increases effectiveness and customer satisfaction.

More than 20 years ago, SAP started with the Business-Process-Based strategy, which materialized in ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system as an Interaction Center (transaction CIC0). Very likely, this was also one of the reasons why Gartner placed SAP into the visionaries’ quadrant years ago.

Sinch Contact Pro – a timeless Process-Based Contact Center

Sinch Contact Pro, a solution for contact centers formerly named SAP Contact Center (SAP CCtr), is supporting current trends such as AI and multichannel self-service technologies. Repetitive tasks of agents with not so much need of evaluating business context can be automated. Today’s contact centers implement chat/voice bots, only if the customer’s requirement is more complex, the interaction reaches the live person. Agents need quick access to all customer data and objects, rather than exact telephony data. In Sinch Contact Pro, information about agent events is collected, allowing evaluation of both technical communication data and business data.

Technology-Based strategy

The traditional Technology-Based contact centers get maximum from the underlying communication technology – processes, tools, and skills are mainly based on contact center technology.

The data model is usually rather simple – 1 customer – N contracts – M phone numbers. However, the reality is usually more complex than that: one physical person with one phone number can speak as a consumer, and also as a commercial customer for a company he/she is employed in.

Disadvantages

• To get the business context of a caller, the CC system usually replicates and loads customer data, e.g. customer master data, and subscribed contracts, from one or multiple back-office systems, when necessary, the data are being fetched on the fly using some (web) interfaces.
• Any relevant business process change in back-office systems results in a redo of the agent’s UI (User Interface).
• Every interaction means a storm of web services calls, which increase the load of back-office systems and CC servers and/or clients, although if we speak about read-only access to back-office systems, this is acceptable.
• If agents enter data through the CC UI to the back-office system, it becomes more painful – it is necessary to re-develop all checks, search helps, listed fields, etc., which were defined in the back-office system.
• The necessity of clicking the save button after entering many fields of an object, e.g. complaint or service request, is not very ergonomic – users want to have a check on fields as soon as possible.

Business-Process-Based strategy

In Business-Process-Based contact centers, agents are more involved in the overall business processes and communication technology is not the core of the process – rather it is a business supporting system, usually back-office.

Advantages

• Agents work with necessary business objects natively and see customer master data, e.g. contracts, invoices, due payments, similar to non-contact center employees.
• A communication system is here as an accelerator, routing communication to the right agent at the right time.
• There is no necessity to replicate any business data, nor to call unnecessary web services.
• If there is any change in the ERP/CRM system, the onboarding is simple, because CC agents have a similar user experience, involving back-office users as backup 2nd line agents is easier.
• If a new field, check, or object is added, it is automatically ready in the system for agents as well.
• To help and navigate an agent even during a ringing call (online analyze context information, e.g. open tickets, campaigns, or due payment) is much easier.

Disadvantages

• Some special features of a communication system may not be easily accessible from a CRM system.

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