Last week I wrote why I think adding Backstage to Pandora was a good idea and why it was wise for Pandora to develop Backstage instead of integrating external service. I had several discussions about subject of merging services since then, especially connected with call center software.
The main function of call center software is managing voice channel of contact (phone calls). However, currently it’s hard to find a call center which doesn’t need much more. Even terminology has changed – call centers evolved into contact centers, covering different channels of communication: phone calls, faxes, e-mails and web. Customers still want more (what a surprise); CRM functions or help desk features are quite often on the road. A vendor developing call center application should ask a question: if really all those functions we should do on our own, or rather we should integrate with some other software?
This case is a nice counterexample for the Pandora Backstage case. I think call center software shouldn’t grow into do-everything application. Much better scenario is integration with other software to deliver requested functionality to the customer. Few reasons why:
• Call center application doesn’t store data needed for creating and using workflow (help desk is a kind of workflow). The same situation is with CRM – you can find only very narrow piece of CRM data within call center database (information about phone contacts and some basic customers’ data).
• Both workflow and CRM systems are usually rather big solutions, I guess often bigger than call center application itself. Adding all the CRM functions to call center is a wild-goose chase. It can’t be done well. OK, it can, but cost would be very high. Much higher than in integration scenario.
• Data exchanged during integration would be rather simple (customers, very basic information about phone call). There is low risk of complex, multi-way data exchange process.
• It’s rather easy to define one-way data import between systems. In a call center with CRM scenario customers would go from CRM to call center and calls in another way. In a call center with workflow scenario customers would go from call center to workflow. On general level no other data needed.
• It’s quite easy to achieve loose yet useful integration between the systems. When in a result of phone call there should appear new record in workflow you just need to pass an id to workflow application and the rest will happen there. With CRM after every inbound call there should be similar action initiated by the call center system. Outbound scenario goes another way – it should be initiated from CRM application and some call center function should be called with a phone number as a parameter.
Of course there is some generalization above. Depth of integration can differ depending on customer’s requirements. Something I call “string and chewing gum integration” won’t be enough in many cases, but still it will take less time to achieve good integration than to develop it all on your own. And at last, in that case integration doesn’t limit call center’s own potential in any way. The systems are far enough from themselves, so they don’t compete with each other.
I started with referral to the previous post about merging service so I’ll finish with another. Both cases call center’s and Pandora’s show the need of merging services but with different scenarios. I believe integration is reasonable far more often than own development, but there is always a place for a bit of reflection.
One more thing for the very end – merging services isn’t always reasonable, so I’d give it a bit of reflection also.
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