By Erika Morphy CRM Buyer Part of the ECT News Network
03/31/08 8:00 AM PT
Contact center representatives typically have to juggle a myriad of applications and desktop tools to interact effectively with customers and obtain the information from a company's data vaults that's needed to answer their questions. SynerG aims to solve that problem with a SOA-based mashup that takes a federated approach to data management.
SynerG, formed in 2005 to develop interactive business mashups, has released its first product -- a contact center application -- from beta.
SynerG Contact Center targets a familiar pain point -- one that all agent desktop apps have tried in various ways to address: the difficulty of accessing and integrating data from a company's back end so that agents in the contact center can answer questions as quickly as possible.
SynerG does this by using a contact center's own Web service-based or API (application programming interface)-based integration infrastructure to access the corporate database.
"We connect into the back-end system, pull out and sometimes merge together the necessary data," Kalpana Narayanaswamy, vice president of products and cofounder of the firm, told CRM Buyer. "We don't store or cache data on the desktop at all."
Federation, Not Integration
In fact, "integration" is not the appropriate term to describe SynerG Contact Center's interaction with the back-end corporate data, said Michael Norring, CEO and cofounder of the company.
"What we do is federation," he told CRM Buyer. "We take the data in the format that it is in and then virtually merge it for a single view for the agent."
So, if asked about several invoices in one call -- an agent can view the relevant information in one document.
"The typical call center deals with multiple applications on the desktop," Norring continued. Adding e-mail and chat can muddy an already-complicated scenario even more. "What we do is provide an application that ties all the sources of data together into a single experience for the agent and then structures that data in such a way to make it easy to answer the customer's question."
Competing applications usually sit on the desktop and "screen scrape information" to provide the necessary data to the agent, he said.
A Web-based model, the SynerG application is built on SOA (service-oriented architecture) principles. The connections to the back end are defined in XLM (extensible markup language), Narayanaswamy said, which means users can customize the application without having to write a single line of code.
Three-Month Cruise
Deployment takes three months at most, according to SynerG -- and one of its early adopter clients, Cruise West, backs up that claim. The cruise line is using SynerG's Contact Center app as an integrated reservation platform from which agents can research and book cruises against real-time information.
"Within three months, SynerG assisted us in defining the requirements and deploying an integrated and consolidated view of all necessary reservation information," said Cruise West Chief Marketing Officer Al Petrone. "We knew we had the basic infrastructure in place -- we just needed to operate more efficiently and provide our employees the single integrated application they needed to provide the best customer service and effectively sell our cruises."
New Avaya App Unifies Presence Info Across Multiple Channels March 18, 2008
The immediate use of Avaya's latest addition to its product line is likely to be corporate. For example, a company with many reps on the road would know how to best to reach each of its staff members at any particular moment -- by cell, instant message or e-mail.
Related Stories
The Building Blocks of Contact Center Consolidation March 10, 2008
Consolidation improves a corporation's ability to manage its IT resources. Forty-five percent of Best-in-Class companies were able to improve the efficiency of their IT staffs and rapid application deployment as a result of consolidating resources. In support of this, Best-in-Class firms have also focused on standardizing their software applications.
More by Erika Morphy
Windows 7 Flies Off the Shelves November 06, 2009
Early sales figures on Windows 7 boxed software suggest a high level of consumer enthusiasm for the OS. Unit sales were a whopping 234 percent higher than Vista's out of the gate. The revenue haul was not as impressive, as Microsoft offered sharp discounts to spur presales. Also, sales of PCs with Windows 7 preinstalled have been lackluster -- but October is historically a weak month for PC sales.
Southwest Doesn't Fool Around November 06, 2009
Either Southwest Airlines had better deals for my favorite route than its competitors or its superior Web site tools made it easier for me to ferret them out. Either way, kudos to Southwest. In the not-so-hot department were the airline's long list of what passengers weren't allowed to do and its very short list of what Southwest was obliged to do for them. Left me feeling a little chilly.
Commerce Search Puts Google Inside Retailers' Catalogs November 05, 2009
Google has launched a new cloud-based search tool targeting enterprise-level e-commerce operations, just in time for the 2009 holiday selling season. Commerce Search provides a set of features designed to improve the relevance of results for consumers searching a retailer's own product catalog, while boosting cross-selling opportunities.
Headline Feeds
application -- from beta.
Talkback: 
