Great customer service relies on hiding complexity. Interactions should seem effortless, and be centred on the customer, not the inner workings of the provider. That means giving everybody involved at the “sharp end of the business” – agents in call centres; customers using self service, partners – simple IT systems to deal with. Relevant functionality and information should be provided in a straightforward way, appropriate to who the user is and what they are trying to do.

Obvious? Then why are call centres full of agents struggling with crowded PC desktops? And why do companies struggle to make self service make sense?

"A typical contact centre agent uses 6 applications on a call and 3 once the call is over!" Source: ContactBabel 2005.

The reason is simple. Today, creating high quality joined up user interfaces (UIs) means customising enterprise applications combined with bespoke development and integration. In other words, heavy, centralised IT projects. This approach gets overwhelmed by the wide ranging needs of different agent roles; self service and extranets; and often IT departments and budgets cannot keep up. The increasing rate of product launches, new bundles and promotions just aggravates the problem further. “Just build another user interface” is not getting the job done. Hence all those crowded desktops and complex, disjointed self service experiences.

“Even a 1-second drop in average call handling time can lead to sizeable cost savings in a large call centre.” Source: Datamonitor

A new approach is needed to provide the flexibility and control at the user interface (UI) that is essential for great customer service. Today’s Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) aren’t the whole answer. UIs still need to be developed and customised, and portals alone don’t give a controlled, joined-up user experience.

Corizon´s technology replaces complex integration and user interface development with the safe, rapid combination of pre-build components provided by UI services. It delivers tailored, highly usable composite applications that are specific to different users and processes without becoming caught up in complex, slow developments. This is made possible by the Corizon Platform that brings a software services approach to the user interface.

• Rapidly assemble & change role specific UI without complex development
• Leverage valuable UI functionality from packaged or legacy applications
• Build new UI once as re-usable building blocks
• Model, monitor & control user and application interactions

With Corizon, organisations can achieve new levels of flexibility in providing functionality to multiple groups of users.

• Provide employees and customers with composite, functional user interfaces that are easily tuned to the task at hand
• Rapidly adapt processes without major impact on core IT systems
• Provide in-depth end-to-end data on user processes, giving a full picture of customer interactions

As a result people involved at the “sharp end of the business” become customer rather than system centric. The customer service issues that are caused by complex, hard to use interfaces are eliminated; performance and service quality are improved and ultimately the contact centre can align with its business goals.