Customer care these days are left in the hands of contact centers. If customer reps in these contact centers are not well trained, both in product knowledge and customer service, companies will be losing customers in seconds.

While there’s no substitute for a person-to-person transaction, the help of the right technology to enhance customer experience won’t hurt. Some contact centers are actually using technology to do some legwork. And in so doing customer issues are solved faster and more accurately so customers are happier and costs are lower.

The technology that makes it possible is called service-oriented architecture (SOA). Essentially, SOA-based solutions are comprised of bits of software–called Web services–that link existing customer care systems into a single, unified solution.

A DestinationCRM article describes how SOA works.

With SOA-based solutions, a company’s legacy systems, modern enterprise applications, and custom systems–regardless of platform–can be brought together seamlessly in a flexible and easy-to-use single, unified view. Whether the customer initiates contact by phone, live chat, Web portal, e-mail, or IVR, an agent can seamlessly provide service from a common platform, because data from many systems is immediately aggregated and brought to the agent’s desktop. From the moment a customer makes contact, the agent has a complete picture of the customer’s previous interactions. Customers don’t need to provide details and agents don’t need to dig for information while the customer is waiting. Instead, agents can greet customers by name, better understand customer issues, and immediately work to address those issues.

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This may sound too good to be true but BT Germany, a global communications provider, is using the technology and it claims to have cut the time to address customer queries by 80 percent.

For those of you who have experienced being transferred from one CSR to another, and had to narrate to each one of them your problem, this SOA-based solution is like rain after a long drought.

*Photo from MorgueFile