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			Business Research: Contact Center Imperative Research: Performance Improvement, Process Improvement Vendor Research: AIM Technology, Aspect, BMC Remedy, Cisco Systems, Enkata, Five9, Genesys Telecommunications Lab, HardMetrics, IBM, Informiam, Inova Solutions, Jacada, KnoahSoft, Latigent, Merced Systems, Microsoft, NICE Systems, Noetica, NovaMind, Onyx, Oracle, Par3 Communications, Quality Plus, RightNow, Salesforce.com, SAP, Saratoga Systems, Symmetrics, Syntellect, Verint, Witness Systems
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Summary
Established contact centers face a major challenge: improving performance while still supporting many legacy processes and technologies. They have trouble integrating existing and new technologies, providing agents with a desktop that matches their customer interaction-handling processes and delivering the kind of metrics required to manage the center with more of a business focus. With the latest version of its WorkSpace and Fusion products, Jacada provides a pragmatic solution to these challenges, while also allowing centers to take the first steps toward building a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Ventana Research believes agents need all the support they can get at their desktops so they can concentrate on the customer rather than on making technology work.

Assessment
Our research into the maturity of contact centers shows that even though many centers already deploy multiple communication channels, more than half (52 percent) intend to deploy still more channels over the next 12 to 24 months. The research also showed similarly high levels of deployed customer self-service channels, but again 52 percent expect to add more during the same period. In deploying these additional technologies and continually striving to improve how agents access application data, centers will need an IT architecture that can integrate both legacy and new technologies.

Conflicts between old technology and new business needs often manifest themselves at the agent’s desktop. Our research shows that agents need access to a multitude of applications from their desktop: call timers, a softphone, call scripts, workflow, knowledge systems, performance dashboards, news flashes, e-learning systems and others. And the vast majority (89 percent) of call center organizations also have to access up to four legacy applications to resolve customer issues. Yet less than one-fifth (19 percent) of agents have an intelligent desktop that helps them log into multiple systems, navigate intelligently between systems, and avoid having to enter data more than once. And they have to make their way through all this while trying to concentrate on customer calls. 

Jacada WorkSpace is a unified desktop for agents that provides a single point of access to all the call center tools and applications required to handle customer interactions. Version 3.0 provides several new features, including a universal agent that allows the desktop to be configured to meet the requirements of an individual agent based on a variety of parameters such as agent profile, location and dialed number. Built on Java and XML technologies, WorkSpace 3.0 delivers client/server-type features through a Web-based thin client. This makes it possible to support remote workers in a virtual environment as if they were based in the center, without the need for heavy-duty bandwidth or powerful servers.

Jacada Fusion 3.0 is a process optimization platform that works with existing business applications. For agents, it simplifies processes, automates workflows and supports call scripting, which enhances their ability to up-sell and cross-sell. For managers and supervisors, Fusion delivers dashboards, reports and alerts that help them manage the center more effectively.

Market Impact
The Ventana Research contact center research report notes that reducing cost and increasing customer satisfaction are the two highest priorities for contact center operations. Agent performance has a major impact on both. In turn, the agent’s desktop has a major impact on both the agent’s efficiency – speed of resolving a customer interaction – and effectiveness –ability to resolve the interaction to the customer’s satisfaction. In the past, Jacada and Microsoft have been the only real options for building an intelligent desktop. Others are emerging, but Jacada’s latest offering continues to provide companies with enhanced tools to build an intelligent desktop, and it combines this with process improvement tools and a strong reporting capability. Ventana Research believes this combination can help agents become more efficient and effective, and help companies improve the performance of their contact centers.

Recommendation
Our research indicates that over the next 12 to 24 months businesses will continue to invest in upgrading their contact center infrastructures and systems. From complementary studies, we further conclude that many companies see this as an opportunity to integrate the contact center systems into a more broadly based SOA architecture that will improve the management of core customer data. We recommend companies evaluate the Jacada products to see how they can support improved performance in centers and through that improved management of customer relationships.