Years ago, retail organisations gathered customer lists. That list became a database, which linked to early call centre software. Then it grew with the sales funnel: suspects, prospects, lapses and repeats got labelled, glued on, stitched together.
As customer segments fragmented and media channels broadened, other applications—customer relationship management (CRM) packages, custom customer service agents (CSA) forms, interactive voice response (IVR) management dashboards—got layered on top.
Vertical integration of contact centre technologies leads to brittleness. Explore three reasons the contact centre IT professional should think in terms of a customer ecosystem, not application stack.
