MOST GOOD businesspeople realize that there's often no substitute for old-fashioned person-to-person contact. Analysts and vendors agree that as enterprises seek to offer customers an even wider array of service options while also collecting critical customer data, a key ingredient to success will be the integration of call centers with the rest of enterprise operations wherever possible.

Doing so will further a technology convergence that may not always make CRM (customer relationship management) faster, but will make it more efficient.

Only now are corporations getting serious about bringing their IT departments, which typically build the e-commerce Web sites, and call centers together, says Don Van Doren, president and founder of Morris Plains, N.J.-based Vanguard Communications. Instead of putting off such collaboration, he says, companies should speed them up, and both sides should realize that customers want an array of choices when dealing with their representatives.

"The Web guys think that any time somebody wants to pick up a phone and call you, they've failed," Van Doren says.

Large and small vendors, such as Nortel Networks, NEC, and startup White Pajama, are providing more integrated CRM solutions, and increasingly, the call center is front and center.

Such integration makes sense, according to Bud Bivin, research director at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner's CRM practice. Bivin says the next evolutionary step in the call center life cycle is to "solution centers," where multichannel CRM solutions are integrated with back-office systems to collect, store, and manipulate data, further benefiting both the customer and the company.

"It's just a continuing evolution from the call center to the contact center to the solution center," Bivin says. "The solution center should feature tighter integration with front- and back-office applications."

Brampton, Ontario-based Nortel Networks, for example, offers Symposium Call Center Server 3.0, which blends call center functionality with Web collaboration, e-mail, chat, and other CRM functions for an integrated approach.

"The leading-edge companies have integrated," says Betsy Wood, an evangelist for Nortel's Clarify eBusiness Applications. "You get a totally inconsistent [customer] view if you're not integrated."

A new vendor, White Pajama, is targeting small and midsize customers, as well as departments within large enterprises. Hewlett-Packard is using White Pajama's Contact Center Network in about 20 departments, according to Mansour Salame, president and CEO of the Hayward, Calif., startup, which launched in January.

White Pajama's ASP (application service provider) model appeals to smaller operations because of the ease of working within a browser, as well as reducing the length of time it takes to get the call center system running. But White Pajama customers will get more than the clients of most ASPs because the company continues to innovate, Salame says. "A lot of ASPs are systems integrators, but we are a technology company."

NEC recently beefed up its enterprise offerings by integrating Quintus' eContact Suite with its own CCDesign multimedia contact center solution. The eContact Suite will provide personalization, routing, management, and reporting tools to NEC's product, inncluding Web chat, Web collaboration, e-mail, and VOIP (voice over IP).

"Our agreement brings together NEC's rich CCDesign and telephony capabilities with Quintus eContact's multichannel e-CRM strengths, enabling businesses to offer their customers consistent sales, service, and support across communication channels to drive customer satisfaction and overall business success," says Lawrence Byrd, chief strategy officer at Quintus, based in Dublin, Calif.

The road to multichannel CRM is a tricky one that should not be navigated carelessly, Vanguard's Van Doren says. Vanguard usually advises companies to draw out a long-term vision, but also to take small, incremental steps to ensure room to make midcourse corrections as the market, or technology, changes.

Also, many companies need to re-evaluate their contact center goals, Van Doren says. Vanguard recently helped a bank revamp its customer care system, and the length of customer calls rose by 30 percent afterward. But he deemed the upgrade a success, saying that statistics such as the length of customer service calls are becoming less important.

"They are doing a much better job interacting with the customer now," Van Doren says. "They're differentiating what they're doing based on the service they're providing."

Call center priorities should include supporting the overall corporate strategy, improved cross-and up-selling, and securing repeat Web customers, Van Doren says.

InfoWorld

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