***The Siebel Hub thanks AMC Technology for supporting this publication***

Good Experience is Good Business

Any CRM software worth their salt revolves around relationships (the ‘R’ in the middle of CRM). The most important relationship a business will ever have, is with their customers.

For a business, it does not matter if you have only a handful or millions of customers. It does not matter if you keep records on your customers and interactions with them on paper or in a stone-cold database.

As a customer, all you care about is the quality of products, services and interactions that you experience with a business.
This is where the holy grail of CRM comes in: the Contact Center. Where human customers engage with humans (or bots).

It is fascinating how many channels we can describe just for a simple customer/business interaction: We browse the web shop on our phone, look at reviews and ratings from social channels. The sale is confirmed by email. Inquiries are done via chat. Issues are resolved via phone calls.

What the customer will remember, is the experience, and depending on the experience, the customer will decide to repeat it or not.

The Integration Challenge

Siebel CRM, at the core of the biggest contact centers in the world, supports all channels mentioned above. The technical integration, such as CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) has always been challenging. This is true for on-premises, but even more so for Cloud-based or hybrid deployments.

The first challenge is the variety of systems that are used by corporations to process the incoming calls and messages. This is the realm of communication services providers such as Avaya, Genesys, Cisco (names that have been around for a while) and “new” Cloud players such as Amazon Connect, Twilio or Five9.

Each of these Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) vendors have their own API and/or UI and both the integration and customization are very time consuming.

Countless CRM deployments – including Siebel CRM – are integrated successfully with these providers, albeit in a very tight point-to-point fashion. Add a new player on either side, another Cloud-based CRM system, another communication channel, agents who are not bound to a physical office, and the weaknesses of point-to-point integration become obvious.

Architectural Challenges

Apart from the issues with point-to-point integration, we can define additional challenges for the shift from a strictly on-premises contact center towards a hybrid or full-Cloud architecture:

• Slow and expensive migration of premise-based communication platforms to the Cloud
• Shift from on-premise telephony to omni-channel CCaaS
• Finding a modern client-based replacement/match for the traditional server-based communication APIs that are used in legacy Siebel CTI
• Implementing a client-side/browser-based integration to deliver rich content directly to the agent’s browser without being concerned about the Siebel back-end infrastructure
• Supporting remote agents (accelerated by the Covid pandemic), preferably using CCaaS instead of VPN-to-premise.
• Customers looking for video-based interactions

AMC DaVinci: An Open Architecture for Contact Centers

As the Contact Center evolves from traditional on-premises call centers to fully cloud-based or hybrid solutions, organizations using Siebel CRM find themselves at a crossroads. They want to quickly integrate new cloud-based channels without heavy and time-consuming investments in proprietary hard- or software and their customizations.

AMC Technology’s DaVinci allows organizations to integrate their CRM(s) of choice with their communication provider(s) of choice. DaVinci, an Experience Integration Platform as a Service (XiPaaS), implements a middleware layer between CRM and CCaaS, overcoming the limitations of point-to-point integrations.

With DaVinci, organizations can reap the benefits of CTI within their CRM (including Siebel CRM) while future-proofing their contact center, so they can expand and integrate how and when they want.

DaVinci can combine several pre-built Contact Center applications into a single resource for Siebel CRM. Organizations can use the pre-built vendor UI or custom DaVinci apps either in an embedded CRM experience or workspace model. DaVinci prevents customer service organizations from getting stuck on point-to-point integrations with a single CCaaS platform.

DaVinci customers benefit from the open architecture as it allows them to migrate safely and at their own pace from premise-based CTI to omni-channel CCaaS.

At the same time, DaVinci provides customers with a modern client-side/browser-based replacement for their legacy server-bound Siebel Communications API.

As a result, users and customers benefit from rich content and interactions, including video, screen-sharing, chat and of course telephony and email, be it remote or office-based.

With DaVinci, the customer service organization is no longer limited to the fixed-feature options offered by the CCaaS vendor, therefore vastly increasing the quality of the experience on both sides of the channel (agent and customer).

Learn more about AMC Technology’s DaVinci for Oracle Siebel CRM

DaVinci and Siebel CRM Architecture

How exactly does the integration of existing (or planned) Contact Center Software (on-prem or as-a-Service) and Siebel CRM work?

Let’s start with a big picture:

From an end-user perspective, the Siebel Web Client – with the DaVinci communication panel – is the point of interaction.

The underlying Open UI JavaScript libraries – provided by DaVinci – support the UI and also establish communication with the Siebel Server (Object Manager) by using business services and workflows. These drive the data retrieval and updates, such as activity creation, and view pops.

One of the most important aspects is that the Siebel Server is not burdened with the communication to the CCaaS provider, nor to the DaVinci Cloud. Both connections and interactions are handled from within the browser on the end-user’s device.

The DaVinci Cloud allows organizations to register CRM and CCaaS apps. In the example above, the configuration includes Siebel CRM and Genesys, but could also include other CCaaS providers such as Avaya, Five9 or Amazon Connect (not a complete list), and other CRM systems such as Oracle CX or Salesforce (not a complete list either).

At runtime, the end user will either be able to use the (familiar) CCaaS user interface, or a custom UI created with DaVinci.

The DaVinci communication panel acts as a container for the UI elements. For example, here’s a Genesys chat:

About AMC

AMC Technology is a leader in the Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) world, bringing people together through great interactions since 1995. We improve interactions between agents, customers, businesses and communities through our flagship product, DaVinci™, the industry’s first and only iPaaS made specifically for contact centers that offers unlimited omni-channel integrations for cloud, premise or hybrid environments. DaVinci integrates best of breed CRMs and CSMs with communication channels enabling contact centers to deliver superior levels of customer service and boost productivity, now and in the future.

Learn more about AMC Technology’s DaVinci for Oracle Siebel CRM

For more information about DaVinci and Siebel CRM, contact info@amctechnology.com.

***The Siebel Hub thanks AMC Technology for supporting this publication***