This document discusses West Connect, a middleware platform by West Interactive that enables multichannel communication and customer engagement. It provides core services through APIs to help companies manage customer interactions across multiple channels. The platform is built on open source technologies like WSO2 and aims to address challenges around flexibility, standardization, and centralization for West Interactive's contact center clients. An example use case of how it leverages customer context data to drive intelligent engagement across channels is also described.
4. West Interactive
• Headquartered in Omaha, NE - Subsidiary of West Corp
• Providing contact center solutions for 20+ years
cloud-based IVR/Speech automation
mobile apps for customer care
hosted contact center
carrier grade, scalable and reliable platform
5. Our Scale & Reach
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4 Billion Minutes of Customer
Engagement annually.
Half Billion Proactive mobile and voice
notifications delivered annually.
140,000+ Ports of IVR.
4,000+ Customer Engagement
Applications deployed.
350+ Client Contact Centers are frontended with West’s voice solutions.
150+ real time host interfaces.
44 Global Contact Centers owned and
managed by West.
35 Global Data Centers across all of
West
Network Operations Center in Omaha, NE
8. The Business Challenge
• Customers are demanding anytime, anywhere access
to data and services
• More channels for communication than ever before –
mobile apps, text messages, phone, e-mail, social,…
• Just offering the channels is not enough, need to
connect them to improve the overall customer
experience
• Systems have to be intelligent
9. Consumer Interactions
•
More complex and urgent the problem, the more likely the consumer
will attempt to access channels at the higher end of the scale
10. Our Internal Challenges
• Inflexibility – Silo’ed technology and services with
channel centric application business logic, not flexible
enough to support dynamic business needs.
• Lack of Standardization
• Need for Centralization – underutilized duplicate
technology resources resulting in higher operational
management & maintenance costs
• Old, Proprietary technologies
11.
12. West ConnectTM
• Enabling middleware platform based on Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA)
• Set of technologies and core services that are open,
flexible, and standards based
• Provides for multichannel communication, multi-tenancy
and services such as
Identity Mgmt.
Rules Engine
Notifications
Context awareness
Analytics
and more
13. West ConnectTM APIs
• REST APIs made available for internal and external
consumption
• Cloud APIs – potential new source of revenue
• Allows communication channels not owned by West
to take advantage of West Connect Services
15. Why WSO2?
• Open Source – low cost of entry
• Flexible, pluggable architecture – allows to install
only products we are interested in using
• Low infrastructure footprint
• API Manager
16. Interaction Cycle
Collect
& Store
Collect and store
customer interaction
data across all
channels
Based on the
learning and rules
perform action –
could be pro-active
Act
Analyze
Analyze the
data, learn from
it and apply
business rules
17. West Connect™ Context Services
Manages customer
context and history to
drive intelligence in
various
interactions, regardle
ss of channel
Video
Mobile
Recent
History
Customer
Identity
Customer
Past
History
Web
Agent
Social
18. Context Services
• APIs to support reading and writing of context data
about customer interactions from all channels
• User profile management – identify users based on
any one of their stored IDs – phone number, email, login id, mobile device id
• Business logic, rules and event processing
• Drives predictive and proactive communication