Thought of as non-interactive and batch, business workflows have traditionally not included telephony and other multi-media hooks. But the reality is that back-end business workflows—think mortgage applications, stock transactions, and insurance claims—often have logical points in which real-time communications would make sense. In many automated business processes, managers still must step in when it comes time to review documents and requests, gain approvals before signoffs, or simply to perform a manual task that can’t be programmed. Even if not explicitly part of the workflow, the human factor comes into play when there is an unexpected glitch that forces worker teams to confer before a fix is deployed. The sticking point for real-world deployments is that embedding communications has meant programming to computer telephony (CT) APIs. IT-ers had only to look over their shoulders at the contact center to see that communication applications involved special expertise, collaboration between data and voice staff, and often support from outside vendors. IT came away believing that adding communications to business apps was difficult and expensive. Now there’s a new, simpler way to add communications that eliminates the technical details of CT programming. Unlike traditional computer telephony, the Avaya Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) solution is based on an underlying Service Oriented Architecture layer. This middleware protects applications from dependencies at both the software and hardware level. IT developers work with high-level services accessible through well-defined interfaces, leaving lower level call management and event processing to the Avaya Communications Process Manager. They can rapidly add communications capabilities into business applications without deep telecom knowledge.
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