It’s not uncommon to find enterprise software to go through different product lifecycle stages. Literature also shows that the relaunch of a product is a sign of a new phase in its development cycle. [1] IBM Sterling Call Center has reached such a milestone, and its core value proposition is being relaunched with new capabilities and a modernized User Interface (UI) that is useful and easy to use by both the Call Center Representative (CSR) and the developer implementing the application.
The customer-centric designs and product enhancements stem, in part, from a co-creation process between the users and the internal IBM teams through initiatives like the Sponsor User Program. This initiative allows the voice of the customer to influence the product design, roadmap and development processes which adopt generalizable customer inputs.
The new Call Center has adopted a Carbon Design System with an Angular-based UI that gives a consistent experience across all Sterling Order Management UI applications.
We see from the literature that when it comes to technology acceptance, “Perceived Usefulness” and “Perceived Ease-of-Use” play a key role in determining an individual’s likelihood of accepting the technology. [2] The question is then, how useful and productive is this latest iteration of the Call Center to its users interacting with their customers and to the developer implementing the application?
It’s common for retailers to have multiple channels from which orders are generated; regardless of this, however, customers expect their orders to be delivered on time and to the correct address. To help retailers maintain customer satisfaction and a smooth, hassle-free experience, IBM Sterling Call Center (at minimum) provides an efficient Call Center that is useful for conducting Customer Inquiries, Order Creation, Order Modification and Order Returns and Exchanges.
This application enables Call Center Representatives (CSRs) to create, view and perform complex order modification tasks. It also allows the CSR to have a single view of customer transactions to enable more relevant cross-sell and up-sell discussions with customers. It permits scheduling deliveries and appointments efficiently and also provides the ability to take over a customer’s online cart to reduce cart abandonments.
For the developer, the Carbon Design System used in this Call Center version allows the use of little-to-no code. It also improves the agility of developers to work independently when building and deploying across our SaaS, on-premises containers and on-premises traditional installations.
As a developer, you’ll have an improved and useful experience that enables you to easily make UI customization in a low-code/no-code model. The modern UI architecture enables the developer to set up environments quicker and deploy their customizations faster in a modular way.
In summary, the IBM Sterling Call Center is a useful, easy-to-use, comprehensive web-based order management application that provides solutions for the CSR to effectively manage customer orders. The modern UI gives the developer a similar experience across all Sterling Order Management applications because of the consistent modern micro frontend architecture and User Interaction that employs an easy-to-use Carbon Design System.
You can engage the IBM team and request a product demonstration, visit the IBM Sterling Call Center product page, read the solution brief or watch these videos to learn more.
[1] Easingwood, C., & Harrington, S. (2002). Launching and re-launching high-technology products. Technovation, 22(11), 657-666.
[2] Davis, F. D. (1989). Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS quarterly, 319-340.