Contact centre applications often require the same information or need information that resides in other systems. QPC's Integration Layer (QIL) makes it easy to share information and integrate solutions to reduce the cost of operation and create processes that leverage additional value from new and existing technology investments.

QIL also allows contact centres to adopt a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to workforce optimisation and integrate these systems with existing enterprise applications. Typically the QIL allows systems such as workforce management, quality monitoring, learning management, skills based routing, skills management, ACDs, CRM, ERP and HCM to work together and share data.

QIL is platform independent and can run on any operating system that supports Java. Using reusable libraries of message handlers and processes QIL integrations are quick to create and very flexible, so that virtually any database or application can be connected.

The QIL can connect to and provide data for virtually any application or database, typically using ODBC, Web Services, APIs and Directory Services. The QIL works by taking data from single or multiple sources - comparing, organising and manipulating this - and then making it available for use by other systems. The comparison, organisational and manipulative processes can be either automatic or have manual input. The QIL can also provide exceptions to highlight the need for manual intervention when automatic processes cannot not complete successfully. Using exceptions minimises the amount of manual intervention necessary to process information whilst ensuring that the data passed is accurate.

Using the QIL data like human resource (agent names and IDs), quality, skill, productivity and sales can be kept consistent through all systems reducing errors and removing the re-keying cost associated with keeping multiple systems up to date. The table below shows some of the data commonalities that typically exist between solutions within a contact centre

Quality Monitoring
Learning Management
Workforce Management
ACD / Skills Routing
Agent Analytics
Skills Management
Payroll / HCM
CRM / Sales

Typical data source

Using the QIL, data within any of these applications can be shared with other solutions automatically as required.

The QIL can also be used to handle very transient data and has been used to connect ACD's with workforce management systems requiring real time information. With the QIL third party integrations between solutions can quickly be created so that businesses are freer to choose the applications that best meet their needs and continue to get return from their previous solution investments without the need for replacement or expensive major upgrades. Using the QIL also means that purchasers are less constrained by what integrations exist currently, high development cost of integration or long development lead times from their solution providers.

• enables the adoption of solutions that may have better functionality but have limited interoperability by providing a cheap and flexible third party integration path
• prolongs the life of applications by affording interoperability rather than changing or upgrading
• reduces cost of existing and new system operation by sharing commonly used data to remove the need for duplicate manual data input
• reduces errors introduced by duplicate manual data input and increases consistency by sharing commonly used data
• can integrate most existing applications and data sources
• cost effective through use of reusable libraries that speed the development of integration applications
• low cost of deployment as can run on any operating system that supports Java and can be co-deployed with other applications on existing server hardware
• reduces cost of application operation and leverages solution investments by allowing the development of automatic processes e.g. using skills data held within a skills management or learning management system for workforce management and skills based routing systems.