The Hudson Group, a Boston-based application service provider, builds and provides software services for ground transportation companies. The company was looking for a way to integrate voice with its existing Web infrastructure and its order entry and dispatch systems — everything from click-to-talk to voice interfaces. Most important, however, was the need for unified call detail records. “Unified call detail records represent the Holy Grail in this business,” says Mark Ustik, Hudson Group president and CEO. “Typically you have telephony call detail information in one place that tells you a certain extension was busy at a certain time and software logs in another place that tell you that an agent did something around that time period. What our customers would really like to see is a unified log-on detection that gives them the entire picture of the customer interaction in one place, which they can use to improve customer service.”
The Hudson Group turned to BlueNote Networks to provide the tools to weave these capabilities together. “The BlueNote SessionSuite tools we’re using are entirely SOA-based,” Ustik says. “We’ll be using SessionSuite services to set up an application that takes in all the incoming calls to our customers and queries Web services that we provide from our back-end systems. Our services will be able to make some decisions about how to route the call and drop a payload that follows the call as it’s routed through the customer phone system.” The company will then use SessionSuite’s APIs to pull the telephony log data from its phone systems and merge it with conventional customer information from applications.
“We’ll also be using SessionSuite services to provide customer click-to-talk reservations, and voice entry reservations for hotel concierges,” Ustik says. “Our ultimate goal is a unified technology delivery, whether via voice, Web, or BlackBerry. The capabilities we’ll be getting are unique and will put us way ahead of our competitors,” Ustik says.
