Last week I spoke with SynerG CEO and co-founder, Michael Norring and vice president of products and co-founder, Kalpana Narayanaswamy. SynerG provides a business mash-up solution designed to address both simple and complex user needs in accessing enterprise information, SynerG recently released a business solution that addresses call center challenges. This is an area of great need that I am very familiar with having worked on knowledge support for many large call centers, here and in the UK. I remember one UK call center veteran saying that the most important skill you learn is how to engage in friendly chat with a caller while you are frantically searching through multiple databases to find the answer to their question.

Or as SynerG puts it:

“Regardless of industry or line of business, call-centers require the highest level of data integration to quickly and effectively respond to customer needs. However, existing solutions are limited in their ability to provide comprehensive and up-to-the-minute accurate information. As a result, employees are forced to spend time searching for and manually aggregating, correlating and updating relevant data instead of utilizing unified information to deliver a quality customer experience.”

Agreed. So what do they do?

SynerG does deep mashups within the enterprise systems through a SOA approach to extract real-time information from enterprise systems (even legacy systems). They bring this information into an intelligent unified business application so the call center person sees only one application on their desktop. Through mashups they build new applications that draws data from multiple sources but have intelligence to act on this data. In some ways it is like a portal in that the application provides access to information through a single source. However, portals are thin layers that just pass through information. SynerG creates a “thick” layer that goes much deeper. Most enterprise data sources were built for specific audiences, like accounting, purchasing, or production, and often have tool constrained interfaces. Data that is then passed through to other departments is often not in the format that meets the needs of the new audience. SynerG allows for the dynamic restructuring of data to meet each specific audiences requirements.

The data remains stored in the original spots. SynerG creates a virtual data map of the enterprise. Then it adds a layer of business intelligence to know what to get from where and how to change it to fit the new need. This also allows for better security, as well as efficiency, as employees only see what they need to do to perform their job. This mashup approach also allows for one step actions. For example, if someone cancels a subscription, changes do not need to be made in multiple databases. Their solution does something else: it cleans the data during use. They have a data federation model (with some pending patents) that does not assume clean data but then allows employees to clean up data in the course of use. These data cleanups are passed back to all the original sources.

This approach to push mashups deeper into the enterprise data structure takes a bit more time that the simple connecting of two data sources like Craig’s Apartment List and Google Maps but the impact can be significant. In this case it is still much simpler and less time consuming that tradition big system data integration that can take months, it not several years. For example, Kalpana and Michael told me that in eight weeks they replaced three major applications on a call center desktop with a single one, operating with bidirectional data flow and better suited to the job requirements. The mashup implementation is model driven and requires little coding.

SynerG has had several limited releases with a select group of clients but they are now undertaking a full release. Kalpana and Michael told about an existing customer. Cruise West, who needed an integrated and consolidated view of all necessary reservations information. SynerG provided a solution in 3 months that enables Cruise West to operate more efficiently, deliver the best customer service and effectively sell cruises.

This makes sense to me as I have seen in past call center engagements that providing better data more efficiently to operators does increase performance on many measures such as cross-selling, reduction in repeat calls, fewer escalations to supervisors, etc. And that was with old style tools. I have always felt that mashups can be one of the biggest breakthroughs of enterprise 2.0. It appears that here is another example.