The Customer Care Framework (CCF), Microsoft's specialized developer platform for customer service applications, has been updated to speed development and support the company's latest developer technology. The CCF supports customer service applications that layer on top of existing business applications (e.g., billing and customer relationship management applications) and existing systems for interacting with customers over voice, chat, e-mail, and other channels. The resulting applications can speed work and reduce errors in call centers and other customer service systems.

Toolkit for Customer Service Applications

The CCF delivers a customizable client (called the Agent Desktop) and server that can log into and communicate with the user interfaces of multiple back-end applications, enabling a developer to create a single user interface for customer service representatives that automates business processes (e.g., customer sign-up) across multiple existing applications. Developers can also integrate communication sessions (for example, chat and voice sessions hosted by Microsoft's Communications Server) into the combined user interface, enabling representatives to coordinate conversations with customers from their desktops. Separately, the CCF provides a customizable self-service Web portal that can enable customers to perform some operations (such as reviewing account balances) over the Web.

The CCF does nothing out of the box: It requires a knowledgeable systems integrator to integrate a company's existing business applications and communications systems into a CCF-based application and create the workflows and user interface of the overall application. Originally developed for telephone companies and other service providers, the CCF now has 70 customers (including deployments of up to 15,000 seats) in telecommunications as well as finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and utilities.

Simpler Integration in 2008 Version

Notable among the new CCF 2008 features is the Hosted Application Toolkit, which enables developers to quickly adapt Windows and Web applications for use in the Agent Desktop, in some cases without coding. CCF 2008 also includes a stand-alone version of Microsoft's Enterprise Single Sign-On component, enabling developers to implement this critical function without deploying the BizTalk Server or Host Integration Server products that were formerly required.

The CCF has also been completely reengineered to use Microsoft's latest developer technology, including the Windows Workflow Foundation for cross-application workflow and SharePoint Server for the Web self-service portal. This will enable developers to use Microsoft's latest developer tools to build CCF applications and helps ensure that the customizations they build will be supported by Microsoft in the long haul.

The CCF 2008 is available free to MSDN subscribers for development and test purposes. Production deployments require CCF licenses with mandatory Software Assurance (SA) coverage; prices with two years of SA are US$360 per client and US$15,819 per server. (Prices depend on volume and the term of SA coverage.)

For more information on the CCF 2008, see www.microsoft.com/ccf.