Enterprise social software company Moxie has announced the integration of Microsoft's Lync unified communications server into its Spaces customer support tool.
The move is designed to support collaboration between workers and for routing customer phone calls and instant messages to the correct person. It follows the integration of Spaces with Microsoft Dynamics CRM last year.
Moxie Vice President of Products, Nikhil Govindaraj, said the new integration makes it easier to use Dynamics as "a system of record and your single source of truth".
He added: "It enables you to deliver a more customised experience to your customers because when you talk to them you have the full context of them as a customer. You know who they are and how important they are to you.
"Companies already have all this great information about customers but it's usually stuck in someone's head or on a Post-It note or in Excel.
"You can use Dynamics and Spaces as a knowledge base to put all that information in one place. And with Lync, however your customer wants to engage with you, by chat, email or phone, Moxie's unified agent desktop provides a one stop shop for information, so you can be consistent, predictable and repeatable."
Moxie's Phone Spaces technology can route incoming customer calls to the right agent using interactive voice response (IVR - enabling customers to speak their choice from a list of options), something Lync cannot do on its own.
It can also pop up relevant information like support scripts and details about the customer's order history on the agent's screen as the call arrives.
Moxie Spaces does not offer call recording, but it can capture the IVR information into Dynamics and you can add categories to make it easy for agents to tag a call as a complaint or a billing inquiry and add that to the customer records.
Lync integration will be available from April 1and there are plans for Spaces to work with Skype in the future.
"There are some interesting things coming down the pipe," Govinderaj said. "Moxie and Microsoft have a vision of making it easy to engage with customers via multiple devices.
"Customers have all these channels, all these choices. You could start with a tap that triggers a phone call talking via Lync and escalate that into a video conference."
He added that offering customer support via the web is no longer enough because of the popularity of mobile devices.
