The recent Forrester Research Customer Service Software Solution WAVE™ Q4 2008 study points to a strong need for a new customer service solution: one that bridges the three silos of interaction-, record-, and process-centric customer service products.

Forrester says that a complete customer service solution includes three key components to provide great customer experiences:

1) An interaction layer to manage all customer interaction channels and underlying knowledge management, workflow, and business rules engines

2) A customer record repository to aggregate customer information and manage more complex contract and entitlements

3) A business process automation to streamline common cross-departmental tasks

"Customer service app vendors are beginning to develop applications that deliver multichannel experiences, tap into multiple business processes, and access multiple data sources," says the report. "However, most have been developed from one of these three heritages and still deliver functionality that is skewed toward one of these three components. Until vendors provide a new type of cross-component architecture, Forrester will continue to divide customer service vendors into three categories to help businesses understand the current choices, their pros and their cons."

That's your challenge, solutions vendors. When you come up with a proven, reliable application to meet what Forrester is calling for, let me know, and in doing so we'll let the world know.