How important is customer service to your overall corporate strategy? If you are evaluating the value of adding unified communications (UC) to your environment, have you examined the impact it can have on customer service? To get the most out of any UC implementation and to maximize the customer service approach, the most logical place to start is in the call center.

While UC promises to increase productivity and streamline processes, this can only go as far as the number of customers your company is aiming to serve. After all, without a solid customer base, it won't matter how productive you are or whether or not you can operate efficiently. When UC is the base for the call center, the company is better equipped to address a specific set of customer-facing business processes.

Traditionally, call centers accomplished customer service priorities through simple communication and collaboration tools, such as agent-assisted calls and self-service technologies. Now, as standards-based communications protocols - such as IP and SIP - continue to find a home within the enterprise, call centers have access to more technologies referred to as UC, including e-mail, IM and calendars.

When the call center makes this switch, agents are enabled with next generation communications technologies that can be leveraged along with their customer service experiences. This is the most logical place to start implementing UC software that will extend out to the enterprise. The success of the solutions can be measured within the call center by assessing their direct impact on company results.

The lessons learned within the call center can easily be extended out to the rest of the enterprise. Why does this work so well? If you think about UC strategy, a number of companies are evaluating how capabilities like presence and multimodal communications can help to achieve an improved customer experience. The call center already uses concepts like presence, so the center is really just expanding on technologies and processes already in place.

In essence, the call center is providing the discipline for UC as it has already defined the processes necessary to leverage knowledge workers from across the enterprise. UC is the perfect platform to easily extend customer contact to knowledge workers. The challenge then becomes extending the fine-tuned discipline practiced in the call center to the rest of the enterprise.

To learn more about how unified communications can streamline your call center operations and improve customer service across your entire organization, click here.