×

SUBSCRIBE TO TMCnet
TMCnet - World's Largest Communications and Technology Community

CHANNEL BY TOPICS


QUICK LINKS




 
July 2009 | Volume 28 / Number 2
Headset

Aren't Centers Already Unifying Communications?

By Keith Dawson (News - Alert)

Several major vendors have developed significant product offerings for the contact center that hinge on bringing unified communications (UC) applications into that orbit. Yet contact center professionals have not yet come to fully understand the power and value of UC technologies. The key reason is that contact centers have always used UC but in component parts: presence, point-to-point calling, chat, IM, audioconferencing, and unified messaging in a tightly controlled environment, unlike other departments and functions.




Given that fractured functionality, UC is best understood as a framework for better technology management, not just as a single product, and especially not as a technology grab bag.

Unified communications allows a company to build a structure for integrating its people together through the adoption of presence and availability-awareness tools. These tools meld each individual’s capability for communication with the availability to communicate and the specific knowledge that person holds. It’s brilliant, the way UC breaks down silos around people the same way business intelligence tools break down silos around information.

This has the direct result of improving First Call Resolution. It eliminates the step where an agent has to beg off solving a problem and promises a callback by someone who has more knowledge or authority. More calls are completed on the first go, which directly affects metrics like FCR, customer satisfaction, and ultimately is reflected in the bottom line.

UC also consolidates contact center communications functions into coordinated, often standards-based platforms. That promises easier deployment and upgrading and less costly management of the core systems. IT and telecom support groups can better manage tools when they are integrated than when they are added to an organization piecemeal. This lends itself to better propagation of systems, information and best practices throughout the company. The contact center, as the main operational engine of telecom, benefits first and most.

Yet for contact centers UC must go beyond their typical ad hoc use at the agent level. There is de facto demand from customers that organizations use UC to link into mobile access and social networks to communicate with them on their terms. Even customers who are "satisfied" use quasi-UC tools like Facebook (News - Alert) and text messaging to insist on a different kind of relationship. They can gather more information faster and deploy it better at the time of the contact than your agents.

What this means is that contact centers are in an arms race with their customers to deploy multifaceted communications tools quickly at the agent level.

To keep up with the changing customer base, the contact center needs to leverage more diverse sources of information to paint for the organization a much richer picture of the customer's intentions and needs. Fortunately, the contact center is usually sitting on a massive storehouse of data which is not as widely used as it should be: call data, customer data, and recorded calls themselves. A company may not have as much power to control the customer interaction, but it has a lot more information available to shape and influence it.

Moving that information into a position where it can be used by the right person at the right time is exactly what unified communications is designed to do.

As Generation Y and the Millennials age into the workforce more contact center reps will expect to have UC tools at their disposal. If a company doesn't provide them with the tools they think they need, individual workers will deploy them nonetheless.

It's important to remember that contact centers have been pioneering "UC" in different forms for more than twenty years. Every time an agent starts his shift and signs into an ACD, he is establishing "presence" that tells his supervisor and co-workers exactly what his "state" is. His availability, skill set, preferences and performance are all communicated in real time to people who need that information. That is the essence of unified communications.

The contact center is the most finely tuned engine of high-productivity communications ever created. Contact centers are expert at unifying communications; now that enterprises are interested in learning how to do it, why shouldn't the contact center lead the way?

CIS Magazine Table of Contents









Technology Marketing Corporation

2 Trap Falls Road Suite 106, Shelton, CT 06484 USA
Ph: +1-203-852-6800, 800-243-6002

General comments: [email protected].
Comments about this site: [email protected].

STAY CURRENT YOUR WAY

© 2023 Technology Marketing Corporation. All rights reserved | Privacy Policy