How Unified Communications Benefits The Call Center

By Tracey E. Schelmetic

The concept of “presence,” which is central to unified communications, is not new to the call center, of course. In days past, it was referred to as “agent state.” Because of this, one might reasonably say that a rudimentary form of unified communications was actually born in the call center. Today’s UC technologies, however, have the potential to turn the whole concept of “call center” on its ear. As many companies are pulling away from the concept of one large call center facility — either out of necessity or choice — many are turning to unified communications to build a call center entity that looks very different than it did just a few years ago.

In the simplest explanation possible for what is a notoriously complex and often poorly defined subject, unified communications is the successful blending (or “convergence”) of all communications media, methods and devices into one interconnected entity, if you will, that breaks away all barriers to communication within an enterprise. Unified communications, when utilized in the contact center, leads to better and faster customer service; a more satisfying and seamless customer experience; better utilization of business processes; a greater likelihood of first-call resolution and more efficient usage of a company’s human capital (no more wasted hours of “phone tag (News - Alert),” for starters).

By applying the tried-and-true formula of multiplying the seconds…or even minutes…unified communications can shave off customer contacts following a first-call resolution model by the number of calls made per day, it’s easy to see that unified communications can save a large call center (or even a not-so-large call center) a great deal of money in real dollars. Factor in the “soft” costs like greater customer loyalty, improved agent job satisfaction and lower turnover, and unified communications can very well be considered the backbone of a successful customer-facing company.

Unified communications allows the concept of “outside the contact center” to disappear entirely. When the same communications protocol wraps around the entire organization, the very concept of “outside” disappears, taking with it long hold times, dropped calls, busy signals, dead ends, unbalanced queues, misrouted calls and voice mail hell. It turns an organization’s customer-facing infrastructure transparent, consistent and reliable. In an era of rising customer expectations in terms of quality and speed of service, and increasingly tight budgets, pleasing everyone within and without a company seemed like an impossible feat.

For a more in-depth look at the state of unified communications in the contact center, we’ve reached out to UC marketplace leaders for their vision of how UC can revolutionize call center operations.

Aspect Software (www.aspect.com)
Mike Sheridan, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Marketing
Many companies are thinking about unified communications (UC) and some are already in the midst of executing on UC strategies, but most of these efforts are focused on improving employee productivity. While this has merit in its own right, it is a narrow way to look at what UC can do for the business. UC, done right, has the potential to make an enormous impact on much more than internal productivity – it can transform the way you interact with your customers and really lift your bottom line.

For example, according to new research, 10.3 percent of daily interactions that originate in the contact centers require assistance from experts outside the contact center. The study, conducted by research firm Leo J. Shapiro & Associates LLC, found that each of those inquiries requires two interactions to fully resolve a customer’s issue and last approximately two-and-half minutes longer than a call that is handled within the confines of the contact center. That means that in a 200-seat center, for example, every agent is reaching out to an expert in the enterprise once an hour. When you do the math on that, with each issue taking two interactions and two-and-a-half more minutes to resolve, you are looking at a lot of room for improvement in terms of talk time, agent productivity and first-call resolution.

UC is a viable way for every customer-facing process to be drastically improved. Instead of frantically running down a call list to reach someone with the technical expertise to answer a specific customer question, UC empowers agents to check the availability of experts in real time and quickly get their input with a few keystrokes and the click of a mouse.

Unified communications technologies can even be applied inside the contact center. Past concerns with instant messaging (IM) security, lack of reporting and indiscriminate presence broadcasting are being addressed so that colleagues and coaches can be leveraged to collaborate on customer service, sales and collections interactions.

Importantly, companies need to consider the impact that comes from bringing the knowledge worker and additional contact center employees into the customer interaction equation, such as scheduling those workers to enable them to continue to do their “day jobs,” as well as ensure the quality of those customer interactions through recording and training. Performance optimization capabilities — workforce management, call recording and monitoring, and measuring key performance indicators — can be applied to calls routed to knowledge experts to ensure quality and consistency.

By streamlining customer-facing processes, companies can make experts more easily accessible to agents when appropriate and accelerate responsiveness to customer needs. A successful UC for the contact center strategy translates into a higher proportion of exceptional interactions which means better business results.

Avaya (www.avaya.com)
Vickie McGovern, Vice President, Global Customer Service & CEBP Solutions

There are several benefits to using unified communications in the contact center. Most significantly for purposes of customer satisfaction is the increased ability to drive first-call resolution. For example, agents can see the presence status of subject matter experts — either individually or particular skill groups — and either contact them with an instant message, conference them into the customer conversation or transfer the call. If the person is moderately to highly mobile, unified communications gives them one number through which an agent can reach them on any device they’re using wherever their location.

On the incoming call/message side, customer satisfaction can depend on how informed agents are about past interactions and transactions — even though the customer may use a variety of ways to communicate about a particular issue. They want consistently good experiences regardless of how they decide to contact the company — Web chat, e-mail, phone call, etc. Unifying incoming communications means that advanced routing strategies can be applied to all messages, which can be consistently handled by the agents with which the customer may be familiar; who can also respond in the method the customer is using at any given time. With unified communications in a contact center, a consolidated record is kept of customer interactions that provides the total view of the customer relationship. With the addition of video, companies can better build trust and personalize the customer experience.

Finally, unified communications enables home-based agents to be as effective as those in the office and provides a “green” approach to staffing. Use of videoconferencing also supports training and cooperation among agents that are part of a team.

CosmoCom (News - Alert)(www.cosmocom.com)
Steve Kowarsky,
Executive Vice President

“Unified communications” is a very broad term related to the current revolution in communication technology. A specialized subset of this term is “unified customer communications,” which is unified communications in the call center. The disruptive technology VOIP and the convergence of voice and data networks into one IP network are changing the ways we will all communicate, and especially the ways we will communicate with our customers.

Unified communications is about unifying all communication channels at the personal and organizational levels to communicate more effectively. It refers to the unification of all the forms of voice communication, such as fixed and mobile phones, video, chat, e-mail, voice mail, fax, SMS and collaboration tools such as conferencing and screen sharing. It also implies unifying the communication channel itself with other information, such as caller identity, caller state or presence, caller location, etc.

Unified customer communications is about systematically offering unified communications to an organization’s customers, so that they may interact with it more effectively and efficiently, creating customer satisfaction and loyalty, growing revenue and reducing costs. Unified customer communications includes unified communications, plus facilities such as automatic call distribution, queuing, self help IVR and IVVR (interactive voice and video response), unified recording (recording of all the channels), unified reporting and unified management and supervision — all focused on the customer.

But it’s really much more about the process than the technology. Unified customer communications is unifying and streamlining the business process across all communication channels and across all locations, all the way to the individual employee. Implementing it unifies the organization’s workforce, goes beyond the boundaries of the call center to create informal call centers or, in other words, a true virtual call center. Every employee can and should be part of this “unified customer service” process.

Finally, it’s about a unified customer experience, in which customers can select any communication channel and receive the same quality of service, supported by the same process, by people with access to the same information, including the history of previous communication sessions with that customer via any and all channels.

Interactive Intelligence Inc.(www.inin.com)
Tim Passios (News - Alert), Director of Product Marketing

Most contact center managers don’t need to be told that many of the so-called “new” applications that define unified communications (UC) have actually been around for nearly a decade. That’s because these applications actually originated in the contact center. Many contact center managers have been using applications like presence management, conferencing, e-mail routing and Web collaboration for years.

What’s new, however, is the use of these applications by the contact center to take better advantage of enterprise-wide resources for both increased productivity and improved customer service.

A good example of this is how contact centers are expanding the use of presence management. Increasingly contact centers are using presence management to reach knowledge experts throughout the enterprise and across distributed sites. By knowing, in real-time, exactly which experts are available and when, agents can improve first-call resolution and enhance customer satisfaction.

This same strategy can be used with instant messaging (IM) or internal Web chat. Contact center agents can initiate an IM session while on a customer call to reach knowledge experts, field technicians and sales personnel in order to more quickly address questions and issues.

While extremely beneficial to the contact center, the use of UC to improve enterprise-wide collaboration is just the beginning. The real power of UC — and the next stage in its evolution — is the foundation it provides for business process automation.

Many contact centers are already familiar with the use of multi-channel queue management services to route “objects” such as trouble tickets. UC lays the foundation to extend those services into the enterprise. So, similar to routing a call or e-mail to an agent, these same services can be used to route an insurance claim, university application, or sales lead to the appropriate employees in assembly-line-like fashion. Importantly, this can now be done while applying the same queuing methods, alerts and tracking mechanisms along the way so service levels previously only guaranteed by the contact center, can now be guaranteed throughout the enterprise.

This next phase in the evolution of UC promises benefits beyond the type of soft ROI that comes from improved collaboration. It offers savvy contact centers the ability to demonstrate hard ROI, while further improving customer service. With the need to cut costs and retain customers more important than ever in today’s tight economy, contact centers are in a prime position to realize the full potential of UC and, in the process, elevate their status to trusted advisors within the C-suite.

Spanlink (News - Alert) (www.spanlink.com)
Brett Shockley, CEO

Breaking Down The Silos
The great thing about unified communications, and what makes the technology revolutionary, is that it breaks down silos within an organization. Often times, departments within organizations, such as accounting, sales, and even the contact center, act as completely separate business units. With UC technologies, however, the walls that divide these departments can come down.

For example, let’s say a contact center agent receives a call from a customer regarding a billing error and she is not able to address the customer’s question. Rather than asking the customer to hold or transferring him to the accounting department without knowing whether someone is available and able to answer the customer’s question, with presence, chat and collaboration, the agent can see who within the accounting department is considered the “expert” with regards to billing questions and that expert’s availability status. From there, the agent can instant message the accounting representative, pull the representative into the call or transfer the customer’s call.

By combining the resources of an organization’s formal call center and informal experts, you are able to create a better customer experience and improve employee productivity.

Maximizing Your Investment
In order to take full advantage of unified communications and knock down the silos within an organization, however, the technology must be implemented and built into an enterprise’s underlying infrastructure layer and be part of its foundation. In addition, the organization as a whole needs to think broadly in terms of how unified communications can transform its business. Too often, organizations implement new technology to do exactly what their old technology was doing. Or, they implement a solution to fix an immediate need, not thinking about the future.

Video-enabled chat and video conferencing, for example, can promote human interaction both internally within an organization as well as externally with customers. In a contact center setting, a supervisor may not be in the same location as an agent. With video-enabled chat or collaboration, however, the agent and supervisor can collaborate as if they were in the same location. This isn’t the only way this technology can benefit this organization’s contact center; perhaps the organization is considering video-enabled chat as a method in which customers can reach agents.

When the organization rolls this offering out to its customers, the underlying technology will be in place. By evaluating current communication processes throughout an entire organization and implementing open-standards-based UC technology at the core, businesses will be able to meet today’s immediate objectives, and have the infrastructure in place to meet the objectives that lie ahead of them tomorrow.

Zeacom
Ernie Wallerstein (News - Alert), Jr., President

Of course, contact centers are continually looking to improve their quality of service and enhance every customer’s experience. At the same time, operations managers are looking to increase agent productivity. This jargon is nothing new to the ears and eyes of a contact center manager. So, what new and affordable technologies can integrate with existing systems to fulfill both of these needs?

You have probably heard the term unified communications (UC) being thrown around a lot lately. Did you know that contact centers have had characteristics of UC within their own environment for over a decade? (It just wasn’t called UC!)

Think about the contact center’s use of unified communications:

Multimedia. Customers have been communicating with applications-enabled contact centers via voice, e-mail, Web chat and fax;

Agent presence. The state of other agents in co-located and geographically dispersed contact centers has been delivered for years by companies like Zeacom, Aspect, Genesys and Interactive Intelligence.

IP and TDM. Software-based solutions have provided the bridge and migration strategy from TDM (traditional voice) to IPT (packet switched voice).

Soft phone. Control of the phone via the desktop user interface has been a key deliverable of contact center applications

The challenge for the contact center solutions providers has been how to break down the barrier to the rest of the enterprise. The contact center agent is used to being in front of and using their desktop application all day. The user interface did not work well and was typically too cumbersome for the rest of the enterprise.

By adopting today’s newer approach, where the entire organization uses one communication interface (though simply more robust for agents and console operators), the contact center has real-time access to subject matter experts across the entire enterprise. Agents can see if the sales rep for a specific customer is at their desk or available via their mobile phone in the event of an escalation or a sales-sensitive request from a customer. Additionally, agents can easily work from home in adverse weather conditions. By using software-enabled UC, an agent’s mobile phone can become their extension. Managers can see if an agent is on a contact center call, even if it is on their cell phone.

In addition, field technicians can become part of an extended contact center — the field tech can simply use his or her mobile device to set the applicable presence. For example, the technician can choose on-site, or traveling to site, or available. And leveraging a conference bridge, agents can quickly set up a bridge and drag and drop attendees (for example, a customer, contact center manager, and sales rep) to set up a conference call — there is no need to send an e-mail with a bridge number. CiS

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