UC Breaks Down Barriers Between Call Centers & The Enterprise

On June 12, 1987, President Reagan famously called on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall between Eastern and Western Europe. More than 22 years later we're hearing a similar invocation from communications types relative to the call center and the enterprise.

Michael Kropidlowski, senior product marketing manager at Aspect, which provides both licensed and SaaS-based contact center applications that help its customers improve or execute sales, collections, telemarketing and the like, says from his vantage point UC is about presence, collaboration and extending the enterprise into places it hasn't gone before.

To the last point, Kropidlowski says businesses can employ UC to extend the contact center beyond its own four walls. For example, he says, Aspect offers an ask-an-expert feature that enables contact center workers to easily tap knowledge workers elsewhere in the enterprise should they require specific expertise to resolve a specific issue. Say a contact center agent is on a call with a customer who has a billing question. The agent is unable to address the question without assistance, so that individual can in real-time use the Microsoft OCS interface with which Aspect has integrated its software to reach out to someone in the billing department via an IM or a voice call.

Given the difficult economic climate in which we're all operating, Kropidlowski says, the ability to solve problems in this way through UC means enterprise can do more with less.UC can also help break down barriers between the contact center and the enterprise in another important way, as illustrated by Don Brown of Interactive Intelligence, a global provider of unified IP business communications solutions related to the contact center. He explains it can be used to help the enterprise as a whole realize the benefits of business process automation that are already enjoyed within the call center.

"Contact centers are unbelievable, and we know what everybody is doing in them," says Brown, II's co-founder, chairman and CEO. "How many other places in the organization do we have that kind of discipline and that kind of flexibility? Not very many."

That kind of process and visibility can be duplicated through the enterprise, he says, if businesses work to create process and bring communications into the mix so work is done more efficiently. That, he adds, will enable businesses to reap enormous savings because they'll then be able to get more work done with fewer people. (For more on this subject from Brown, see "The Skinny on UC ROI" on page 24.)

In the future, Brown says this unified communications picture could be expanded to bring web services into the mix to give workers access to valuable outside databases or communications resources provided by third parties.

This idea dovetails with where Avaya sees things going with social networking relative to the enterprise.

At a pre-conference event on Aug. 31 just prior to ITEXPO West, Avaya unveiled what it called Facephone.

Reinhard Klemm, research scientist for collaborative applications research at Avaya Labs Research, said Facephone, or something like it, could be used as an overlay on top of Facebook so when coworkers want to communicate on the platform they can do so securely, and without first having to "friend" that coworker.

Beyond employee-to-employee communications, this Facephone idea also addresses customer-to-enterprise communications (enabling a rich two-way customer care channel) and customer-to-customer communications (allowing "expert customers" to sing the praises of a company's products to others, for example) via social networks, according to Avaya.

As Jon Alperin, director of developer marketing for Avaya DevConnect, notes, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are creating a flurry of entirely new contact channels."It's a whole new way of interfacing to the enterprise."

Social networking and UC in general offer a whole new way of interfacing within the enterprise as well.