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February 2009 | Volume 12/ Number 2
Viewpoint: Voice of the Customer

What Are Contact Centers Saying about Unified Communications?

Over the course of the last few months, I spoke with more than 20 call center managers and asked, “What unified communications (UC) scenarios can you envision for your contact center in the future?” We defined UC as those tools that increase personal productivity and integrate communications into business processes.

The responses included video conferencing, unifying branch and campus agents, unified messaging and click-to-call and click-to-chat. There were common threads between different industries: unified messaging, web self service tools and presence. Finally, nearly all see Instant Messaging (IM) and chat as the most influential UC tools for improving their business processes.




Financial Service companies want to use IM and chat to give agents and field representatives access to back office experts and Underwriters. Others see IM as a way to connect customer facing employees — like sales other field staff — with back office knowledge workers. Most are excited about using UC to reduce response times and enable more efficient knowledge transfer internally and to customers. Of the barriers to UC implementation, one hurdle can be the cost of licenses. Another is lack of common tools across multiple locations; for example, home agents may use a different IM service — Microsoft (News - Alert), Google, Yahoo, etc. Storage and data management become an issue in industries that require storing every single written communication between internal employees and/or between employee representatives and customers. Another challenge we see is lack of an enterprise UC strategy to drive the use of UC for customer facing communications in the contact center.

The good news is that the concepts of UC are not unknown or speculative, but are being openly discussed by contact center managers as concrete solutions to real problems they are having today. In our consulting work, we see the use of UC tools growing — often informally, as users themselves realize the power of IM to reach SMEs or respond to a customer faster. This kind of grassroots evolution means that contact centers will deal with UC sooner rather than later. IT

Anne Keefer is a Consultant at Vanguard Communications Corporation (www.vanguard.net), a consulting firm that specializes in contact center processes, operations and technology. She is a strong supporter of call center leaders and managers. Contact Anne at [email protected].

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