Author:  Jim Mitchell

A common complaint that I hear is that companies are just spending too much time trying to get their disparate contact center systems to work together. Some contact center managers tell me that they dedicate too much energy and money to getting their systems to work together and they wish they could just focus on improving agent productivity, customer interactions, and their contact center’s overall contribution to the company’s strategic objectives.

I consistently ask these operations folks if their solutions are integrated or unified, and the response is often, “We’re moving toward unified.”  Nine times out of 10, what they mean is that they’re using integration to move toward unified communications, not implementing a single contact center solution that offers all contact center applications in a single product, which is how we define a unified approach. To find out if you are integrated or unified, ask yourself this question: is your contact center made up of point solutions from various vendors that have been cobbled together to give the appearance of a “single” solution?  If the answer is yes, your center is integrated. 

As an integrated center, you may be facing some or all of the following challenges.  First, you may find that your flexibility is limited and it is difficult for you to adapt to changing market needs or campaign conditions. You may also find that various systems linked together make it virtually impossible for you to gain a comprehensive view of the performance of your organization; reporting, administration and troubleshooting are much harder than they should be.

The cost of integration, in both hours and dollars, may be exorbitant.  In fact, to get all the pieces to work together, you have most likely involved each point solution vendor in the integration process – a process that probably required some level of customization.  Your agents are logging in and out of numerous systems multiple times a day, which is a pain for them and a time and money eater for you.  And finally, you are likely having difficulty delivering consistency across your communication channels because your agents are unable to tell if a customer who just emailed them a follow-up question about their order was the same customer who called the day before. 

Don’t feel disillusioned about your integrated center. You used the technologies that were available to you over the years to address the immediate and pressing needs of your customers and your company. The interim end result just happened to be a plethora of siloed solutions. With a unified solution you would be able to access applications that are inherently designed to work together as a single product so that you can unite your automatic call distributor (ACD), predictive dialing, speech self service, Internet contact via email or chat, recording, and logging and quality management into one platform.

More about unified in my next posting.  For now, I’d be interested to know if your contact center is integrated or unified. What challenges are you facing?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 8:17 am and is filed under Contact Center Technology, Unified Solutions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.