Author:  Gary Barnett

We’ve been talking about the value of a unified approach for quite some time now, but I still often receive questions about what, exactly, a unified approach really means. The questions mostly stem from confusion around the term “unified” – it means different things to different people.

Many people automatically associate “unified” with unified communications – the successor to unified messaging that allows access to voicemail, email, and fax messages, with elements of presence and instant messaging. But, a unified approach, couched within a contact center context, has a much larger impact on the day-to-day operations of a contact center and on customer satisfaction than say unified messaging.  A unified approach gives you everything you need on one platform, making it is easier to administer, manage, monitor and drive the performance of your contact center.

Let me give you an example. In the 1960s, when word processors first came out, they didn’t have electronic editing or correction capabilities, which made the whole writing process a bit more arduous than it is today.  Instead of just being able to buy one piece of software with spell check capabilities, in the old days you had to purchase word processing software and separately buy a spell check application.  After you wrote a document, you had to save your file, launch your spell check application, run your spell check against your word processing document, then review your document and make revisions based on your spell check recommendations.  One day, somebody thought, “It sure would be great to have spell check capabilities built into my word processor.”  The rest, as they say, is history.  Modern day word processing applications come standard with spell check capabilities, among other things, and life is simple and good.

A unified approach does the same thing for your contact center – it delivers all of the capabilities that your center needs on a single, scalable platform.  As a result, administration and reporting are infinitely easier; troubleshooting is simplified; and, you are able to quickly adjust to changing business conditions without requiring intervention from multiple vendors.

So, just as you can’t imagine your life now without unified word processing software, unified solutions will be the fundamental approach for every contact center in the future.

When are you planning to unify your approach?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 4:25 pm 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.