Unified Communications for the Contact Center – What’s It All About?
Guest Author: Mike Sheridan, SVP of Strategy for Aspect Software
A big thanks to the three luminaries for giving me the floor this week for my first blog posting! I have to admit that I’m excited about the topic but I’m also thrilled that I’ve been entrusted to make an extremely important announcement to our blog-reading community. Starting today, Aspect Software wants to make sure you are thinking about and developing a strategy for unified communications for the contact center.
Right about now you may be scratching your head wondering what that means.
Let me start by saying that unified communications (UC) is not a piece of technology. It’s a concept that uses communications to streamline processes and help companies more easily achieve their business goals. UC generally relies on building bridges between many types of enterprise and collaboration applications – email, calendars, IM and presence, Web conferencing, directory integration – and communications tools, such as mobile devices, audio and video, unified messaging and desktop call control.
Many companies are already in the midst of deploying UC strategies, but most of these efforts are focused on using UC strictly to improve employee productivity and internal-facing processes. Thanks to UC, employees in geographically diverse markets can instantly see if their colleagues are immediately available for quick brainstorming sessions, they can post information in central repositories for efficient collaboration, and they can locate each other anyplace, anytime.
But, there’s a key piece of this strategy that most organizations are forgetting about – the customer. Which means, the contact center and how it can leverage unified communications, is also being forgotten. Do you remember the 10.3% of calls Gary talked about last week – the calls that require expertise from someone outside of your contact center? Well, with UC you can reduce the amount of time it takes your agents to contact and engage knowledge workers (someone outside of the traditional contact center boundaries who has particular expertise) and, by extension, the amount of time your customers spend on-hold or even the number of interactions it takes for their inquiries to be resolved. Instead of frantically running down a call list to reach someone with the technical expertise to answer a specific customer question, UC empowers your agents to instantly check the availability of knowledge workers and quickly get their input with a few keystrokes and the click of a mouse. For more complex customer issues, UC makes the call conferencing process faster and easier.
By simplifying your customer-facing processes, you can make your knowledge workers more easily accessible to your customers, accelerate your company’s responsiveness to your customers’ needs and most importantly make your customers happier. That translates into a higher proportion of exceptional interactions and improved customer loyalty which, in the end, increases top-line revenue growth and makes you a big hero.
To learn more about the media’s perspective on UC for the contact center, check out TMCnet.com’s Rich Tehrani’s blog.
