Author:  Gary Barnett

Earlier this week, Aspect Software announced that we are now offering UC for the contact center. With this announcement, I felt the need to come clean.  I’ve seen far too many companies with plans to begin their UC deployments in the non-customer facing parts of their enterprises. I strongly believe that your contact center should actually be leading the charge!  

Wait…wait.  Now, please hear me out for a minute. The idea of combining multiple communications methods with communications-enabled processes was born with the opening of the first real digital intelligent call center in the early 1970’s. Over the years, as call centers have morphed into contact centers, that integration has become stronger. It has evolved from very simple communication and collaboration methods, namely agent-assisted calls and self-service technologies, to an ever-growing list of IP- and SIP-based technologies that are today broadly categorized as unified communications – things like email, IM and calendars. And, though your enterprise is viewing technologies like presence as brand new and cutting edge, the truth is that your contact center has been using them for quite some time – each day for as long as you can probably remember, every one of your agents has logged on and established their “agent state” letting the technology know they are ready to take calls. 

Your contact center has a significant amount of experience communications-enabling customer service, collections and sales business processes, and is therefore the only logical starting point for an enterprise-wide UC deployment. Your company should be applying what you’ve already learned and the processes that have been honed in the contact center to your enterprise as a whole to shorten problem resolution cycles, enhance the effectiveness of collections activities, and increase cross-selling and up-selling of services and products. Your company should also be using your expertise and proven contact center applications to more efficiently link agents, customers and access pre-scheduled knowledge workers, and ensure the quality of all customer-facing interactions across the enterprise.

Tell me if you agree – should your contact center be helping to drive your organization’s UC strategy?  If so, further educate yourself – it’s your first step to leading this enterprise-wide change.  

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 7:48 am and is filed under Unified Communications for the Contact Center. 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.