Guest Author: Mike Sheridan

During the past few weeks, we’ve been talking an awful lot about unified communications.   In fact, just today Aspect Software made another announcement about how we plan to support our Unified Communications for the Contact Center strategy through our partnership with Microsoft.

We’ve outlined what it is and why it’s important to your contact center, your customers and your enterprise as a whole. As you can imagine, I’ve been thinking about UC for quite some time now.

Last week I was on a plane heading home from our customer conference - the Aspect Customer Experience 2008, and I started to think about Gary’s UC-related blog  and how I could expand on it. In that posting, Gary talked at great length about why he believes the contact center should lead the UC effort – a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree. As I was mulling over his thoughts, something occurred to me - we left you hanging!  Gary shared with you his view of what you should do relating to UC in your contact center, but nobody has yet provided you with any guidance on how to actually do it.

So I thought I would share with you the four steps that I think you should take to move forward and implement UC in your contact center:

1. Educate yourself. There is an abundance of information about UC available on our Web site, as well as on Web sites of technology-related, non-profit organizations, industry analyst firms, and industry-related publications.  Take the time to read about UC and ask questions. Don’t stop until you have all the answers you want and need. 
2. Close the yawning chasm between your contact center and the enterprise. Help your company develop a well-rounded UC strategy that includes all facets of your business – not just those that are internally-facing. To bridge the gap that most likely exists right now, initiate talks with your IT department to determine how far along they are in their UC strategy development and implementation.  Then, help them understand how they can leverage your insight and existing contact center tools to benefit your customers and your enterprise as a whole.
3. Use UC to foster collaboration between your contact center and the rest of the enterprise. As your organization looks ahead to deploying unified communications in the contact center, make sure that you deploy IT-ready solutions that can be easily extended out to the enterprise. Taking a unified approach – having all of the contact center applications on a single platform – makes it very easy for the enterprise to leverage all of those capabilities.  You should also take advantage of standards compliant, highly reliable, services-based software. 
4. Proactively consider potential issues and address questions relating to how knowledge workers will be measured for customer-facing activities.  Determine if all customer-facing knowledge worker interactions will be recorded and monitored and how those knowledge workers will be coached to improve their customer service skills.  After all, the satisfaction levels of roughly 10 percent of your customer interactions depend to varying degrees on the performance of these employees.

Hopefully you’re now ready to move forward and lead your contact center’s unified communications strategy.  If not, how can we help?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 9:11 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.