Author:  Gary Barnett

In my last posting, I spoke in detail about why I strongly believe your contact center should be leading the unified communications (UC) effort within your enterprise.  Simply put, your center already has the technology, expertise and experience your company needs to successfully connect its people. 

I think it’s important for me to define a “comprehensive UC strategy”.  Rather than focusing exclusively on presence and availability-awareness, a comprehensive strategy reaches further to include elements of meta-information about each person’s skill set and knowledge base.  It also involves certain contact center technologies, such as those related to performance optimization. 

Take, for example, the idea of workforce management as part of your company’s unified communications strategy.  Using this technology can give your company direct, real-time validation that agents and subject matter experts are where managers have scheduled them to be based on their specific skills or knowledge.  This type of knowledge provides your overall organization with the ability to direct specific types of customers towards specific agents or toward specialized knowledge workers who are based outside of your contact center.

Your company can also use workforce management to schedule subject matter experts in short timeslots based on expected call volumes.  By proactively incorporating this capability into your company’s overall UC strategy, you can reduce the overuse of knowledge workers who are still trying to do their “day job” - a big concern of anyone thinking about how to successfully implement a UC strategy.

I’ve talked a lot about workforce management today, but it isn’t the only performance optimization tool that should be incorporated into your company’s UC strategy.  Quality monitoring and recording, speech analytics, eLearning and performance management applications are just as valuable. These applications give your enterprise a way to easily extend quality management capabilities to your enterprise so that you can track the overall customer experience, gain a better understanding about when and why your customers are calling, identify knowledge gaps that can be improved through coaching and training, take action to close those gaps, and ensure that all interactions are meeting pre-determined business objectives.

Reporting is the last essential component of an enterprise-wide UC strategy.  Organizations need a way to effectively track and report on the frequency of knowledge worker interactions, the type of interactions and ultimately the success of those interactions.  This can be done simply by extending reporting tools from your contact center to your enterprise so that the rest of your company can use and access the detailed real-time and historical reports that are currently limited to your contact center.

Whether you realize it or not, your contact center is already a real-time test case for unified communications.  Your enterprise-wide UC strategy will see greater success if it incorporates established best practices for improving performance in contact centers, and applies those existing applications and processes to workers in other parts of the business.  Why reinvent the wheel?

Do you think your enterprise is learning all that it can from your contact center?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Performance Optimization, 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.