Applying Collaboration Tools to the Enterprise
Author: Kevin Schwartz, EVP of Aspect Global Professional ServicesThere is no doubt that “collaboration” is a hot topic of late. And, while there are varying ideas of what collaboration entails and what it really has to do with unified communications (UC), we are confident in the benefits that collaboration can provide to organizations.
As Andy Bezaitis wrote in his last blog , collaboration capabilities provide significant opportunities to improve workflows and increase first call resolution in the contact center. Collaboration will also play a big role in improving processes across the enterprise as well, which translates into greater productivity, reduced costs and improved results within the enterprise and between the enterprise and its customers.
Collaboration tools, like Microsoft SharePoint, are playing an increasingly larger role in communications-enabling of business processes (CEBP) for the enterprise as part of a larger UC deployment. The important thing with both UC and collaboration is that by surrounding software applications and platforms with systems integration (SI) capabilities, organizations will be able to achieve specific goals and objectives better than they could if they were just using services or applications alone.
As unified communications and collaboration capabilities converge, there are a number of ways that companies can apply these new technologies to enhance business processes across key functional areas, including:
- - Customer Interaction
- - Customer Collaboration
- - Customer Acquisition
- - Field Service Management
- - Payment Processing
- - Web presence
- - Data Management, Analytics & Reporting
- - Data Integration
Some examples of how collaboration tools, coupled with UC, can positively impact areas of the business include:
- - Leveraging video and web conferencing tools to create virtual meetings to create, update, or review content in real time.
- - Utilizing IM, presence and screen sharing capabilities to quickly resolve issues across multiple locations or even across departments.
- - Creating a central content repository for employees – as well as potentially partners and customers – enabling easy access to information and providing the presence on the expert associated with that information and the ability to seamlessly communicate with the person through UC tools if more data is required.
The interesting thing about collaboration is no matter where it’s being applied, it can have immediate results. It can be applied to individual productivity, workgroup productivity, and communications-enabled business processes and will yield benefits in each area.
Has your company begun leveraging collaboration tools? What are some of your initial results so far?
Author: Aspect
Catergories: Unified Communications, collaboration
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