Contact Center: Unplugged

Unified Communications – Taking Communication To A Whole New Level

Author: Serge Hyppolite, Director of Interaction Product Management, Aspect

I spend a lot of time thinking about Unified Communications (UC). Of course, I think about it at work – it’s an important part of my job.  But, I also think about UC when I’m eating dinner, mowing the lawn, or sitting on the couch watching a soccer game. You see, I really do believe that UC has the potential to massively impact how we communicate and conduct business. In my own mind, I often liken it to the rise of email and other disparate productivity-enhancing tools such as IM, in enterprise environments.

Depending on your age, you may or may not remember when people communicated only in-person, by phone and by fax. If you weren’t physically next to someone, you had to actually pick up the phone, dial their phone number, wait for the person to answer, ask them your question or tell them what you wanted to tell them, and then hang up.  Sometimes, you had to follow-up your phone call with a fax or written correspondence sent by snail mail or courier.

Then came email. Email gave people a new alternative for communications, but it also increased productivity by making it possible for employees to more easily and quickly reach out to one another.  IM took that concept one step further, giving people the true ability to ping each other for information in real time.

Unified Communications is the next logical step in that evolution.  By creating an architecture that automates and unifies all forms of human and device communications (voice, video, instant messaging, conferencing, presence, voicemail, and whatever else may be coming our way in the future), UC makes it entirely possible for companies to optimize business processes and enhance human communications – beyond the realm of anything we’ve seen so far. 

Suppose that one of your customers calls your contact center with an unusual and very specialized request. Today, your agent might need to conduct some research and offer to get back to the customer at some point in the future.  Regardless of whether the agent gets back to the customer in a timely fashion or the customer calls back three, four or even five times in order to get the answer they are seeking, the process can be annoying to your customer and costly to your business.

Consider the same request after you’ve deployed a well thought-out UC Strategy. The agent talks to your customer and simultaneously accesses real-time information about the availability of a specialized expert who can help with the request. The agent quickly finds and consults with the expert – either via the phone or IM – while your customer remains on the line. The customer’s issue is resolved immediately – there is no need for the agent to follow-up, and no need for the customer to call back; everyone wins.

Some companies are already tapping into these new capabilities to improve communications, productivity and customer satisfaction. Others are taking a wait and see approach. Where are you on the spectrum?

Author: Aspect
Catergories: Customer Service/Consumer Demands, Unified Communications

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