Taking UC to the Next Level by Streamlining Business Processes

Author: Kevin Schwartz

In my last two blogs, I talked about Personal unified communications (UC) and Collaborative UC. Both are essential building blocks for an important concept that extends well beyond the individual or the workgroup – Enterprise UC. The third stop along the UC journey, Enterprise UC, or communications enabled business processes (CEBP), involves embedding unified communications capabilities into business processes that extend across functional groups within your enterprise.

Why would you want to do this?

Just think about how much more efficient your organization would be if you improved your communication-intensive business processes, your business processes that are prone to latency when people get involved, or both. What if, for instance, rather than having to hang up the phone, research an issue, then call a customer back, your contact center agents could use instant messaging (IM) and presence to connect with knowledge workers outside your center in real time? Your agents could quickly get the information they need to resolve your customers’ inquiries, your customers could get on with their day instead of sitting by the phone waiting to be called back, and your business could reap big rewards resulting from increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

You could also use UC capabilities to further eliminate latency and accelerate problem resolution by removing people from processes where they aren’t essential. A good example relates to product inventory.  If you embedded presence, conferencing and IM into your systems and applications, you could address issues based on pre-defined conditions.  When your product inventory fell below a certain level, your ERP system could look at the presence of the people who can automatically resolve the issue.  It could initiate a telephone or online notification, and then inform the appropriate sales manager to contact the customer with the change in status.

In addition, you can use UC to accelerate processes that require multiple steps and/or approval levels.  For example, a typical sales process requires many steps, from capturing customer requirements, creating a proposal or quote, establishing pricing/discounting, to confirming production and delivery timeframes.  Each of these steps requires the participation, expertise, and approvals from multiple individuals.  In many organizations, precious time is wasted during and between these steps and approvals during which a more nimble competitor may close the deal.  Embedding UC directly into each step in the process can improve quality, remove latency, and ultimately result in competitive advantage that impacts sales.

There is no doubt in my mind that Enterprise UC is an exciting stop on the UC journey.  But, it is also one that requires significant planning, a certain level of maturity in the use of presence and other tools, and an emphasis on employee training and cultural preparedness.

What processes do you think you can streamline with Enterprise UC?

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It’s Time to Free IT!

Author: Mike Sheridan, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Strategy

I was recently at a tradeshow speaking with a number of operations managers who described some of the challenges they are facing in the contact center: slow speed of technology deployments, costly maintenance contracts, difficulty tracking the effectiveness of individual agents, and a lack of metrics, goals and actionable data. In these extremely challenging times, everyone is looking for a way to save a buck. Some organizations need to identify immediate cost-savings opportunities, while others are looking more closely at what they can do over the long term.

Plus, another challenge that we hear regularly is that companies have to continually think about the end-of-life of their contact center software, PBXs and teleconferencing solutions. One large financial company told us that 72 percent of all their technology was at or nearing end of life.

The good news is, there is a better way to address these concerns in the contact center – and unified communications is the driver. By combining specific capabilities into a unified communications application that uses software to target operational objectives (such as customer service, collections and sales), organizations can better drive company goals and objectives, start using the solutions quicker and reduce the costs associated with implementation and maintenance.

For example, by uniting capabilities like inbound and voice portal and call centers can coordinate a customer’s experience from self-service through to live agent assisted service and even bring in experts from outside the contact center to improve first call resolution and enhance the overall customer experience. Or, by bringing together outbound, voice portal and campaign management capabilities into a unified communications application, organizations can automate early stage collections and provide a more effective past-due account targeting strategy to reduce delinquencies and write-offs.

Not only does combining these capabilities from one vendor into a single unified communications applications allow organizations to target very specific business processes, it also helps them get the technology they need up and running quickly, and leverage the advantages of standards-based IT-ready software solutions. In fact, we’ve seen customers at Aspect reduce maintenance costs by 20 percent and improve productivity by 10 percent by using unified communications applications.

Since so many companies are looking to get the most ROI out of their benefits quickly, it makes sense to deploy an application tailored to specific business goals and requirements. Is your company seeing these challenges that the operations managers mentioned above?

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