Last month, I wrote about the opportunities and the seemingly overwhelming challenges involved with getting contact centers and unified communications together. Ironically, the lessons enterprises have learned in their contact centers apply directly to UC deployments in other parts of the enterprise.
Contact centers focus on an important business goal--handling customer interactions efficiently and effectively--and they harness people, processes and technology to work together to achieve it. That is precisely how the best UC implementations work throughout the rest of the organization. Contact centers are a good example of the UCStrategies.com definition of UC--"communications integrated to optimize business processes."
While some suppliers have been paying at least passing attention to either integrating UC and contact centers or using contact center functionality in other parts of the enterprise, these efforts are starting to ramp up. For example, consider what Aspect Software and Genesys have been up to.
Aspect is focusing on ways to link contact center agents with experts--through IM, multiple-media conferencing and other capabilities. Since Microsoft made an equity investment in Aspect last March, Aspect has been busy integrating its ACD functionality with Microsoft's Office Communications Server. Aspect commissioned a study that shows that over 10% of customer calls require the intervention of a specialist or expert outside the contact center, and has concluded that bringing together ACDs and UC will help address that issue.
Of course, products from other suppliers of integrated or standalone IM and other collaborative functionality could be used in contact centers, but Aspect aims to change the pervasive reluctance within contact centers to use these techniques. Look for announcements later this month.
Genesys is taking a different approach. In an upcoming webinar, Genesys will discuss how the ideas, tools and techniques that work in contact centers have applicability to the rest of the enterprise. For example, agent-like status can be extended to staff outside the contact center. This enables overflow coverage, expert-level tier support and at the same time takes advantage of queuing, skills-based routing, reporting and availability (think, presence).
We are starting to see some innovative examples of contact center capabilities applied to other parts of the enterprise. I know of one financial services firm that is using the company's workforce management software to schedule credit analysts (who aren't involved in customer calls) based on workload patterns.
Certainly other suppliers could--and probably will--emphasize similar capabilities. But Aspect and Genesys are focusing on this problem now.
Of course, as this is being written the stock markets are in free-fall, and so marrying UC to contact centers may not be the biggest issue on management's mind today. But maybe it should be. In troubled times, the rich have opportunities to get richer. UC can help leverage those opportunities, but only if you understand where they are and how your company can take advantage of them.
Dramatically improving customer interaction capabilities to solidify and extend customer loyalty are always part of a winning strategy--even now.
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