A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by Mitel:

Mitel delivers flexibility and simplicity in smart unified communications solutions and applications for organizations of all sizes. Combined with a full range of managed services that include voice and data network design and traffic provisioning, custom application development, and attractive financing options, Mitel is reinventing how successful organizations gain competitive advantage by easily collaborating and communicating over distance and time with customers, colleagues and partners.

Visit us at www.mitel.com

At next month’s VoiceCon Orlando, I’m moderating a session called “Company as Contact Center,” which is about how contact centers and unified communications should fit together like a hand-in-glove.

Contact centers are excellent examples of how enterprises can achieve results when people, technology and processes all focus on achieving a simple business objective: Finding the best way to deal with the large volume of customers who want to interact over the telephone. Indeed, meeting this goal is the raison d’être for the entire contact center industry.

Unified Communications is also about finding the optimum ways to link people, technology and processes to accomplish a business goal. In our consulting work, we see many examples of how companies achieve this objective by reducing cycle time, finding answers or information more quickly and accelerating collaboration-all aimed at getting tasks done more quickly and accurately.

Recently, the concept of “first call resolution” has been gaining a lot of attention in contact centers. There are two ways to do this: Make agents experts through training or through access to knowledge bases; or enable agents to find and connect the caller to experts outside the contact center who can answer the inquiry in real time.

At first blush, UC and contact centers seem to be a natural fit, and via IM, agents who are on a call can get answers by chatting with a supervisor or other agents. But there are relatively few examples of contact centers enabling presence-based solutions to identify outside experts and bring them immediately into a conversation. Here are some of the reasons why this is the case:

• Many contact centers managers are measured by how calls are handled. Sending calls to experts outside the center would diminish managers’ control over key metrics.
• The experts are busy with other things, and often don’t see their job as interacting with customers, let alone as call center adjuncts.
• Today’s presence-based availability information is usually organized by the name of the person. What’s needed is availability organized by skills.

Our vision is different. Companies that have a strategic focus on the customer (sadly, only a fraction of all firms) will begin tearing down internal divisional or functional silos and organizing their operations more around the customer. In these environments, the contact center will cease to be a standalone group sequestered in a corner; it will become a much more integral part of the organization.

But, what does it take to really make this happen? At the VoiceCon session “Company as Contact Center,” several vendors and customers will be discussing the opportunities and impediments to making this natural “fit” work well. Write to me here in the VoiceCon UC eWeekly forum or at dvandoren@unicommconsulting.com and let me know what you think about this opportunity. And if your company is doing this already, I’d really like to hear from you!

Don Van Doren
Principal, UniComm Consulting
President, Vanguard Communications

Posted in Collaboration, Contact Centers/CRM, Don Van Doren, Unified Communications |

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