Frequently Asked
Questions
Table of Contents
UC-enabling the Contact Center
...1Understanding the Benefits
...2Impacts on Corporate Culture
...3Customer Service Implications
...4Technical Issues
...4Beginning the Process
...6About the Author
...6Learn More
...6UC-enabling the Contact Center
The term unified communications (UC) began to appear in vendor brochures, communications industry magazines and trade show banners in around 2005. Today, the expression is applied to an array of platforms, applications and services offered by an array of providers. This can make it difficult to understand what unified communications is, whether or not you need it and how it might benefit your organization.
One way to understand the value of unified communications is to limit the conversation to a specific set of users or vertical applications. For example, the healthcare industry has been an early adopter of UC technology as the benefits of being able to quickly reach the right healthcare professional at the right time can be quickly shown to improve the quality of patient care.
Increasingly the contact center is seen as an environment where unified communications can have an immediate positive benefit. Nowhere in a company is the importance of optimizing real-time communications processes more critical than in those ‘moments of truth’ that happen all day, every day in the contact center. Moreover, nowhere can the return on investment from a technology be more immediate than where it directly influences the delivery of products or services to customers.
Information technology professionals have been aware of the concepts and technologies of unified communications for several years. For customer service, marketing and service professionals who work in the contact center, however, UC is a relatively new concept. While each company’s processes and procedures may be different, there are many common questions that contact center professionals ask about UC and its place in the contact center.
These FAQs answer questions that are often asked about the use of UC in the contact center, benefits that can be derived today and into the future, and technology decisions involved in bringing UC into the contact center.
Understanding the Benefits
What does it mean to UC-enable the contact center?
There is general agreement that “presence” is the foundation of unified communications. In the contact center, the notion of presence is similar to agent status. An agent can be in ready mode, on a call, performing after-call work, etc., and that information is typiafter-cally available via real-time reporting screens to supervisors and other contact center management.
To take the analogy one step further, contact center solutions can display whether an agent is on a phone call, handling email or involved in a chat session. In addition to knowing whether or not someone is on or off the phone, UC detects their availability for an instant messaging or even a video call. With presence indicators, callers can know whether the party being called is available, busy, or would consider the call an intrusion.
Unified communications presence extends this kind of availability status information to employees beyond the contact center, making it available to the rest of the organization and potentially beyond a single company to include partners, suppliers or customers. Just as one can easily determine whether an agent is busy or not, presence enables parties to determine the communications status of those outside the contact center. In summary, one of the defining capabilities of UC-enabling the contact center is extending the concept of presence from the somewhat narrow contact center definition of a supervisor’s ability to view information on agents to a broader view in which agents, supervisors, enterprise workers and even those outside the organization have rule-based access to information about the availability of others.
What are the benefits of adding unified communications capabilities in the contact center?
The best way to understand the benefits of deploying unified communications in the contact center is by describing scenarios where it can be beneficial. Let’s imagine a customer asks to talk to the supervisor of a relatively small center, just 30 agents and three supervisors. Even in a center of that size, it is impossible for an agent to know if a supervisor is available to handle the customer escalation. Invariably, the agent puts the customer on hold and tries to find a supervisor to take the call, leading to a fair amount of customer frustration. In a UC-enabled contact center, the agent’s desktop would have a UC presence icon which the agent could click to see the availability the three supervisors. For example, the icon would show a supervisor as available, busy or in do not disturb mode. The agent would click on an available supervisor to open an instant messaging chat to work on resolving the customer’s issue or to transfer the call to the supervisor. In larger centers, the complexity inherent in the sheer number of supervisors and agents would increase the timesaving benefits.
Another example involves agent-to-agent communications. Some companies find that allowing agents to communicate with one another via instant messaging helps resolve customer issues more efficiently. With UC in the contact center, relatively new agents can get support from more seasoned agents to answer quick questions. The novice agent able to open an instant messaging chat with the more senior agent may be more likely to resolve a customer issue without transferring the call, improving customer satisfaction with first call resolution and decreasing the overall handle time for the contact.
Impacts on Corporate Culture
Conceptually, people agree that customer service is everyone’s job but it is sometimes
difficult to translate that message into actions. Could UC-enabling the contact center help?
Conventional wisdom supports the notion that the people who know customers and processes best are those closest to the work — agents and supervisors. A popular suggestion for helping to permeate a business with the spirit of customer service is having executive and administrative staff spend a day working on the front lines serving customers on some regular basis, say quarterly or yearly.
While there is certainly value in putting such a plan into place, better still is a re-evaluation of processes that enable a broader proportion of a company’s staff to bring their particular expertise to bear on a customer issue. While a programmer might benefit from spending a shift taking contact center calls, both the customer and the business benefit if that same programmer is quickly able to be included in a customer interaction that requires his or her programming expertise. Similarly, the ability to quickly include the regional vice president of sales in a service escalation for a national account customer can turn a potential customer service nightmare into a smoothly-handled transaction. UC-enabling the contact center can be a way to infuse the entire business with the spirit of customer service.
Management is concerned that UC-enabling the contact center will mean that highly-paid
experts will spend too much time on contact center calls. How do we keep that from
happening?
One of the goals of UC-enabling the contact center is to deliver first call resolution to customers. In a measurable proportion of cases, successfully resolving a call requires involvement of knowledge workers or experts from outside the contact center. Advanced technical support is a great example where having experts — for example, product managers — available for very specific types of inquiries can help deliver outstanding customer service and/or avoid customer dissatisfaction.
There are two keys to maximizing the value of including critical subject matter experts and specialists in contact center interactions. First, it is important to ensure that policies are put in place so that agents understand the specific cases where they are empowered to engage with experts. In addition, the skills of each expert need to be documented and experts organized into groups so that they can be appropriately matched to customer needs. Because solutions offer the ability to report on any interaction that includes experts, an organization always has the information to monitor and control the amount of time that experts spend on customer interactions.
If my company UC-enables the contact center, will agents chat with each other when they
should be paying attention to customer interactions?
This concern, understandable in a world where millennials spend their days texting one another seemingly non-stop, is addressed when UC is tightly integrated into the contact center agent application. Allowing agents to instant message on public messaging clients, such as Yahoo or AOL, offers no option for management oversight. As part of an integrated agent desktop, all interactions are recorded and can be reported on.
Experience has shown that once a business explains the rules it has put in place regarding use of inter-agent communication, this type of abuse is minimal. In fact, companies with at-home agents or multiple locations have found that implementing unified communications capabilities can help remote agents feel more connected to their work group.
Customer Service Implications
Due to the nature of our business, the experts we need to contact to help resolve
customer inquiries are often at supplier or partner companies. How can UC-enabling
the contact center help my business in this kind of scenario?
One of the benefits of today’s best-in-class contact center applications with unified communications capability is that they are built on standards-based software technology and they support federated presence. Federated presence provides the ability for a company to connect with entities outside the business. For example, instant messaging capability with presence indicators can be extended among multiple enterprises securely and safely via federation. In the context of a contact center, this means that a company could set up a group of experts at a partner or supplier company. Agents could view the presence and availability of these outside experts as easily as a group of experts within the company. When multiple companies are using unified communication solutions that allow for federation, it is possible to set up this kind of cross-company access to experts.
Many of my customers use public Internet instant messaging clients, such as Yahoo, MSN and
AOL. How can UC-enabling the contact center help me interact more effectively with them?
Just as standards-based UC solutions can enable inter-company instant messaging and presence, federation allows integration of corporate UC applications with public ones. In the contact center, this means that your company could set up a click-to-chat functionality enabling customers to interact with your contact center using one of these instant messaging clients. Customers would easily be able to see if agents were available to answer questions. As purchasing over the Internet increases, connecting to customers via public Internet clients enables a business to bring contact center support closer to the point of purchase. Instead of reaching for a phone to answer the question that could tilt a decision in favor of a purchase, and many times deciding not to bother, customers would be able to get answers to their questions within a single Internet session and complete their transaction.
Technical Issues
My company has not started deploying unified communications. Will UC-enabling the
contact center have to wait until the whole company has unified communications?
As with all business strategies, a decision to deploy unified communications should be based on understanding a company’s specific challenges and priorities and how a UC strategy can help the business. With that in mind, it is not necessary for UC to be deployed to every desktop in a company to derive the benefits of UC.
Consider a satellite television company that has a contact center into which customers can call to inquire about billing or to schedule installation and service calls. One reason customers call is to understand why a service technician has not arrived as scheduled. Long hold times, repeated transfers and increasing customer frustration often result. If instead the agent had access to a list of dispatch managers and could ascertain which was available to help with the interaction, the agent would be able to establish the estimated time of arrival more quickly. Not only is customer satisfaction ensured but agent time is used efficiently.
Typically, unified communications is purchased and deployed as individual user licenses. There are many businesses cases where it makes sense to purchase and implement UC licenses for the contact center and other departments that directly impact the company’s overall customer service experience. In such cases, simply adding a small number of UC licenses in the dispatch department could yield measurable results. Over time, that initial investment in UC-enabling the contact center could be extended by adding additional expert teams from other departments — for example, billing.
My company has not moved to an IP or SIP PBX yet. Is it still possible to bring unified
communications into the contact center?
Yes. Your organization can implement a UC system now, use it with your traditional phone system and migrate to IP later. The belief that implementing unified communications is dependent upon having IP or SIP communications technology is a common misconception. Some believe that UC is a strategy that can only be put into place after first migrating from TDM-based technology to IP. While this may be true for the solutions from some vendors, it is not universally the case. UC applications are supported by both TDM and IP-based communications systems. Media gateways provide a simple alternative for connecting legacy TDM systems to new unified communications solutions.
Our company is debating whether or not to migrate to a SIP-based enterprise
communications system. What impact would that have on our ability to UC-enable the
contact center?
While it is possible to implement unified communications in contact centers regardless of technology, SIP offers an even broader range of potential applications — the most exciting being video. Imagine trying to call a contact center to find out how to install the new keyboard you received for a laptop. With SIP and unified communications, instead of trying to explain this to you verbally, an agent could send a video clip that shows you how to do it. Many things are difficult to explain over the phone. In these cases, video can make communication more efficient and can cut down on the amount of total time required to complete the interaction.
Another use of video in a UC-enabled contact center is to send video advertisements to customers waiting for an expert to become available for an instant messaging chat. Instead of potentially losing the attention of the customer to other websites, videos relevant to the customer’s query can be sent to keep the customer engaged.
Beginning the Process
If my company believes that there may be benefits to deploying unified communications
in the contact center, where should we begin?
By reading this document, you have already begun the process of understanding how your company’s contact center can benefit from the implementation of unified communications. The next step is to document specific challenges faced by customers interacting with your contact center and how UC technology might offer solutions to those challenges. To accomplish this, many organizations find it useful to engage with the consulting services organization of a contact center application vendor. The services offered typically include business evaluation and technology assessment to help ensure that the move to UC in the contact center addresses your business objectives while improving operational performance.
When choosing a partner to help you UC-enable your contact center, it may make sense to start the conversation with your current vendor. They are in the best position to tell you what would need to be added to your existing implementation to get the result you are looking for with the least amount of disruption and expense. You may also want to widen your search. Increasingly, companies with standards-based SIP contact center solutions may offer interoperability with the communications system you have in place already.
How can we ensure that UC-enabling the contact center will deliver the benefits we
expect? What are the critical success factors?
Experience has shown that the most successful unified communications projects, both within the contact center and in the broader enterprise, begin by understanding that UC is not a technology. Unified communications is a philosophy; it is a way of thinking about improving how a business communicates within the company and with customers, partners and suppliers.
Unified communications does not begin with a new softphone on a PC or a new rack of equipment in the data center. Ideally, it begins with an examination of current business processes, identification of how those processes could benefit from improved real-time communications, and an implementation plan that takes into consideration both the people and technology changes that must occur to deliver a successful outcome.
About the Author
Sheila McGee-Smith, the founder of McGee-Smith Analytics, is a leading communications industry analyst and strategic consultant. With a practice focused on the contact center and unified communications markets, Ms. McGee-Smith works on a daily basis with both solution providers and enterprises to help them develop strategies to meet the escalating demands of today’s consumer and business customers. Ms. McGee-Smith’s views on the communications space can be found in her weekly blog at www.nojitter.com.
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