Q208 Aspect ONE Newsletter

Keeping the Customer in Your Unified Communications Strategy

Unified communications for the contact center is all about serving your customer — enabling customer-facing processes, such as service, collections, and sales, to ensure you are delivering a consistent, optimal customer experience. The contact center has deep knowledge in utilizing unified communications applications that the entire enterprise can leverage.

What do we mean by unified communications? Some think of it as the successor to unified messaging — the melding of voicemail, email, and fax messages. Others view it as a fancy term for IP telephony.

We defer to a recent Gartner definition: “Unified communications offers the ability to significantly improve how individuals, groups and companies interact and perform.”¹ Of course, this improved ability to interact and perform depends on the use of technology. Analyst firm Forrester Research includes the following technologies under unified communications:

Communication applications: Business telephony, mobile devices, audio and video, unified messaging, desktop call control.
Collaboration applications: Email, calendars, IM and presence, web conferencing, directory integration.²

However, technology is only part of the equation. Gartner and others point out that the importance of unified communications is that it offers a method to integrate communication functions directly with business applications. Gartner calls this capability "communications-enabled business processes."³

What is the Promise?

Why are mega-companies like Microsoft and IBM extolling the virtues of unified communications? The first and most obvious reason is increasing productivity. Companies are constantly being challenged to do more with less, to maximize every resource by implementing clear, streamlined processes.

Enhancing the customer experience has only more recently been recognized for its ability to differentiate excellent companies from the merely good. Communications both within and across businesses must be united in a common goal to address customer requirements in a superior manner. Businesses and consumers both gain when knowledge workers can be part of the enterprise pool of customer-facing employees. High-value sales or service interactions can be addressed directly by the appropriate employee — no matter their location or job title — based on availability.

The Contact Center: A Logical Starting Point

Contact centers, by definition, are at the heart of unified communications. They were created to address and enact customer-facing business processes.

Of course, initially, this was accomplished using the very simplest of methods, namely agent-assisted calls and self-service technologies. Increasingly, with the advent of standards-based communications protocols like internet protocol (IP) and session initiation protocol (SIP), contact centers are increasingly using email, IM, and calendars. As such, they have been communications-enabling their customer service, collections and sales business processes for years.

Because the contact center already has experience in communications-enabling business processes, it would be logical to extend those lessons learned or best practices out to the enterprise. For example, companies are looking closely at how capabilities like presence and multimodal communications could help companies deliver an improved customer experience. Once again, the contact center already has mastered these concepts.

Extending Quality Customer Service across the Enterprise

With unified communications, customer transactions can become a collaboration between the contact center and the rest of the enterprise and, using existing tools, the contact center can manage the entire interaction.

How? Call routing software can determine, for example, if a customer interaction should be handled via chat, email, or through a live agent — using criteria like the lifetime value of the customer. The contact center can provide the tools to schedule knowledge workers, or determine their availability to support customer interactions using rich presence, integrated with calendaring. The notion of presence, while relatively new for enterprise knowledge workers, is not new to the contact center. For decades contact center software has managed 'agent state' from sign-in to sign-out.

The value that this way of thinking about unified communications and contact centers will bring to the enterprise is easy to envision, from customer service to sales to collections:

Customer Service: A customer calls into the product support desk with an unusual problem. The agent, while capable, has never seen this problem before and the knowledge database doesn't address it. The agent goes through her knowledge base of experts and checks availability according to their presence state. When an available expert is found, the connection is established according to the media type the expert is available to use. In this case, the expert is on a conference call but is available for an instant message. The agent passes along the inquiry to the expert, but the expert needs more information from the customer. Rather than acting as an intermediate, the agent invites the expert into the call by converting the customer's audio to text for the expert to see. The expert decides to feed the responses to the agent rather than use text-to-speech (TTS), so he instant messages (IMs) the solution to the agent and completes the inquiry.
Sales: The contact center gets a lead about a person interested in a new auto insurance policy. The contact center calls the prospective customer and provides them with all of the information they need to make a decision. However, the customer has a question about a specific line item in the policy the agent can’t answer. The agent sees that an expert is available via chat and he sends a quick message, receives his answer almost immediately, along with a document that the insurance expert has attached to the chat message. As a result, the agent is able to make the sale in one call and the customer is pleased with his first interaction with the insurance company, which could lend itself to creating life-long customer loyalty.
Collections: An at-home agent calls a customer about an outstanding bill, but the customer has questions about a couple of the items on the bill. The agent can address two of the items, but isn’t sure about the 3rd item on the bill. She determines using her presence engine that one of the accounts billable employees has been scheduled to be available for inquiries from the contact center. The agent conferences in the accounting employee. She explains the situation and the accountant is able to easily explain the line item. The customer is satisfied with the response and promises to send a check that day to pay the entire bill.

These vignettes highlight how the corporate assets of traditional contact center employees, practices and technologies can be further leveraged throughout the enterprise with the addition of unified communications technologies like presence, mobility and multimodal communications. And, most importantly, the contact center, which has the greatest understanding of customer interaction best practices and has the tools to measure satisfaction, retains control of the customer experience.

First Steps toward a Unified Communications for the Contact Center Strategy

Unified communications is not about technology alone, but a new way of thinking about your business and changing it for the better. The following are factors to consider when crafting a unified communications for the contact center strategy:

Objectively assess your business challenges.
Evaluate how unified communications for the contact center can help deliver on your business goals.
Develop a strategy that starts with the customer and adds other organizations based on the measurable contribution that can be made by including them in the communications chain.
Determine which contact center processes and disciplines could readily and effectively be extended to improve the overall customer experience.
Ensure that the contact center technology partner you choose to work with as you explore unified communications has open standards as a core value. Bring in complementary technologies and partners as needed to ensure your success.

By considering all of the above criteria, companies can ensure the best results, including improving agent productivity, increasing customer satisfaction and ultimately improving the top and bottom lines. Most importantly, always keep customers at the core of the strategy and apply established contact center technologies, processes and disciplines.

¹ Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications, 2007, August 20 2007, Bern Elliot.
² How to Determine If Unified Communications Is Right for Your Business, June 7, 2007, Elizabeth Herrell.
³ The Three "Ds" of Customer Experience, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, November 2005.