Q208 Aspect ONE Newsletter

Why a UC Strategy Is Like the London Tube

By Raun Kilgo, Director, Product Management, Aspect Software

During a recent business trip, I found myself in downtown London and needed to get to an office in Stockley Park. Turning to my map of the London subway system, known locally as the “Tube,” I found I was located in the white area of the map, or Zone 1, the proverbial center of the donut. My destination was Zone 5, one of the outer frosting layers.

I walked from my hotel to an underground ticket office and told the clerk my destination. He sold me a prepaid pass for 30 pounds, which I used to take the Tube from Earls Court Station to Paddington. I then had to get off the Tube and find a national train. After some confusion, and a wait of 20 minutes, I got on the right train and rode it to the Hayes and Harlington station.

When asked for my ticket, I presented the prepaid card, and was promptly told I had violated London law and was subject to a 20-pound fine for not having the right ticket. I made my apologies and paid on the spot for a round-trip ticket, then made my way outside to pick up a bus. I found the bus stop for the 350 bus to Stockley Park, and after waiting 45 minutes, boarded the bus for the 15-minute ride. Once there, I disembarked and made my way to the office.

Why am I sharing this story? Because my stop-and-go experience is exactly what your customers may experience when they call your contact center. More often than not, the first person they speak to is not going to have all the information they need, and the route they must take to reach someone else in the enterprise can be frustrating, time-consuming, and potentially painful.

The contact center is the heart of the enterprise and thus the heart of unified communications. When you think of all your company’s contacts with the outside world, the vast majority are facilitated by the contact center. Your company may have a dozen executives and hundreds of sales people, but on any given day, your contact center agents have more contact with the outside world than all other corporate groups combined.

For decades, contact center vendors and their solutions have helped organizations manage these contacts while knowing exactly what is going on with each agent. What we call agent state is now called “presence” by the rest of the enterprise. Rather than needing to know who has a bit of knowledge, contact centers have defined skills groups, so that a question or call can be routed to the first person available who is likely to resolve the issue. And, days after the contact, we can tell you what happened and when, down to a very detailed level.

As contact centers and unified communications reach across the enterprise, they will need to assure the same level of information for enterprise workers as they would for the contact center agents — presence, persistence, skills, and disposition, independent of communication mode or media. Why is this important?

Because a significant percentage of contacts managed by the contact center — an average of 10.3 percent¹ — cannot be resolved within the center. They must be routed into the enterprise, many times a day. Today, this is done ad hoc, and the presence information is spotty. The disposition of the call after transfer is often unknown and untrackable, meaning the data and resolution does not persist for later validation and follow up by management. Given the volume of customers served by today’s contact centers, better serving that 10.3 percent will have significant impact on customer satisfaction, revenue and retention. And let’s know forget about those other 89.7 percent — would they benefit from occasional interactions with knowledge workers — would it make their experience exceptional?

As we reach deeper into the enterprise, we find that business leaders have challenges that are best served by a unified communications approach for the entire enterprise. Going back to our London Tube analogy, enterprises need to give their customers a universal pass to access any point on the map, using their mode of their choice — chat, Yahoo messaging, phone extensions, cell phones, LiveMeeting, and more — and deliver them smoothly to their destination.

¹ Source: An Evaluative Report of the Knowledge Worker's Role in the Contact Center; survey conducted by Leo J. Shapiro & Associates, December 2007.