Gaining Steam

There has been an increasing deployment of unified communications in the

outsourcing industry. A lesser known but important aspect of deploying UC in

business process outsourcing is that it is the key to substantially increase the

incidence of first call resolution, and, subsequently, leads to increased

customer satisfaction.

Unified communications is basically a solution set aimed at collaboration.

With the ever-increasing modes of communication coming up everyday, employees

find it increasingly difficult to find the right personnel. While earlier the

same agent needed to enter an additional instance of call back to the customer,

now with the deployment of UC, the availability and communication with subject

matter expert (SME) is almost instant. This, in turn, ensures reduced telecom

costs while giving superior customer service. Agents now have real time

information of SMEs addressing the relevant query.

“We have seen tremendous improvement in our productivity after the deployment

of UC. We have been able to increase our sales by at least 30 to 40%. Since we

are mostly in inbound sales, when we make a sale it has to be verified by the

third party. And if an agent is busy with a third party, it is very difficult to

get the customer again. With UC, it is easier to get through to the right person

and make the sale efficiently,” says Shankar Lingam, CTO, Amtex Systems. Amtex

recently implemented unified communications to increase customer satisfaction.

The company has developed the UC system in-house to track the presence and

availability of an agent.

“Features in UC not only provide instant information of the status of the SME

and other features like click-no-to-call and click-to-chat, they also provide

the ability to reach out to the SME almost instantly,” says Ketan Shah, head,

contact center business, Avaya Global Connect.

Increasing customer satisfaction is more important now than ever before in

view of the current slowdown-when client retention is important, and it is

critical to offer the best possible services. The current bearish environment is

further likely to fuel the adoption of unified communications in the industry.

UC can substantially enhance agent performance which will lead to more first

call resolutions, and increasing the productivity of the agent. Instant

Messaging (IM) functionality can be a better way to get assistance while on a

call with a customer. This is now possible with the deployment of UC. Achieving

the first call resolution may just need a quick response from a supervisor or a

support person in the center. Frequently, the contact center agent doesn't even

need to transfer the call once s/he has the relevant information.

“If the agent is not able to respond to a query with UC he can route the call

and find the agent in a relevant facility or in another facility of the same

organization, and then transfer the call. This helps increase the first call

resolution for a BPO, which ultimately leads to a better customer satisfaction,”

says Dhananjay Ganjoo, vice president, enterprise, Nortel Asia.

Nortel's Xpert Anywhere solution includes SIP-based Contact Center 6.0,

Multimedia Communication Server 5100, Nortel IP phones and clients and secure

VPN gateways. This helps in transferring the call from one facility to another,

and the company claims that about 20% of its contact center clients have

deployed this for better customer satisfaction.

“There is a definite advantage with unified communications for first call

resolution. The technology can help in increasing first call resolution and in

decreasing the amount of time customers spend on hold, which greatly impacts

customer satisfaction. The more satisfied customers are, the more follow-on

business they will conduct, and the more often they will refer that company to

their friends, family and colleagues,” says Rajeev Soni, general manager, South

Asia and Middle East, Aspect Software.

According to a recent research from Aspect Software, on 10.3% of calls

handled, agents are already reaching outside of the contact center to leverage

the help of subject matter experts elsewhere in the organization.

The main advantage is that agents no longer have to search for knowledge

workers to explain the customer's situation, to call back the customer, and to

introduce the customer before they can finally transfer the call. Rather, they

could potentially transfer detailed notes about the issue-at-hand to the

knowledge worker along with the call, shortening the transfer process and

preventing anyone from having to repeat information.

Organizations that consider their contact center as part of their overall

unified communications strategy can drastically increase their agents

efficiency, thus reducing the amount of time spent with contact knowledge

workers to answers customer inquiries. These calls, typically, take a little

more than two minutes to handle, thus decreasing the number of interactions that

customers need to have their inquiries resolved, which generally requires more

than two interactions on an average.

Industry Response



The outsourcing industry is positive about UC, and there has been an

increase in the deployment of unified communications in the industry.

“Unified communication has not taken up as it should have, but looking

broadly into the space it is a good vision. It will help our agents to attend

calls faster and more efficiently. UC will come across as the most effective

technology to track clients while at the same time being a low-cost technology,”

says Sanjiv Dalal, CTO, Firstsource.

However, there are a number of challenges associated with the deployment of

UC as well. “Since we developed our own in-house UC solution, technology

co-ordination with the client was difficult. We had to convince the client that

the system would be beneficial to them. First getting client's approval and then

technology co-ordination with their system was the biggest challenge,” says

Shankar Lingam of Amtex Systems.

Mostly, BPOs are first deploying IP networks as the foundation technology and

then deploying UC applications to provide a multimedia collaboration experience.

Many companies are running pilots for this.

According to some reports, unified communications in collaboration with other

UC technologies help in increasing as much as twenty minutes of productivity per

day per employee.

In the future, through federated environment, we will be able to connect different islands of people. These kinds of applications will go a long way in increasing customer service effectiveness” Dhananjay Ganjoo, vice president, enterprise, Nortel Asia	“Features in UC not only provide instant information of the status of the SME and other features like click-no to-call and click-to-chat, they also provide the ability to reach out to the SME almost instantly” Ketan Shah, head, contact center business, Avaya Global Connect	“There is a definite advantage with unified communications for first call resolution. The technology can help in increasing first call resolution and in decreasing the amount of time customers spend on hold” Rajeev Soni, general manager, South Asia and Middle East, Aspect Software

However, there are some discerning voices as well. “UC is actually not

directly associated with first call resolution. A dialer can help in skill-based

routing that can route the call from one agent to another. However, since UC is

IP-based, one can have the whole infrastructure at one place and agent in

another. For instance, a call can be transferred from Delhi to Mumbai. Another

advantage is that one need not invest in another dialer for another facility,”

says Rajendra Sawant, CTO, Adventity. Adventity has installed Cisco's UC.

Emerging Trends



In the same vein, UC helps in customers getting in touch with the agent not

only through voice but through other mediums as well like SMS, email or even

video. Video is in fact the biggest emerging trend in UC and there would be more

and more deployment of video in UC. Multi-modal contact center is the future

where UC is concerned.

“Video is going to be the most important functionality of UC going forward.

This is especially useful for helpdesk type BPO where the agent has to explain

the technical aspect of the product or the caller has to visualize the product.

For instance, if the agent has to explain how to install GPRS in your

phone...video can help in explaining it to the customer and can increase instances

of first call resolutions. These kinds of problems typically take more than one

call right now,” says Ilango Periathambi, director, pre-sales at Bay Talkitec.

The company is a provider of communication technology platform and business

enabling solutions. The company claims to be among the early companies in India

to have developed a technology platform for unified communications.

Though video is likely to emerge as an important trend, it is not likely to

happen for some time since video demands more bandwidth and this is likely to

happen with the arrival of 3G which is away by at least six months to a year.

Though most vendors are ready with their video products or applications for UC,

it is not likely to hit the market any time soon.

Nortel is coming up with Agile Communications Environment (ACE) where the

agent will pop up on the screen, and it will be a combination of voice-video

data. “It will allow UC to flow seamlessly without deploying any new hardware.

This also works through multi-vendor environment,” says Ganjoo of Nortel.

Another upcoming and interesting application which would in the future give

flexibility to the customer to reach the agent through a different environment

is instant messaging. It is an important tool to reach the agent, and will be

pro-actively used by the BPOs and contact centers. However, there is a problem

in this since a Yahoo! user cannot get in touch with a Hotmail user, and the

like. “In the future, through federated environment, we will be able to connect

different islands of people. These kinds of applications will go a long way in

increasing customer service effectiveness,” Ganjoo adds.

Avaya is also concentrating on mobility applications. “We feel mobile is a

far more preferred mode of communication. We have integrated some of our

products to provide mobile unified communications across Wi-Fi and cellular

networks. It is basically a dual-mode solution for mobile employees to move

seamlessly between campus-based wireless networks and cellular networks,” says

Shah of Avaya.

“The tangible benefit of deploying UC differs from process to process and

depends a lot on the vertical that you are addressing. Add to that staffing

related parameters which will ultimately play a vital role in the first call

resolution. However, on an average, if one was to look at the financial

industry, Avaya has deployed solutions on the trading floor that have increased

first call resolution by as much as 40%,” he adds.

The UC solution has generally been lapped up by the industry. However,

adoption also depends on the type of processes that are outsourced to BPOs. As

the quality of the outsourcing contract becomes more and more sophisticated the

adoption of the UC solution set by the industry is only likely to improve.

Gagandeep Kaur



gagandeepk@cybermedia.co.in