New Lessons

The business
world is on a quest to break down information silos, and for good reason-more
people will have access to critical knowledge, they can collaborate, work
smarter, and react faster to market and business changes.

But what if silos aren't just around
information; what if they are around people themselves? What if the entire
communication infrastructure, instead of connecting people, creates a fractured,
inefficient environment for getting things done? Experience has shown that the
more systems require to establish contact, the harder it becomes to actually pin
someone down for collaboration or knowledge sharing. Having tools that can help
identify when those types of interactions are required, based on past customer
and call volume history; monitoring quality of those collaborative interactions,
and ensuring that right resources are available to handle those interactions are
imperative.

Unified communications (UC), worthy
successor of unified messaging, is an enterprise's way of removing silos around
its people. For this reason, many companies are beginning to adopt wide scale UC
strategies; and major software vendors like Microsoft have lent credibility and
stature to the effort. Creating an enterprise wide UC strategy is as much art as
science, because it forces every company to ask (and answer) critical questions
about internal business processes and workflows. Unified communications allows a
company to build a structure for connecting people, through the adoption of
presence and availability-awareness tools.

It does not, and cannot, stop there,
because there are two key variables implicit in building a creative UC strategy
that many companies overlook. One is the customer-along with tools, the customer
uses to connect to the company. The second is the contact center, where agents
can use the UC infrastructure to boost and extend effectiveness of the customer
experience. Beyond the contact center itself, extension of presence awareness to
other employees- represents a chance to use the company's larger employee base
as a reservoir of knowledge, that contact center agents can use in real-time.
People with relevant expertise, outside the contact center, can become part of
the knowledge pool, that can be tapped during the customer interaction. This is
where performance optimization technologies present a unique opportunity to
extend UC practices enterprise wide.

Hidden Benefits

As it turns out, basic elements of what we now call unified communications,
are part of standard operating procedures for any contact center. Unlike
traditional office workers sitting at desks, contact center agents sign in and
out of their phone system. The automatic call distributor (ACD) has always
included a 'state management' function, that tracks whether the agent is on a
call, between calls, available to take a call, or logged in but unavailable.
These are clearly analogous to what we see in modern instant messaging and
presence tools, which are the core of unified communications.

When we extend what's already being used
inside the contact center with tools that are becoming widespread in rest of the
enterprise, we find common elements and synergies that were unforeseen.

This valuable relationship between
company's subject matter experts and contact center is often overlooked. UC
strategies typically focus on productivity benefits of communications
technologies. It's just as important (and valuable) to include tangible and
intangible benefits that accrue to the organization and its customer
relationships, when enterprise knowledge workers fall within the contact
center's sight lines.

UC can be used to provide contact center
representatives. With an expert base they can call for specialized information
during the customer contact. A customer might call with a problem not typically
encountered by the service center. After searching the established knowledge
base, agent needs a contact center setup, that can seamlessly inter-operate with
UC applications to identify potential experts within the organization, who can
quickly provide guidance-such as a suggestion to ask the customer a key
question, or other useful bits of advice. In a supportive environment, this can
make all the difference between escalating a case (and taking hours or days to
close it), and solving the problem on the first call.

Therefore, UC strategy has to include more
than just presence and availability. It has to reach a bit further, to include
some element of meta-information about each person's skill set and knowledge
base. That is what makes each person in the organization potentially relevant to
the customer interaction on an ad hoc basis.

A successful UC strategy will yield
measurable improvement in the key contact center performance metrics- like first
call resolution, increase sales, higher collections rates, and customer
satisfaction. These are accompanied by intangible benefits that accrue to the
company overall, such as reduced customer churn, that is not necessarily a
normal part of UC deployment strategy.

Performance Optimization Apps

In addition to straightforward UC tools, there are ways to leverage existing
contact center applications to enhance the overall enterprise UC strategy. When
you begin to understand how many of today's best practices in enterprise UC
already exist in a contact center, you start to appreciate how all sorts of
performance optimization practices benefit and improve overall business
communications. And it is these applications, that can provide difference
between success and failure of a company's UC strategy.

What makes the contact center so uniquely
positioned to propel deployment of UC outward-is concentration of performance
optimization technologies already in use.

They can complement a UC strategy, and
help the contact center effectively schedule knowledge workers across the
enterprise; determine availability to support customer interactions, or monitor
these interactions to drive improvements in customer care.

The three agent-facing applications
directly involved are:

• Workforce management
• Contact recording and quality
  management
• Performance management

Workforce management plays a key role in scheduling these experts in short
time slots, based on expected call volumes, which help reduce overuse of
knowledge workers, who are still trying to do their 'day job'-a big concern of
any UC strategy.

Quality monitoring and recording, speech analytics, and performance
management tools function in a similar way; although they have a somewhat
delayed effect, because their results are not usually handled in real-time.
Nevertheless, by integrating their aggregated knowledge of skill gaps and
expectations, along with near real-time reports of actual performance—to-goals,
these tools provide a way to use presence in the contact center to extend
quality management across the enterprise; and ultimately ensure a positive
customer experience.

Contact center tools are in midst of a historic period of integration, which
seems to be happening in parallel with the development of UC related
applications, largely based on the common need across the enterprise, and for
the contact center to reduce complexity and costs. In conjunction with this
trend, many of the systems that keep track of agents and customers, are having
their data streams pooled together and analyzed for the first time. This is
helping companies identify patterns to understand why customers call, and how to
control the interaction to make each connection as helpful (and profitable) as
possible. And, these tight integrations between various contact center
applications are making it easier to manage agent behavior, through a more
careful oversight of individual performance. Connecting training to workforce
management-allows agents to improve skills in specific areas — at precisely the
moment when taking training doesn't interfere with customer assistance.

In the very near future, the term 'unified communications' will be redundant.
All communications will be unified and seamless throughout an organization. Our
present concept of UC is the one in which we link together disparate streams of
connectivity, through clever ideas like visual, voice mail, text-to-speech,
emails, instant messaging, and collaborative web conferencing.

Most critical aspect of this evolution is that it needs to be managed so as
to not create a higher tech version of the isolated individual worker, totally
plugged in, and yet working solo. The ideal strategy is to use contact center as
the test case for making UC practical and transparent. With it's vast experience
in connectivity, presence, and availability management; and it's established
knowledge of performance best practices, it sets the bar and provides the
metrics for deployment company wide

Rajeev Soni

The author is GM, South Asia & Middle East, Aspect

vadmail@cybermedia.co.in