by Ross Daniels, Director, Unified Communications Solutions Marketing, Cisco

For many people, "presence" means the little colored icons next to colleagues’ names on the buddy list of their Instant Messaging client.  Is someone available?  Do they prefer to not be disturbed?  This is useful, and many modern business users would be at a loss without IM and its straightforward application of presence technology.

Since presence has proved its worth in facilitating communication between business users, how can it help improve interactions between businesses and customers?  One obvious answer is to provide contact center agents with an IM client that allows them to chat with fellow agents or subject matter experts outside the contact center; this gives agents an opportunity to get answers to caller questions that are outside their areas of expertise. 

There are a number of potential problems with this approach, however.  Who should populate the agents' IM buddy lists?  If agents do it, how do they know who the best experts are for answering specialized questions?  What if five hundred agents add Bill from Engineering to their buddy lists, and then twelve of them try to IM poor Bill with questions simultaneously?

Consider also the usage challenges facing an agent armed with an IM client and a buddy list.  When the agent is on the phone, do they really want to have to scroll through buddy lists to find the right expert to consult with?  Presuming they find one or more available experts, how will they enlist their aid?  IM them sequentially, or scatter ten IM’s to ten experts and go with whoever answers first?  What if the best way to address the caller's problem is to have the expert join the live call?  Finally, consider that a number of contact center administrators prefer that their agents don't use IM clients at all, since internal chat can be a distraction.

While it's true that there are ways to mitigate these kinds of issues, it's also true that presence technology can do much more for customer interactions ... if we broaden our thinking.

Consider a scenario where an agent is on a call, and the customer has a specialized question.  Instead of bringing up an IM client, searching for available experts, sending IM’s asking for help, passing on customer data, etc., what if all the agent has to do is press a button that effectively says, "I need help on a call from an expert with this skill set"?  At that point software takes over and looks for candidate experts based on previously-configured skills and current presence state.  The software can select experts across multiple dimensions, such as skill rankings, location, time of day, time of last-answered call, etc.

When a candidate expert is identified, the software sends an IM such as, "Are you available to assist on a call with Ms. Caitlin Sanchez, customer # 123123?"  The expert can answer "yes" or "y" in their IM client, at which time the software can dial their phone (at a preconfigured number or entered in real time by the expert via their IM client) and bring them into the call with the agent and the customer.  If multiple candidates were identified, the software could have sent the IM invitation message to several of them simultaneously, and selected the one who answered first (and then informed the other candidates that their help was no longer needed).
Notice that there is no IM interaction between the agent and the expert; indeed, the agent doesn't even need an IM client!  All the agent needs to do is indicate, "I need help!" from a button on the agent desktop and then the expert-selection software takes care of the rest.  The customer gets the help they need on their first call into the contact center, instead of hanging up in frustration.

Scenarios like this are part of the future of customer care, and are already available in solutions such as Cisco Unified Expert Advisor.  Presence is the enabler, but in a broader, more powerful sense than its conventional use with Instant Messaging.