Unified communications and collaboration provides the infrastructure to create the next-generation contact center, by connecting not only the contact center and the rest of the enterprise, but also the enterprise and the customer in new ways. Capabilities include rich presence, voice, multimedia conferencing, instant messaging (IM), fax, email, desktop sharing, web portals, data sharing and content management. Creating experiences appropriate to each channel— from phone based to SMS/text messaging and increasingly, customer communities—puts companies in a better position to service and satisfy the emerging consumer and build relationships that cultivate loyalty. As social capabilities expand, consumers will expect more, and customer-centric companies will need to adapt and move from customer interaction to customer-company collaboration.
Most companies face serious barriers to delivering at this level. Their contact center platforms are outdated and therefore tend to be siloed from the rest of the enterprise, and augmenting existing systems with new products and capabilities can be expensive and time-consuming.
The next generation contact center requires a unified platform that can initiate a dialogue and respond to inquiries in a consistent manner across all contact channels. A unified contact center overcomes the challenges and expense associated with the previous generation of proprietary, siloed and hardware-intensive computer telephony integration (CTI) architectures. Replacing outdated, stand-alone systems with a software-based model that unites key capabilities of the contact center architecture’s communications components—full-featured, inbound routing, intelligent proactive contact capabilities, and virtual routing to remote agents and dispersed locations—alleviates system fragility and reduces or eliminates the need for integration across applications. A software-based architecture also provides extreme flexibility, enabling contact centers to respond more quickly to internal or market changes.
A unified platform integrates business rules and centralizes communication channel management and administration, empowering business line managers to monitor and optimize operational and agent performance in real time. Unified architecture that supports session initiation protocol (SIP) interoperability provides a standards-based way to employ new and third-party applications as they become available, giving contact centers a foundation for taking advantage of unified communications and collaboration technologies. This enables contact centers to support the real-time unified communications capabilities and features such as call control and speech recognition—and non-real time communications such as voicemail, email, SMS and fax. The benefits include greater first-call resolution, optimal balance of proactive and customer-initiated contact, and adoption of Web 2.0+ applications for the next-generation consumer.
Contextual presence is a core element of unified communications and collaboration. Among its many functions are the abilities to identify and engage enterprise knowledge workers in customer interactions or drive intelligent-notification via the best channel for announcements and alerts, such as order shipment status or prescription refill notices. As interactions expand into the enterprise, next-generation contact center operations will need to leverage workforce optimization both in the contact center and the enterprise. This allows the use of a common set of unified communications and collaboration technologies to track, manage and optimize customer interactions within the contact center and into the enterprise and consumer communities.
Unified communications and collaboration capabilities in the contact center support favorable business outcomes, including cost reductions through increased operational and agent efficiencies, and stronger customer relationships. As customer interactions become more integrated into the enterprise, leading companies will use their organization’s full knowledge and expertise to engage their customers while embracing social networking to enhance customer-company collaboration. The most qualified vendors will provide a contact center solution that optimizes a company’s resources and allows easy adoption of the best tools and technologies as they become available. That means enhancing customer-company collaboration through applications that can be configured to optimize both business processes and intellectual capital in real time.