By: Sohail Qasim, Sr. Global Marketing Manager, Portfolio and Offer Management
According to market research, mobility − making the enterprise more adaptive, flexible and faster − are the driving forces behind many investment decisions made by CIOs.
1gIP (1st generation IP)
The first generation of contact centers were focused on delivering call distribution to agent groups using unsophisticated methods by today’s standards. Through their evolution over time they began delivering business value through multi-media contact, blended queues, customer segmentation, skills-based routing and intelligent routing. First-generation IP solutions only replicated the PBX model in the TDM and IP networks by leveraging the feature-rich proprietary protocols of PBX Systems. However, distributed architectures and the fragmentation of communication services remained unchanged.
Such efforts were not enough to meet the constantly changing needs of the enterprise of the new millennium – the Global Enterprise. Irrespective of size – small, medium or large – today’s enterprise must transcends the traditional geographically bound organization. It is defined by its ability to harness the power of the ‘expert employee across the enterprise, anytime and anywhere – to provide first-contact resolution of customer issues. This has become extremely important in the successful delivery of the highest level of customer service and satisfaction – a critical element of success for the enterprise in today’s customer-centric and highly competitive global economy.
2gIP (2nd generation IP)
Enterprises are driven to adopt 2gIP contact center solutions to take greater competitive advantage of globalization. This means greater support of virtual workforces and more empowerment of mobile and on-the-go employees. The end result is faster decision-making with the convergence of communications with business applications.
This translates into today’s businesses demanding a process-centric contact center solution that provides for more than the traditional skills-based interactions and multi-media support across a fragmented communications infrastructure. The right solution must provide a comprehensive framework of multi-media presence and collaboration tools that bridge diverse business processes to make the enterprise optimally adaptive, flexible and faster – today and for the future.
This is a new paradigm for managers and they must grow beyond the conventional mindset surrounding proprietary TDM and IP convergence technologies. It calls for the 2gIP contact center to:
- Provide new multi-media channels for customer interaction.
- Enable multi-media presence and collaboration across the extended enterprise.
- Allow integration with business processes.
- Offer next-generation applications, workflow integration and centralization of services.
- Utilize new corporate instant messaging capabilities to enable transparent collaboration.
- Leverage IP soft-client / wireless mobility to improve contact center management and productivity performance.
- Selectively extend the contact center processes to include individuals with higher skills / higher authority across the entire enterprise.
Benefiting from a 2gIP Contact Center Solution: A customer scenario
Let’s see how a 2gIP contact center helps set the stage for fast-paced business operations and more timely decisions that keep customers happy. In the following scenario, a newly updated business-to-business contact center for a regional bank receives a call from a long-standing and, highly valued business customer. The customer is requesting an extension on a large business loan. Providing loan extensions requires permission from a bank supervisor. Meanwhile, the customer is asking for confirmation – right away – since the due date is only a two days away.
The contact center agent receives the incoming customer call, recognizes the process she needs to follow and understands both the customer’s urgency as well as the customer’s value to the bank. The agent seeks the assistance of a supervisor, using contact center presence tools. The agent immediately finds an available supervisor and initiates a voice consultation, with a shared screen pop of key customer information.
The supervisor has moved away from the desk, but is connected to the network and the contact center via a wireless LAN (WLAN)-enabled PDA. He receives the call as a VoWLAN session as he is walking back to his desk. He realizes that the loan amount also exceeds his authority and requires approval from the senior vice president for credit. He checks the status of the vice president using integrated presence-aware software tools. This shows the vice president as traveling but available in real-time for mobile instant messaging and, according to configured rules, selectively available by mobile phone. The supervisor initiates an instant messaging dialog highlighting the customer situation. After an exchange of messages, the vice president briefly exits his current meeting and accepts a call from the supervisor via mobile phone. Upon understanding the situation related to the urgent customer request, the vice president uses Web access through a PDA to authorize the extension.
The agent can now see the approval in the system and confirms the extension with the customer. The customer is saved from becoming delinquent on the loan repayment. The customer is impressed with the speed of response and resolution. A new level of customer satisfaction has been created that will be hard to beat by competitors.
Conclusion
This shows one of many real-life situations where multi-media presence and collaboration tools within a 2gIP contact center solution, along with mobile and wireless real-time communications, enhances business processes to make the enterprise more adaptive, flexible and responsive. Whether it is the financial sector, healthcare, manufacturing or any other business sector the ability to utilize enterprise resources to achieve first contact resolution can only result in one thing – happier customers, reference customers and more customers.
For more information on this topic download the white paper “The Presence-Enhanced Multimedia Contact Center” which “illustrates the business value of deploying presence and collaboration tools in the contact center to improve productivity, reduce costs and raise both employee and customer satisfaction. Specifically, presence management – combined with the ability for contact handling agents to collaborate with others in the organization – yields higher first contact resolution, more efficient internal operations and encourages stronger customer relationships.