By Ari Sonesh, CEO of CosmoCom™
The emergence of the term “contact center” to replace “call center” reflects an evolutionary shift in the way that the role of the “center” is perceived inside, and perhaps more importantly, outside, the organization. This evolution has given way to an important concept – Unified Customer Communications.
It is tremendously useful, for example, for a contact center agent to instantly see a customer’s complete communication history, including phone, Web chat or IM, email, etc. It is even more useful for other knowledge workers and customer-facing staff to be able to access the same view. This is Unified Customer Communications at its best.
Merging communication channels
Unified Customer Communications (UCC) is about systematically offering unified communications to an organization's customers, so that customer interactions will be more efficient and effective. This creates cost savings and fosters customer satisfaction and loyalty, which brings revenue growth. UCC requires facilities such as self-help via the Web, interactive voice response (IVR) and interactive voice and video response (IVVR) that can be smoothly escalated to live help, multi-channel automatic call distribution (ACD), universal queuing, unified recording, unified reporting and unified management and supervision – all focused on the customer. This is a tall order and a good high-level requirements list for contact center technology in the age of Unified Customer Communications.
But Unified Customer Communications also requires unifying the business process across all communication channels, across all locations, and across all staff members. UCC includes the contact center, but it goes far beyond the physical or virtual boundaries of the contact center. Every employee can and should be part of the UCC process. Implementing UCC unifies the organization's workforce around its primary mission of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The objective of UCC is to create a unified customer experience that lets customers select any communication method and receive the same quality of service, supported by the same process, and conducted by people with access to the same information, including the history of communication sessions with that customer via any and all channels. A unified customer experience of a uniformly high level of service is what brings about the customer loyalty that every business wants and needs, ultimately leading to revenue growth. It is also more efficient, and therefore less costly, especially in terms of staff time.
Implementing Unified Customer Communications in the contact center, and in the overall organization, touches many different functional areas. Let’s explore some of the requirements and their capabilities:
Unified automatic call distributors: When a customer or anyone else contacts a corporation using any of the available digital channels, they usually don’t know the name of the person they want or need to reach. It takes an ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) to connect the caller with the right person in the organization. If it’s a problem that needs solving, for example, the call can be directed to the engineer who has the answer—anywhere in the organization. The challenge is to have a single set of queues and routing rules that apply to all communication modes, and skills-based routing across the entire organization.
Unified data access: When a call comes into a contact center, unified data access means that all of the data associated with the caller and his or her interaction history is available across the entire organization. An engineer could see at a glance all the projects associated with a specific caller in order to be better prepared.
Unified agent client: In a contact center, one agent client application should support all communication modes, including collaboration, should provide unified access to information, and should be accessible everywhere using any device. UCC means one application that can instantly link every desktop, notebook, and browser-enabled mobile device in a corporation to its customers.
Unified supervision: Contact center agents are and must be a carefully managed resource. The technology that is used to supervise contact agents—including monitoring, whispering, real time views, historical reports, and recording facilities—should also be available across all the channels and locations within a corporation.
Unified applications infrastructure: Organizations need to be able to roll out new applications (i.e. new contact centers—or any other kind of application) fast. When technology is location-independent, relocation is no longer an issue. The network becomes the location, and the unifying technology.
This concept of Unified Customer Communications implies a lot, both in terms of technology and in terms of organizational innovation. It has the potential to help us live our lives and do our jobs better, in easier and more enjoyable ways, and at a lower cost. But we believe its most significant impact is the organizational one. IP-enabled Unified Customer Communications has the potential to transform the entire enterprise into the contact center of the future, the contact center companies will need to survive and prosper in this century.