Unified Communications (UC) is everywhere in the trade press these days, but for those in the customer service industry, its concepts are anything but new. The new part is that rather than relying on a contact center function, work force, and technology – unified communications promises to engage the entire organization in CRM.
Business process integration, presence capabilities, and consistent tools across multiple devices are the components that commonly make up the definition of UC. But contact centers already support the business process of servicing customers be they internal or external. Seeing the presence of other agents, supervisors, and experts and accomplishing this across the network are critical to a well run shop. UC includes the entire enterprise by extending presence and multimodal SIP-enabled communications to engage the most appropriate resources to resolve the customer query. Using the controlled design process and routing technologies of the contact center to filter and prioritize each contact handling scenario increases effectiveness without allowing unfettered interruptions to disrupt critical business workflow.
The benefits of UC in CRM processes range from individual productivity and satisfaction; to team performance, business process simplification, and direct cost savings and/or revenue enhancement. In the coming months, we will drill down into these benefits, but for now consider what it would take today to realize the following vision:
Having a problem with my phone the other day, I “reached out” for help. Instead of dialing, I selected help on the phone menu. I was out of my office, but a message appeared on my phone and I chose from three options indicating the nature of my problem and then my home phone rang. “My agent” explained that the problem phone needed to be free for diagnosis, so they used my published presence preference and called on this line. Within moments we realized that some special detail was needed from my employer and since we’re business partners, he could quickly “see” an expert who was available right now bridged her in. Having encountered the issue just recently, she had the answer ready; a quick distribution of a firmware upgrade to my phone and we were nearly done. Asked if I had time to complete a survey or perhaps offer a video testimonial on my service experience; I agreed and my phone began sharing video; I spoke my mind and the data the company needed to was collected. Satisfied, I wondered if they would later ask to use my video in their external marketing campaigns…
The phone could have been any device, the network federated across an enterprise and a service provider, and presence shared based on rules, permissions and preferences. In all, the business process was streamlined with enhanced, open and unified communications.
More to come… stay tuned.