Chances are good that you work for a company that is struggling to find a way to drive new levels of productivity out of the call center. And management is looking to technology for answers. On your other side is a workforce that has historically been heads-down, office based, and on the lower end of the pay scale. Increasingly, skilled resources are more difficult to recruit and retain and customer service suffers when expert resources cannot be made accessible to an agent during a customer’s first call as these experts expect to be able to work from anywhere and still contribute to the organization.
If you are struggling with the challenge of virtualizing your contact center and keeping its expert resources connected and productive, then now is the time to look closely at Unified Communications or UC. UC keeps a geographically dispersed and mobile knowledge workforce connected and productive delivering on the promise of the communications-enabled business process – that is, collaboration across all devices, applications and media to address business issues in real-time, regardless of worker location.
Recently we have seen this proliferation of contact methods ranging from cell phones and home based second phone lines, to instant messaging and web cam based video conferencing. Increasingly, contacting a firm’s increasingly mobile expert resources becomes a game of tag requiring an attempt to reach the person on every possible device or medium. Unified communications supports publication of preferred device so that only a single attempt need be made, and then only if the presence status indicates real-time availability.
Since 25% of a contact center’s most critical or urgent interactions require support from an expert resource, the benefits of streamlining collaboration with those individuals becomes apparent. An agent that can make an immediate determination on who is available right now to address the immediate issue, can deliver enhanced customer service in less time and with greater success when the right tools make it possible.