The Contact Center: A Logical Starting Point
Most vendor’s unified communications (UC) pitches are predominately focused on improving employee productivity, and as a result, they are losing sight of the most important part of the business, the customer. Until an organization incorporates true customer metrics into a unified communications strategy, your company will not experience the full value that UC can bring to the business.
A critical component of a complete UC strategy is ensuring that your company is communications-enabling its customer-facing processes - service, collections and sales. Companies have the opportunity to extend the disciplines honed in the contact center to the rest of the business, while always keeping the customer experience in mind. Once you apply processes, such as routing, reporting, queuing, workflow, workforce management, monitoring, training and coaching out to knowledge workers – the same way you do now with your traditional contact center agents - as part of the UC strategy, then you will begin to see success.
Examples of the value this will bring to your enterprise are easy to envision:
• Customer Service - A customer calls into the product support desk with an unusual problem. The agent, while capable, has never seen this problem before and the knowledge database doesn't address it. The agent can initiate a request to find an available engineer with knowledge in this particular area. The contact center goes through its knowledge base of experts and finds a list, most of which are not agents, and begins to check their availability according to their presence state. When an available expert is found, the connection is established according to the media type the expert is available to use. In this case, the expert is on a conference call but available for an instant message. The agent can passes along the inquiry to the expert, but the expert needs more information from the customer. Rather than acting as an intermediate, the agent invites the expert into the call by converting the customer's audio to text for the expert to see. The expert decides to feed the responses to the agent rather than use TTS, so he IM’s the solution to the agent and completes the inquiry.
• Sales: The contact center gets a lead about a person interested in a new auto insurance policy. The contact center calls the prospective customer, provides them with all of the information they need to make a decision. However, the customer has a one question about a specific line item in the policy that the agent can’t answer. The agent sees that an expert is available via chat and he sends a quick message, receives his answer almost immediately, along with a document that the insurance expert has attached to the chat message. As a result, the agent is able to make the sale in one call and the customer is pleased with his first interaction with the insurance company, which could lend itself to creating life-long customer loyalty.
• Collections: An at-home agent calls a customer about an outstanding bill, but the customer has questions about a couple of the items on the bill. The agent can address two of the items, but isn’t sure about the 3rd item on the bill. She determines that one of the accounts billable employees is available for phone calls and conferences in the accounting employee, located in another part of the country. She explains the situation and the accountant is able to easily explain the line item. The customer is satisfied with the response and promises to send a check that day to pay the entire bill.
These vignettes demonstrate the significant value you can experience when traditional contact center employees, practices and technologies are incorporated with UC technologies like presence, mobility and multi-modal communications. By having the contact center maintain control over the entire customer interaction, your enterprise can easily measure the quality of the experience, as well as overall satisfaction to gauge if you’re providing high quality service. Taken together, it’s clearly important to ensure that the customer is part of your unified communications equation.