When considering that approximately 10% of the calls handled by contact centre agents require expertise from external knowledge workers, streamlining customer-facing processes across the enterprise with unified communications (UC) can enable contact centres to accelerate their responsiveness to customers' needs. This approach can lead to both top-line revenue growth and substantial savings.
Combining presence and availability with voice, video, e-mail and instant messaging, UC makes it easy for agents to communicate via the most optimal path, reduces the time spent resolving issues and decreases the number of interactions needed to resolve a customer query.
In fact, it empowers agents to locate a subject expert and secure an answer to a customer's question within minutes or, in more complex cases, expeditiously pass the call to the right resource. They can also leverage customer information to determine the best time and most economic way to make successful outbound calls.
With the advent of session initiation protocol (SIP) and services-oriented architecture (SOA), there is a move away from legacy hardware-based to software-based contact centre applications, which can more readily take advantage of the new opportunities UC offers. By automatically exchanging and synchronising workforce and agent performance data across key contact centre applications, contact centres can ultimately increase customer satisfaction through improved work processes.
As one of the cornerstones for every contact centre, workforce management guides the allocation of resources to ensure the right number of agents with the right skills, at the right time is available. When combined with UC capabilities, it allows businesses to seamlessly extend these processes beyond the traditional boundaries of the contact centre to encompass knowledge workers or subject matter experts in the enterprise.
Contact centre managers can allocate multisite, multichannel and back office agents and effectively communicate schedules or workforce management issues to minimise disruption for non-agent experts outside the contact centre. It can also help improve staff retention by allowing managers, for example, to grant high performing agents their preferred schedules.
In order to ensure quality customer interactions and compliance, quality management is critical. With UC-enabled applications, all interactions with customers, even those outside of the contact centre, can be monitored to flag areas for improvement and ensure regulatory compliance. Quality scores can be used to provide input for coaching and development and speech analytics from across the enterprise can be used for data mining of recorded customer interactions to identify business trends and opportunities.
When incorporating knowledge experts outside the contact centre, it is also essential to track their performance. With UC-enabled performance management, business managers can gain complete visibility into customer service performance metrics and identify problem areas. An efficient mechanism to drive enterprise quality and performance is the intelligent analysis of customer interaction recordings in order to identify good and bad practices, and enable organisations to continuously improve their most important metrics: successful call outcomes and satisfied customers.
Still quite new in South Africa, UC is poised to help organisations address client demands while reducing support and call costs by making workforces more productive. However, not many local companies currently have the necessary infrastructure and technical know-how to develop and implement a successful UC strategy.
It is therefore imperative that organisations select an appropriate UC partner that is competent in aligning the company's business goals to a UC architecture that provides scalability, flexibility, efficiency and security, and immediately realise business benefits and a return on the investment.
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