Unified communications for the contact centre

However knowledgeable your customer service agents, they aren`t going to be able to answer every question put to them.

In fact, according to recent research, contact centre agents and supervisors now require assistance from knowledge workers in other departments on over 10% of calls. Sometimes they need assistance from technical specialists; other times advice from financial, insurance, legal, retail or casualty experts or senior managers.

There are clear benefits in extending service beyond the contact centre. However, if not managed effectively, it can have an adverse effect on service efficiency. Firstly, agents rarely know the availability or whereabouts of knowledge workers, meaning that they frequently struggle to find the right people in a timely manner. And secondly, because when outside experts are involved, research suggests that calls take approximately two-and-a-half minutes longer than those handled exclusively in the contact centre.

Organisations must now bridge the gap between their contact centre and external knowledge workers - and in such a way that:

* Every employee can become an integral part of the customer service operation.
* Efficiency, customer service and sales levels are maximised. Integrating contact centre and corporate-wide unified communications strategies and technologies is a vital first step.

As Bern Elliot, research vice president at Gartner, states: "It is important for organisations to include the contact centre as part of their broader unified communications strategy because customers can be a key beneficiary of the value that unified communications brings."

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He adds: "To succeed, enterprises should leverage contact centre technology broadly into their enterprise, and similarly contact centres should understand how to leverage enterprise unified communications technology into their operations."

Contact centres already have the experience, applications and processes needed to reduce the amount of time it takes to route customer contacts to the right resource (human or automated), to record those calls for quality of service and provide reports to track how well the whole process is working. The challenge is now for them to take their well-honed contact centre processes and applications and extend them to all customer-facing employees.

Technology providers have recognised this challenge and, in their latest generation of Internet Protocol (IP) enabled contact centre solutions, created products that address the need to be both efficient and effective. Products such as Aspect Unified IP now provide contact centres with a totally "unified" solution for improved customer contact. The product delivers ACD, predictive dialling, Voice Portal, Internet contact, workflow management, quality management and consolidated administration, and reporting and routing as an all-in-one, IT-ready software solution that`s designed to meet all of the requirements of the extended contact centre - including performance optimisation and interaction management applications - with little need for customisation. Aspect Unified IP is appropriate for both small and large contact centre operations that have customer service, collections, and sales and telemarketing centres business processes.

It`s a revolution in contact centre functionality. As well as providing faster and more seamless customer communications, unified contact centre products provide agents with access to real time information on customer history and preferences, and provide genuine up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. They can also deliver advanced features such as universal queuing, real time monitoring and unified historical reporting - with the ability to implement a single set of business rules across all interaction channels.

It`s also a revolution in performance. Organisations deploying Aspect Unified IP have reported numerous benefits including a 75% to 80% increase in agent utilisation rates, a 40% increase in self-service automation capacity, a 300% increase in call handling capacity and an 8% drop in call abandonment - benefits that ensure organisations achieve a rapid return on investment.