The Collaborative Contact Center
Most organizations have separate platforms for their business UC and for their contact center, but this doesn't allow the contact center to take advantage of UC for customer care. One of these challenges is the inability of subject-matter experts (SMEs) help with customer interactions.
However, thanks in part to the widespread adoption of Microsoft Skype for Business, this is starting to change. When businesses use an UC-integrated contact center product, such as Clarity Connect, they can benefit from the new "collaborative contact center" model.
Here's some background: Over 10 percent of all telephone inquiries handled by contact center agents require some sort of assistance from knowledge workers or SMEs in various parts of the organization. Examples could include a claims adjuster helping with a call about an insurance claim, a financial expert giving assistance for a bank loan, or a sales engineer answering a technical question about a product. In the past, the agent would have to put the caller on hold while tracking down the SME, which could be a time-consuming process. Often times the agent would have to call the customer back once they found the information they needed. This can result in lengthy calls and multiple customer interactions, which can be costly to the organization. Reducing the time it takes to resolve a customer's issue can save contact centers hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Going Outside the Walls of the Contact Center
The solution is to enable contact center agents to get help immediately from a SME in order to respond to a customer's inquiry quickly and seamlessly. This concept, which I initially called "the contact center without walls," began thanks to computer-telephony integration (CTI), and became more promising with the advent of IP communication. The original idea was that contact center agents could reach SMEs outside of the contact center who could provide information while the agent is on the phone with the customer. While in theory this is great, in many cases it can be challenging, since contact center technologies are usually separate from the enterprise business communication technologies, making it difficult to have seamless interactions between the agent and the SME.
The next phase of evolution is what I call the collaborative contact center, which adds unified communications capabilities to the mix, both inside the enterprise and the contact center. Using presence-awareness technology, contact center agents can see the availability of SMEs elsewhere within the organization, and can contact the expert in real time to either get the information they need via IM or the phone. However, as in the previous phase, this is challenging if the contact center technologies and platform are separate from or not well integrated with the business UC platform.
Moving forward, more and more businesses will deploy the same platform for business communications, UC, collaboration, and contact center, making it even easier for companies to have a collaborative contact center. In the collaborative contact center, contact center agents can easily identify the right SME, determine whether or not they're available, send an instant message to get information, and where appropriate, share documents and even have a one- or two-way video interaction with the customer, regardless of where the agent or SME is located. This makes it easier for the agents and SMEs to work together to solve customers' issues and provide immediate results.
Why the Collaborative Contact Center
Integrating UC and contact center in the collaborative contact center leads to higher customer satisfaction or CSAT scores, reduced operational costs, and increased first contact resolution (FCR), which ultimately saves companies money.
When using the same UC platform, agents can launch an IM, voice call, and even screen-sharing session from the agent desktop, without having to find the right tools for communicating with people outside of the contact center. Callers don't have to be placed on hold while the agent is calling an expert for information, and the agent can engage with the customer while sending and receiving the textual messages from the SME. Collaboration between agents and SMEs is enhanced, facilitating knowledge sharing and resulting in better results for the customer.
Many centers already use IM to enable backchannel communications between agents and specialists or supervisors. But implementing the ability to use presence to find experts outside the center to bring into a conversation has been challenging. By using the same platform for contact center agents and enterprise-knowledge workers, providing unified communications applications including presence, IM, conferencing and collaboration tools to the contact center, agents can easily reach and access experts throughout the enterprise. The result is reduced call handling time, reduced call transfers, decreased costs, improved first call resolution, and more satisfied customers.
Other benefits of integrating UC with contact center is that the contact center agents get advanced UC tools such as screen sharing, document sharing, and even video in some cases. Using screen sharing, agents can visually guide callers through a process, such as filling out a complicate tax form or using an online ordering system.
Let's look at a scenario with and without UC. In a typical contact center (without UC), if the agent doesn't know the answer or have the information needed to solve a customer's problem, they would either transfer the caller to someone else (who may or may not have the information, and may not even be at their desk), or take down the customer's phone number, do some research, and then call back the customer - possibly hours later. This is frustrating to both the customer and the agent.
Today, with the use of UC tools like presence and IM, when an agent needs to get additional information in order to answer a customer's question, they can use presence to see which SMEs are available, and send an IM to ask an available expert for information while on the call with the customer. In some cases, the expert may need to send documents or information to the agent, and can easily do so using the same UC platform.
In other situations, it may make more sense for the SME to speak with or interact with the customer directly. Rather than blindly transferring the customer to a SME who may not be available, and have the call end up in voicemail or back in the queue, agents on the same UC platform can see which individuals and experts are available, and even send a quick IM before transferring the customer call. By being able to view the presence status of SMEs and individuals throughout the organization from within the agent dashboard, the agent can quickly determine how to more expediently handle a customer interaction. Whether it's an insurance claims agent who needs to interact with a claims adjuster, or a contact center agent who needs to get confirmation from the sales department about a new sales promotion to adjust the price of an item, interacting with SMEs via UC tools can help agents provide a better customer experience.
One Option - Skype for Business
As more and more companies move to Skype for Business for their enterprise business communications and UCC capabilities, this same platform can also be used in the contact center, adding contact center solutions based on the Skype for Business platform, such as Clarity Connect, which provides intelligent routing and queuing to Skype for Business. In addition to potentially reducing costs via the reduction of infrastructure and maintenance, the contact center becomes a collaborative contact center, where agents and individual throughout the organization can share information and collaborate in order to provide optimized customer care.
There are many examples demonstrating the power of using UC integrated with the contact center for customer service. One online university was able to reduce its customer service response time from 9 days to 15 minutes using Clarity Connect. Prior to deploying Skype for Business and Clarity Connect, students called the contact center with financial aid questions, and were disappointed to learn that the agents didn't have access to the students' financial aid records and information. The students then had to email the financial aid office, a process that took 9 days to resolve. After deploying Skype for Business and Clarity Connect, the process was simplified so that when the student called the contact center, the agent would send an IM to the financial aid office and immediately get the information they needed to assist the student while the sensitive financial aid information stayed within the financial aid office. By enabling an agent to communicate with the financial aid office using IM, the contact center agent can get the information needed to answer the students' questions in real time, reducing the process to only 15 minutes. As the contact center agents and the financial aid office are on the Skype for Business platform, the communications are seamless, and the agent doesn't have to open a separate communication application or tool.
As more companies deploy Skype for Business, having the agents and SMEs on the same platform makes it possible for them to communicate seamlessly, resulting in reduced processing time and more satisfied customers. As Microsoft doesn't provide a contact center application, companies like Clarity that provide native integration to Skype for Business can help make the collaborative contact center a reality.
Tags
Start YourCustomized Search
SOLUTION AREA
SOLUTION PROVIDERS
- 8x8 (40) Apply 8x8 filter
- Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (50) Apply Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise filter
- AT&T (44) Apply AT&T filter
- AudioCodes (48) Apply AudioCodes filter
- Avaya (396) Apply Avaya filter
- Cisco (573) Apply Cisco filter
- Dell (11) Apply Dell filter
- Five9 (53) Apply Five9 filter
- Fuze (39) Apply Fuze filter
- Genesys (100) Apply Genesys filter
- HP (98) Apply HP filter
- IBM (171) Apply IBM filter
- Jabra (9) Apply Jabra filter
- Logitech (56) Apply Logitech filter
- Lumen (3) Apply Lumen filter
- Masergy (50) Apply Masergy filter
- Microsoft (766) Apply Microsoft filter
- Mitel (232) Apply Mitel filter
- NEC (128) Apply NEC filter
- Nectar (58) Apply Nectar filter
- Polycom (95) Apply Polycom filter
- Ramp (37) Apply Ramp filter
- RingCentral (126) Apply RingCentral filter
- Sennheiser (18) Apply Sennheiser filter
- Slack (13) Apply Slack filter
- Tata Communications (59) Apply Tata Communications filter
- Unify (186) Apply Unify filter
- Vonage Business (80) Apply Vonage Business filter
- Yealink (8) Apply Yealink filter
- Zoom (20) Apply Zoom filter
- Acme Packet (24) Apply Acme Packet filter
- Allworx (2) Apply Allworx filter
- Arkadin (22) Apply Arkadin filter
- Aspect (34) Apply Aspect filter
- BT (25) Apply BT filter
- CaféX (8) Apply CaféX filter
- CallTower (14) Apply CallTower filter
- Clarity Connect (10) Apply Clarity Connect filter
- Continuant (1) Apply Continuant filter
- Damaka (4) Apply Damaka filter
- Dialogic (5) Apply Dialogic filter
- Dimension Data (44) Apply Dimension Data filter
- Empirix (11) Apply Empirix filter
- Enghouse Interactive (17) Apply Enghouse Interactive filter
- Inference Solutions (9) Apply Inference Solutions filter
- IntelePeer (27) Apply IntelePeer filter
- IR (11) Apply IR filter
- Jive (21) Apply Jive filter
- Kurmi Software (21) Apply Kurmi Software filter
- Lifesize (33) Apply Lifesize filter
- Lightware (3) Apply Lightware filter
- Mavenir (6) Apply Mavenir filter
- Modality Systems (8) Apply Modality Systems filter
- Momentum (36) Apply Momentum filter
- Netfortris (5) Apply Netfortris filter
- NetSapiens (6) Apply NetSapiens filter
- NewVoiceMedia (31) Apply NewVoiceMedia filter
- Nureva (26) Apply Nureva filter
- NUWAVE (5) Apply NUWAVE filter
- Orange (32) Apply Orange filter
- OVCC (8) Apply OVCC filter
- Panasonic (18) Apply Panasonic filter
- PanTerra Networks (9) Apply PanTerra Networks filter
- ScanSource (21) Apply ScanSource filter
- SIPPIO (3) Apply SIPPIO filter
- Snom (20) Apply Snom filter
- Star2Star (8) Apply Star2Star filter
- StarLeaf (12) Apply StarLeaf filter
- Tadiran Telecom (2) Apply Tadiran Telecom filter
- TekVizion (9) Apply TekVizion filter
- Unimax (7) Apply Unimax filter
- Verint (40) Apply Verint filter
- Voice4Net (2) Apply Voice4Net filter
- VOSS (85) Apply VOSS filter
- Voxbone (14) Apply Voxbone filter
- West (28) Apply West filter
- XO Communications (3) Apply XO Communications filter
- Yorktel (17) Apply Yorktel filter
- Zultys (2) Apply Zultys filter
- 3CX (8) Apply 3CX filter
- ADDASOUND (1) Apply ADDASOUND filter
- Aerohive (1) Apply Aerohive filter
- Aryaka (1) Apply Aryaka filter
- Asurion (22) Apply Asurion filter
- Avnet (7) Apply Avnet filter
- Bandwidth (5) Apply Bandwidth filter
- Calabrio (5) Apply Calabrio filter
- Consilium Software (13) Apply Consilium Software filter
- Drum (5) Apply Drum filter
- ESI (6) Apply ESI filter
- Esna (16) Apply Esna filter
- Exinda (2) Apply Exinda filter
- EZuce (3) Apply EZuce filter
- GUnify (6) Apply GUnify filter
- Highfive (4) Apply Highfive filter
- Huawei (47) Apply Huawei filter
- Imagicle (3) Apply Imagicle filter
- IPCortex (1) Apply IPCortex filter
- KnoahSoft (1) Apply KnoahSoft filter
- KOVA (1) Apply KOVA filter
- Logmein (9) Apply Logmein filter
- Metropolis Technologies (4) Apply Metropolis Technologies filter
- Mutare (2) Apply Mutare filter
- NextPlane (27) Apply NextPlane filter
- Ooma (16) Apply Ooma filter
- Patton (11) Apply Patton filter
- Radish Systems (1) Apply Radish Systems filter
- Radisys (3) Apply Radisys filter
- Shango (1) Apply Shango filter
- SMART (163) Apply SMART filter
- Stack8 (1) Apply Stack8 filter
- Swyx (1) Apply Swyx filter
- TrueConf (4) Apply TrueConf filter
- UJET (13) Apply UJET filter
- Voximplant (3) Apply Voximplant filter
CONTENT TYPE
- BC Expert Insights Market (42) Apply BC Expert Insights Market filter
- BC Expert Insights Objective - Vendor Neutral (42) Apply BC Expert Insights Objective - Vendor Neutral filter
- BC Expert Insights Planning (15) Apply BC Expert Insights Planning filter
- BC Expert Insights Solution (12) Apply BC Expert Insights Solution filter
- BC Expert Insights Vendor (80) Apply BC Expert Insights Vendor filter
- BC Expert Insights Vendor Solution (145) Apply BC Expert Insights Vendor Solution filter
- BC Expert Roundtable (133) Apply BC Expert Roundtable filter
- Bcs Webinar (0)
- Bcs Webinar Registration (0)
- Best Practice (38) Apply Best Practice filter
- Buyer Guide (14) Apply Buyer Guide filter
- Case Study (29) Apply Case Study filter
- Executive Interview (145) Apply Executive Interview filter
- Expert Roundtable (450) Apply Expert Roundtable filter
- Guest Contributions (34) Apply Guest Contributions filter
- Multimedia (38) Apply Multimedia filter
- News Analysis (2081) Apply News Analysis filter
- Newsfeed Article (1303) Apply Newsfeed Article filter
- Newsfeed Article (1) Apply Newsfeed Article filter
- Thought Leadership (21) Apply Thought Leadership filter
- Vendor Collateral (211) Apply Vendor Collateral filter
- Vendor Resource Best Practices (24) Apply Vendor Resource Best Practices filter
- Vendor Resource Buyers Guides (2) Apply Vendor Resource Buyers Guides filter
- Vendor Resource Multimedia Content (4) Apply Vendor Resource Multimedia Content filter
- Vendor Resource White Paper (4) Apply Vendor Resource White Paper filter
- Webinar (13) Apply Webinar filter
- Webinars (7) Apply Webinars filter
- White Paper (64) Apply White Paper filter
MORE FILTERS
INDUSTRY
- Banking And Investment (800) Apply Banking And Investment filter
- Education (446) Apply Education filter
- Energy And Utilities (487) Apply Energy And Utilities filter
- Finance (12) Apply Finance filter
- Government (675) Apply Government filter
- Healthcare (482) Apply Healthcare filter
- Hospitality (180) Apply Hospitality filter
- Insurance (100) Apply Insurance filter
- Manufacturing (704) Apply Manufacturing filter
- Media/Publishing (422) Apply Media/Publishing filter
- None (43) Apply None filter
- Professional Services (745) Apply Professional Services filter
- Retail & Distribution (798) Apply Retail & Distribution filter
- Technology (1611) Apply Technology filter
- Transportation (110) Apply Transportation filter
Comments
There are currently no comments on this article.
You must be a registered user to make comments