UC-enabled Contact Center Opportunities

27 Apr 2013

UC has opened up many new communications options for enterprises, but one area that has remained relatively untouched is the contact center. Several reasons for this. The "contact" center, for many companies, primarily remains stubbornly "call" oriented. Part of that is because customers have been used to picking up the phone, grumbling about the IVR menus, routing to a queue, and being helped by an agent. Another factor is that many centers are still run as a cost center. Many managers run centers on the metrics of agent efficiency. Senior management hasn't extended their vision to alternative models in which the center is staffed with empowered agents eager to be the public "face" of the company. As a result, operational control remains a key mantra, and UC-enabled concepts such as accessing an expert outside the center have seen slow adoption.

Things are changing. The explosion of mobile devices has changed consumer behavior and how they want to interact with companies. The popularity of social media is creating new communications preferences. The old saw about unhappy customers telling more people than happy ones is amplified a thousand-fold because of the propensity of bad news to go viral. Peer-to-peer connectivity, federated presence, and other UC-enabled tools offer ever-more powerful ways to link companies to their customers.

The emerging and powerful opportunity with smartphones is to change self-service from a verbally oriented IVR to screen-based visual commands. Without a headset, current cellular calls into an IVR is a cumbersome exercise of alternating between listening to the prompts and looking at the keyboard to enter responses. Speech recognition can help in some situations, but implementing effective ASR remains an expensive proposition. Taking advantage of the screen to display choices, however, gets rid of the juggling and is faster for the customer because all choices are instantly visible, rather than wading through a verbal menu. Equally important, the mobile number is usually a more personal identifier than, say, the office phone. In assisted service applications, where the customer enters some information through the IVR and then transfers to an agent to complete a transaction, accurate identification is key to efficient operations and to customer satisfaction with the process.

The explosion of social media impacts customer interactions in a number of ways. First, it's the channel of choice for a growing number of consumers, displacing phone calls and email. Companies that want to engage with young consumers especially need to figure out how to communicate with them using their preferences. Enabling contact centers to work effectively with these new channels poses some challenges for traditional access methods.

Second, the way that consumers find information, share good and especially bad experiences, and get advice is changing through social media. Companies need to understand the options and plan a good strategy. Components of a program may include monitoring, contributing to forums, responding to specific customers (but knowing when to take it private), and establishing monitored (or unmonitored) sites for customers to share ideas, help others solve issues, etc. What's important is to do this in a manner that is consistent with your branding and your overall interaction strategy.

Unified communications tools can expand the capabilities that contact centers offer. 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 because of organizational and control issues.

I believe that a future change in customer interaction will come from the more extensive use of customer portals. Today, companies enable customers to log into password-secured websites to access personal information about transactions. This will be extended include presence-enabled access to individuals within the company-similar to DID access but better because of presence information and more options for interaction.

All of these changes mean excellent opportunities for consultants and for systems integrators to help their clients prepare for, design, and implement these coming opportunities.

At the UC Summit this week in La Jolla, Blair Pleasant, Art Rosenberg, and I will be leading a workshop Tuesday morning about this subject: "New Opportunities in Contact Centers." If you are at the Summit, please join us for the discussion. If not, we'll report on the findings in a future posting.

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