UC and Contact Centers: Will They Ever Get It On?UC and Contact Centers: Will They Ever Get It On?

The UCStrategies.com team recently received an "Ask the Expert" question that resurrects an issue that has long been a hot button for me. A reader wrote: What are the primary challenges Contact Centers are facing in implementing UC strategies and solutions?

The UCStrategies.com team recently received an "Ask the Expert" question that resurrects an issue that has long been a hot button for me. A reader wrote: What are the primary challenges Contact Centers are facing in implementing UC strategies and solutions?As someone deeply involved with both contact centers and UC, I believe that the key to UC's success is to emulate what contact centers have done for decades--find a business opportunity or challenge, and then organize technology, processes and people to address it.

There are lots of reasons why UC ought to have a bright future in contact centers. As customer-centric thinking and "first-call resolution" becomes more critical, IM and other UC tools help deliver fast access to the right information or expert, whether the resource is found inside or outside the center.

To date, however, UC has had a slow take-up rate within contact centers. Many call center managers don't want to relinquish control over external calls, nor are they eager to add routing complexity or to mess with their performance metrics. In fairness, it's also true that in many instances, the other departments don't want their staff be "on call" for handling random customer queries. There are also technical challenges involving interoperability--getting UC from Vendor X to work with contact center systems from Vendor Y.

But the biggest challenge is the need to rethink how customer interactions should be handled given the new functionality that UC makes available. Contact center managers have long sought to extend contacts to specialists, but it's always been a challenge to figure out when and how to reach them.

UC goes a long way toward meeting that challenge, even though the nagging question remains about whether all this UC-enabled connectivity is a good or bad thing. Someday, we will have more robust and automatic presence functionality and more sophisticated policy engines to help govern to whom and under what circumstances someone is "available." We already are developing better skills cataloging, to enable presence engines to identify good alternatives to a primary contact.

Here are just a few of the ways UC already has enabled dramatic changes in customer contact, examples that go beyond simply using IM to get quick help from a supervisor:

* Customers can reach a mobile salesperson--UC supports single-identity access, and provides richer alternatives than just routing the caller into voice mail; customers can be connected to a real person who can help. Shimano measured significant revenue increases when dealers were better able to reach their salesperson.

* Connecting with the right resource--UC can be extended across corporate boundaries so customers, suppliers and partners can have direct access to the advisor, designer or production planner they interact with on a regular basis. UC offers secure presence and secure information portals that enable customers to access information and to interact with your enterprise staff in ways that augment traditional contact-center-based methods. Customers and partners can see availability and initiate the best contact.

* Collaboration--This is UC's sweet spot. UC tools make it possible to rapidly organize and support multi-media conference calls or other interactions that directly impact customer satisfaction and loyalty. Global Crossing's embedding of communications directly into their provisioning workflow has had dramatically reduced time to complete orders.

Just about every company wrestles with the problem of creating more "customer intimacy" and it's no secret that achieving that goal requires that the entire organization be involved with customers. UC capabilities and functionality can support that goal in a way that is organized, secure, appropriate and, increasingly, successful. The tools are evolving; now it's time to apply imagination to how they're best deployed.