Why UC in the Contact Center?Why UC in the Contact Center?
Sheila covers the Aspect "UC in the Contact Center" announcement below. Here's a few more thoughts, based on my own briefing with Tom Chamberlain, director of business process marketing at Aspect.
March 10, 2008
Sheila covers the Aspect "UC in the Contact Center" announcement below. Here's a few more thoughts, based on my own briefing with Tom Chamberlain, director of business process marketing at Aspect.
Sheila covers the Aspect "UC in the Contact Center" announcement below. Here's a few more thoughts, based on my own briefing with Tom Chamberlain, director of business process marketing at Aspect.One useful thing that Aspect did was to quantify the need for the scenario that everyone has in mind when they talk about the intersection of contact centers and UC technology. This would be the call where the customer service rep needs to draw on expertise from someone outside the contact center.
Aspect commissioned outside research, from Leo J. Shapiro & Associates, which found this scenario occurs in 10.3% of all contact center calls. A commissioned study by a vendor, but I include it because it's the first I've seen any number put to this scenario.
Is this a big number? Tom Chamberlain cites a statistic of 1 billion calls to contact centers every day, so you'd be talking about 100 million instances of a need to reach out from the contact center. They further found that calling out from the call center using separate traditional channels add 2.5 minutes to the call, and claim that UC technology can shave a minute off this additional time, saving $2 per call.
Another interesting aspect of my discussion with Tom was about the buying decision for UC and the contact center. He noted that Aspect is making a priority of training its salespeople to talk with IT, up to the CIO level, in addition to the customary route through the contact center group. Chamberlain noted that the corollary, from the enterprise perspective, is that the decision-makers for the contact centers must likewise make this effort, to get to know the IT decision-makers, so that technology isn't imposed upon them. Given the importance of the contact center in most enterprises, it'd be smart for IT to reach out as well.
