Is UC Making Headway in the Contact Center?Is UC Making Headway in the Contact Center?
This article discusses an Aberdeen research report whose key finding is that almost a quarter of contact centers already use Unified Communications. According to the article, Aberdeen defines UC as "the convergence of such technologies as instant messaging, e-mail , voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), presence and e-commerce in or near real-time."
August 7, 2008
This article discusses an Aberdeen research report whose key finding is that almost a quarter of contact centers already use Unified Communications. According to the article, Aberdeen defines UC as "the convergence of such technologies as instant messaging, e-mail , voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), presence and e-commerce in or near real-time."
This article discusses an Aberdeen research report whose key finding is that almost a quarter of contact centers already use Unified Communications. According to the article, Aberdeen defines UC as "the convergence of such technologies as instant messaging, e-mail , voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), presence and e-commerce in or near real-time."Combine this finding with the recent Gartner report that IP telephony has crossed the 50% mark in endpoint shipments, and you get an interesting picture. Contact centers appear to be adopting UC much more quickly than they adopted IP telephony; the contact center reached the 50% mark for IP telephony adoption some three years after the wider enterprise crossed that line. In contrast, while numbers for UC adoption across the enterprise are hard to come by, nobody believes the figure is anywhere close to the 23% that Aberdeen cites for the contact center.
The Aberdeen definition of UC is at once not as granular nor as comprehensive as many other definitions you see out there, but as far as I'm concerned, it's in the ballpark. So what does the finding about UC adoption tell us about the contact center--and about UC?
To me, it's just further proof that contact centers were always the low-hanging fruit for UC. The real test of UC is how far beyond the contact center it penetrates into the enterprise.
One of the noteworthy aspects of the CRM Buyer article and the Aberdeen study is the attention paid to governance. This is obviously going to be a big factor in how successful enterprises are going to be able to be in their procurement, deployment, implementation and use of UC. It's a factor that Aberdeen stresses for the contact center, and one that the enterprise--IT and lines of business--need to find a way to transfer to their own situation.
