Few people in the contact centre industry would disagree that in this tough economic environment, good service and high customer satisfaction levels can make the difference between winning and losing business. The ability to resolve an issue upon the customer’s first call has become one of the most powerful measures of a contact centre’s success. In fact, if a contact centre increases call resolution, not only is the quality of customer service improved, but also customer satisfaction levels climb while operational costs are driven down.However, tying back office systems and processes into the front of the contact centre can present an enormous challenge. This is only heightened by the growing number of an organisation’s experts working out in the field, travelling or connecting from remote offices. So how can you help contact centre managers bring relevant information together successfully to build the foundation for a highly efficient contact centre? And how can technology, process, policy and information all be better integrated for first call resolution?There are three major points I see that will change this.1. Unified communications and collaboration comes of ageUnified communications and collaboration (UCC) has been a much-hyped concept in the contact centre industry during recent years. Now it is truly coming of age, as technologies such as VoIP, video, web chat, email and calendars have become much more common in the workplace and can be integrated using common business rules. The market for UCC has matured in a relatively short space of time as a new generation of tech savvy workers - and customers - have grown up using these technologies in everyday social interactions, such as instant messaging and Skype. At its most basic level, UCC empowers employees to work in the best possible way. They can use technology and tools that enable them to have a ‘birds eye’ view of all the experts within an organisation, indicating their availability and preferred medium for contact at any given time. For example, if an expert is out in the field, a contact centre worker would be able to discover their availability and how best to contact them to get an immediate answer in one snapshot; for instance via mobile phone rather than email or instant messaging. For this to work, people in the field simply have to maintain their status and preferred method of contact via Outlook. This can be easily integrated to other call centre applications, allowing customer agents to view colleagues’ calendars and get in contact in the most appropriate way. In this way, UCC technology gives agents the best multimedia tools for handling customer enquiries and providing quick call resolution. There are many industries where UCC is particularly relevant. For example in the healthcare sector, contact centre agents may require expertise from professionals such as specialised doctors or nurses. UCC technology provides a much easier and more effective way for contact centre staff to connect with doctors and nurses on the go, so they can provide answers quickly on the phone or via IM, and free up more time to develop qualitative patient notes. 2. The emergence of on-the-move knowledge workersThe emergence of multimedia tools and UCC technology means that contact centres and staff need not be limited to office-based activities. The convergence of different media is enabling contact centre managers to extend operations beyond the physical boundaries of the centre while retaining centralised control. Using rich presence tools, they can now improve efficiency by extending customer service activities to new groups of personnel, such as teleworkers, outsourced staff and widely distributed virtual teams. The future for the contact centre industry is on-the-move knowledge workers contributing to the servicing of customer enquiries. There will also be an increase in roaming agents – technology support teams, for example, who are free to move around their location using mobile devices such as WiFi or DECT phones – in addition to remote agents connecting to the centre using mobile phones or VoIP. 3. Considerations for contact centres looking at unified communicationsCompanies considering UCC need to assess their strategy before implementing the technology. As a reseller, you can guide them to ask themselves a series of basic questions:
- What is the purpose of introducing UCC?
- What multimedia tools are already used widely across the organisation?
- What problem(s) do I want to solve?
