Chances are your company is in the midst of deploying its unified communications (UC) strategy and your IT department is working hard to deploy new applications that unite telephony, conferencing, messaging and even collaboration tools. Their goal is to increase employee productivity and streamline internal processes. And, your business is seeing progress at the enterprise level.

Thanks to UC, employees in your New York office now have the ability to instantly see if their colleague in the Tokyo office is immediately available for a quick telephone discussion or online chat to brainstorm about a new service offering. Your company’s engineers, based in San Francisco and Chicago, are posting specifications for new products in a central repository so that they can collaborate more efficiently. And, your corporate communications team is using a combination of calendars and presence to locate corporate executives wherever they may be for urgent media interviews. Everywhere you look, your company is starting to use presence, collaboration, calendaring and conferencing tools.

Has someone forgotten about your contact center?

Your contact center can benefit from UC just as much, if not more than, the other departments across your enterprise. Your agents are on the frontline communicating directly with customers but, for 10.3 percent of the calls1 handled by your contact center, your agents also serve as conduits between your customers and subject matter experts across your enterprise. Incorporating your contact center as part of your company’s overall UC strategy can help you drastically increase your agents’ efficiency. It can reduce the amount of time agents spend contacting knowledge workers for answers to customer inquiries, and potentially decrease the number
of interactions your customers require to have their inquiries resolved. Instead of frantically running down a call list to reach someone with the technical expertise to answer a specific customer question, UC empowers your agents to instantly check the availability of a knowledge worker and quickly get their input with a few keystrokes and the click of a mouse.

For more complex customer issues, UC makes the call conferencing process faster and simpler. Agents may no longer have to call the knowledge worker, explain the customer’s situation, conference the customer into the call and introduce the customer before they can finally transfer the call. Rather, they could potentially transfer detailed notes about the issue at-hand to the knowledge worker along with the call, shortening the transfer process and preventing anyone from having to repeat information.

Aspect Software

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