Unified Communications at Home in the Contact Center

Campbell suggests that the contract center is a natural place for UC because of the great gains to be made in extending tools as directly as possible to the most important constituency a company has, which of course is its customer base. 

Moreover, Campbell points out that the nature of contact centers makes the jump to fully fledged UC much more natural than its implementation in other parts of the organization. The point is that much of what the contact center already does is a rudimentary form of UC; the modern tools simply enable employees to do it more effectively.

Traditionally, call centers accomplished customer service priorities through simple communication and collaboration tools, such as agent-assisted calls and self-service technologies. Now, as standards-based communications protocols - such as IP and SIP - continue to find a home within the enterprise, call centers have access to more technologies referred to as UC, including e-mail, IM and calendars.

Rosenberg cites a Frost & Sullivan survey of the use of UC in contacts centers. The survey says 65 percent of respondents are planning to increase “proactive, value-add customer contact” over the next two years, with 43 percent and 42 percent upgrading sales and marketing and collections programs, respectively. Rosenberg points out that inbound and outbound contact centers (i.e., messages originating from outside the contact center and outreach originally from the center to outsiders) functions are a perfect fit with mobility and UC:

Mobile access, coupled with UC interface options, offers just such flexibility and control for efficient communication contact with individual customers. Without mobility and UC, customers are stuck with the old limitations of location-based communications and no alternatives for selectively communicating under different environmental circumstances.

In some instances, contact centers don’t get recognized as the hotbed of UC activity that they are. Perhaps the reason is simply that they have been doing UC right all along. The step up to the more contemporary UC functions is almost certainly a less dramatic endeavor.