What is Unified Communications and what does it do for contact centers?
Question
What is Unified Communications and what does it do for contact centers?
Answer
DMG defines Unified Communications (UC) as a technology framework that helps organizations provide a standardized user interface and user experience across multiple applications, devices and channels. It integrates real-time and non-real-time communication services. The real-time communication services include: Internet Protocol (IP) telephony, presence, call control, speech control, instant messaging (IM)/chat, and conferencing (voice and video).
As contact centers migrate to multi-channel environments and expand beyond the traditional brick-and-mortar legacy call center, UC will play an increasingly important role in handling customer interactions, whether via phone, email, Web, chat, video, social media or other channels. Vendors and enterprises continue to struggle to build a strong business case and identify tangible benefits that yield a high return on investment (ROI) for UC within a contact center. Among the many benefits of UC are:
- Presence – allows agents to see the real-time availability of other contact center associates, as well as their preferred method of communication. Reduces the unproductive time agents spend tracking down available associates to assist with customer support.
- Collaboration – facilitates enhanced customer service by providing instant access to personnel, subject matter experts and data, regardless of location. Contact centers increasingly require real-time collaboration between co-workers, business partners and customers, using advanced data-sharing and communication devices and services.
- Devices – enables management staff to stay engaged with contact center activities from any location. Mobility is growing in importance as contact center supervisors and managers increasingly use smart devices to complete their daily tasks. Contact center managers can utilize UC tools to enhance contact center operations by extending management, operations and administrative services to these devices.
- Extensibility – allows contact centers to extend their services and tools to remote and mobile workers and partners via UC, allowing recruitment and expansion of staff in areas where they may not previously have had access. This can accelerate entrance into new markets and increase the quality and knowledge level of the workforce.
- Access – enables remote associates to access contact center processes and systems such as workforce optimization (WFO), customer relationship management (CRM), servicing applications and other data management and reporting utilities through a UC interface. This gives a mobile workforce real-time access to internal and partner information that can be utilized for customer service.
For more information about UC, see DMG’s contact center Unified Communications guide at:
