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Best Practices for Integrating Unified Communications in a Call Center?
What are your top 3 best practices for integrating unified communications into a call center setting? Please list 3 tips you would like to share with the Focus community. High quality contributions will be included in an upcoming report on unified communications.
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6 Answers
If you're truly unifying communications, it will be a "contact center" instead of a "call center". What's the difference? In today's contact centers, agents are communicating with voice, video, and chat. Some early adopters are also communicating via Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging. And who knows what the next 5 years will hold in terms of new communication avenues. To that end, my three tips for unifying communications in a contact center would be:
1. Take some time up front to document all the different ways your customers can contact you. Leave out nothing. As ridiculous as you may think it sounds to have a customer contact you via Twitter or text, it's happening more and more each day. Give each of these a weight based on importance and likelihood of the customer initiating contact in that way.
2. A strong voice system is the basis of any successful UC implementation. It should:
a. Be based on open standards to ensure interoperability with other systems.
b. Be SIP-enabled as most communication systems are standardizing on SIP as a transport mechanism. And make sure the SIP is not proprietary. SIP only has a few functions built into the standard and some manufacturers have put so much of their own proprietary code in their version that it won't work with other systems.
c: Have a strong developer community so you make sure you have the choice of best-of-breed products. This is becoming increasingly important because no voice manufacturer has the best of everything, so you're increasingly reliant on the developers.
3.Talk to other organizations with similar systems. Get really in-depth with them and ask them the tough questions. Don't limit yourself to companies within your geography, but the ones that have the most in common. You're making an investment of possibly several hundred thousand dollars and one that could make your company millions. Take the time and effort to do your due diligence.
Michael,
I would agree with Bill that within this context we should be referring to "contact centres" as opposed to call centres. Would also suggest that unified communications can be very broadly defined and has a different meaning for different organizations. That said, believe that there are three (3) broad areas of consideration regardless of context or organizational characteristics.
1) Customer Engagement - Do not make assumptions and/or make guesses about the communication preferences of your existing customers or prospective customers. This may take some time but believe it is well spent when compared to the hard and soft costs of making inaccurate assumptions about customer experience. Use customer and prospect feedback as the foundation for redefining business and communication processes.
2) Employee Engagement - How many times has the contact centre industry declared a revolution in desktop technology without consulting the soldiers in that revolution? Use customer feedback as the foundation but look to your frontline for expertise on how these process modifications will be delivered in the real world of your contact centre. This not only ensures buy-in and accountability from the frontline but, perhaps more importantly, ensures that the potential of unified communications is actually delivered.
3) Platform Neutrality - Not going to pretend to be a technical expert. Would, however, strongly recommend platforms which are open and not committed to roadmaps which are carved in stone. The reality is that we do not know when and how quickly communication preferences will change/evolve. Be sure that your technology is viable in an environment characterized by ambiguity. Finally, resist the temptation, ragardless of how slick the technology to let it (technology) determine the business and/or communication process of your contact centre. If a particular technology cannot support/advance/enhance the business model which your organization has deemed optimal - move on. There is no shortage of options.
Cheers,
William
1) Quality customer relations in a call center begins and ends with quality communications.
2) UC is about unified communications and unifying communications.
3) Time is always kills communications whether traditional or unified. Designing UC systems that enhance time will be key.
Unified Communications means different things to different people. Call Center benefits I would look for is the integration of voice traffic directly into the business process so that the voice connection is available to anyone who needs to participate. (You can also insert video communication.) This means to me that if I am working a document all I have to do is click to call any or all of the people engaged in the work flow or I could IM the group. The fun thing about unification is all varieties become just communications choices.
So my number one suggestion is for the call center to explore possibilities and THEN brainstorm how they would like workflow and communications options to work.
You can see some great implementations in some large accounting firms and engineering based firms that come to my mind.
Next is finding providers and qualification. A good RFP would help.
Then choose and Test Test Test Test
Then engage in the implementation from the top down. Without the support from the top any engagement will very likely fail
I agree with Williams and Bills statements.
In most projects unfortunately the technolgy is placed in the middle and processes, strategy follow the features of the new system rather than the other way round.
First step always should be to have a clear understanding based upon an indepth analysis of the customer expectactions, requirements,... A company can use Voice of the customer, or customer focus group data ... Most important is to use a proven methodolgy where the future technology/platform is based upon.
Secondly the processes/workflows are the key determining factor. Lead management, complaint management,... wahtever processes a contact centres uses should be designed ( to be status) prior to the purchasing (RFI, RFP) process of a unified communication platform. Even more useful is an analysis of the as-is processes to gat a clear picture on how complaints, requests, are handled. In most cases contact centres do not know this as-is state of their own organisation. Any new system implementation will not use it´s full potential or even lead to failures if the processes in reality follow different paths than management think they do
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