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Date: 06 March 2009 Author: Bob Dalton, CEO

De-Risking Unified Communications projects

Management Objective: Taking the risk out of Advanced Technology projects such as the implementation of Unified Communications within the customer contact environment

While some of the latest best practice standalone contact centre technology solutions can play a key role in helping to improve elements of the customer experience, the majority of organisations still operating around a traditional voice telephony infrastructure are starting to feel its limitations - particularly when the requirement is to evolve their call centre operations into a more outward-facing customer interaction network. That’s where a more consistent customer contact approach based on Unified Communications technologies can help in supporting organisations as they respond to changing business requirements.

According to one recent US research study, organisations using IP-based unified communications applications saved an average of 32 minutes per worker per day just by being able to connect with team members more efficiently, while for mobile professionals typical time savings of 40 minutes per day could be achieved when a UC infrastructure was in place. This significant level of improvement in connectivity is particularly important given the nature of interactions in today’s contact centres, with another recent study showing that over ten percent of daily interactions now require assistance from experts outside the contact centre. (Each of these then needed a further two interactions to fully resolve the customer’s issue, and were estimated to last around two-and-a-half minutes longer than if the call could have been handled solely within the contact centre.) In pure productivity terms, this offers a number of significant optimisation opportunities, particularly in terms of reduced overall talk time, improvements in agent productivity and first call resolution performance.

Addressing UC complexities
While some of the latest UC technology undoubtedly has enormous potential, it also brings with it considerable risks in terms of its complexity – both for the end-user organisation and for those suppliers and partners involved in its implementation. Take Cisco’s Unified Contact Centre Enterprise (UCCE) offering, for example, which enables customer contact operators to seamlessly integrate their inbound and outbound voice applications with Internet applications such as real-time chat, Web collaboration, and e-mail. This advanced capability enables a single agent to support multiple interactions simultaneously regardless of which communications channel the customer has chosen.

UCCE also supports the delivery of each contact to the most appropriate resource anywhere in the enterprise, it enables the segmentation of customers and the monitoring of resource availability, and the ability to manage customer interactions based on almost any customer contact attribute. Collectively, this represents an enormous amount of contact centre functionality, and brings with it significant challenges when it comes to successful project management and solutions integration.

Operational and IT management both need to understand the potential systems demands of such a solution, and also need to be re-assured that all of their different UC implementation components – including all the underlying hardware architecture, networking, messaging infrastructure and directories, SOA-enabled enterprise integration, security and contact centre software – will interoperate correctly and deliver the required levels of performance. Clearly there are considerable risks in taking on such potentially complex implementations, and that’s why it’s so important for organisations to ensure that they’ve got access to the correct levels of project management and support necessary to make it a success.

Requirement for specialist expertise and skills
The successful implementation of major UC environments are always about far more than just the technology, particularly with UC’s underlying service oriented architecture approach encouraging the integration of previously disparate contact centre processes.  The skillsets required go beyond IP and UC expertise to include comprehensive ITIL-based project and services management expertise, project design and scoping skills, as well as in-depth SOA application integration to ensure the delivery of an effective UC-enabled customer contact environment.

Having worked across a range of different UC projects based around Cisco’s UCCE offering, we believe that there are number of key UC project issues that organisations should identify and address before starting off on their UC journey.

  1. Don’t underestimate your company’s existing communications culture – it’s important to understand how your staff communicate with customers and each other before determining your own UC infrastructure
  2. Get some UC project champions on board – any next generation communications project will inevitably mean change, and it will be important to have some key users in place who can accelerate employee acceptance
  3. Prepare your environment – you’ll need to get some of the core building blocks in place, get a single authorative directory as a source of contacts, make sure it will be able to support your Corporate IM, that your PCs all have the right spec for new UC software, and that you’ve got the right bandwidth and quality of service to support your network
  4. Make the right architecture choices – are you going to go for a distributed or a centralised architecture – many UC technology solutions rely on real time protocols and that can place serious demands on your network
  5. Assess your security requirements – SOA is a great integration approach, but when applications are asked to integrate in ways that they never have before then it raises serious security issues that need to be addressed right from the start. You’ve got to use all of your existing security functionality, and also make sure you’ve got the same standards in place for remote users such as home-working agents or mobile experts
  6. Find ways to maximise enterprise integration – today the enterprise is the contact centre, it’s important to explore every opportunity to connect your UC-enabled contact centre with all the other parts of the business that feature customer touch-points
  7. Ensure that you’ve got enterprise grade project management driving your UC implementation – UC programmes are wide-ranging and can impact many different parts of the organisation. It’s essential to use a serious project management methodology such as Prince 2 to make sure that you can take advantage of all the processes, tools, templates and technologies that can help. You’ve also got to take any ISO standards or ITIL initiatives into consideration – done wrong, a Unified Communications programme can easily derail your hard-earned certifications
  8. Don’t overlook your support infrastructure – the long term success of any Unified Communications project depends on its stability going forward. There are no short cuts here, so insist on contact centre SLAs, think about whether you need 24x7 support, make sure you’ve got third level support in place, and take advantage of some of the latest software-based remote management and reporting capabilities.

Even though UC solutions such as Cisco’s UCCE Advanced Technology can be challenging to implement well, there’s increasing evidence that the operational business benefits and productivity savings that result from correctly configured UC programmes within the customer service environment can deliver a compelling ROI. Clearly the UC issues that we’ve highlighted above are important to get right, but they will also help to ensure that organisations have a high quality communications infrastructure in place that is both secure and reliable, but also flexible enough to support future innovations for years to come.

Next Steps
To help organisations address these opportunities – and to support the growing number of specialist Cisco channel partners now adding such Cisco Advanced Technology based propositions to their solutions portfolios, Intact Integrated Services operates a specialist IPCC practice offering all the expertise and skills needed to support all aspects of a UCCE solution. Our services range from initial ITIL-based project and services management, through initial design and SOA application integration to the provision of a major Unified Communications solution.

All our UCCE white label services are backed by Intact’s proven ITIL-based project and services delivery model, and we’re unusual in that we bring together all the key UCCE components needed for a successful implementation, including a team with over 35 years’ of specialist IPCC expertise, the UK’s most comprehensive UCCE test lab facilities, and a proven track record in building business solutions based on Cisco’s most advanced technologies.

Intact Integrated Services is an independent provider of project, support and managed services solutions to the ICT industry. Our service capability covers LAN/WAN infrastructures, IP communications, wireless and security, as well as physical infrastructure deployment, application development and support.





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