Blog
Date: 21 June 2009 Author: Bob Dalton, CEOManagement Objective: Making sure that your organisation can provide a more consistent customer contact approach
If you spend any length of time researching customer service in the UK, you could easily convince yourself that, as a nation of consumers, we’re always unhappy. Do a quick Google search, and the headlines tell the story: ‘UK customers are unhappy with Indian call centres’, ‘half of UK consumers are unhappy with their Internet provider’, ‘one in three are unhappy with their bank’, ‘four million broadband customers are unhappy with their service’, and apparently ‘eight million Britons are unhappy with their mobile providers’.
But are customers really this unhappy, or is it more that when they come into contact with customer service operations they’re just not consistently getting the kind of joined-up service they have come to expect? What’s increasingly clear is that – for many organisations – the IT and telephony within call centres just aren’t communicating; and secondly that companies need to invest more in the joined-up technologies that can help support a more satisfactory level of customer service.
The latest best practice standalone contact centre technology solutions can certainly help to improve elements of the customer experience. However the majority of organisations are still operating around a traditional voice telephony infrastructure, and 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 why an increasing number of businesses are considering how a more consistent customer contact approach based on Unified Communications (UC) can play an important role as they evolve to meet changing customer needs. Studies have shown that those businesses that have implemented a UC-based infrastructure can save over half an hour a day simply by interacting with their colleagues more effectively. The figure goes up when UC-enabled time savings for typical mobile professionals are considered.
While obviously no two contact centre operations are the same, it’s clear that the ability to streamline interactions and improve connectivity will become increasingly important. Even more so when you consider how that nature of interactions in today’s contact centres is changing. One recent research programme showed that over ten percent of daily customer relations now require assistance from further experts located 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 suggests that there are significant optimisation benefits to be realised in terms of talk time, individual agent productivity and first call resolution performance. This also opens up real potential for organisations to unlock additional bottom line value from their contact centre operations.
Enabling an improved customer service environment:
When deployed in the contact centre, the latest UC techniques can provide a powerful platform for enabling such an improved customer service environment. The idea of ‘presence’ is a key part of UC thinking, and has the potential to remodel the traditional customer contact structure. Instead of agents scanning internal contact lists to find someone they know with the technical expertise to answer a specific customer query, UC techniques will allow those same agents to assess the availability of domain experts in real time, and then find the answers and contacts they need using just a few keystrokes and mouse clicks.
UC techniques can also be used within the contact centre, with agents able to connect with either individual experts or particular skill groups using techniques such as instant messaging or conference calls. A UC approach also encourages integration with mobile or remote staff or experts who can operate a one-number strategy to make them accessible on any device they’re using – irrespective of location.
Unifying incoming communications:
Sustaining higher levels of customer satisfaction also depends on how informed agents are about previous customer interactions and transactions. Today’s consumers may interact with an organisation by phone, by e-mail, via the web or using an SMS text, and they – quite reasonably – expect that organisation to create and maintain a single view of all their different interactions. Unifying incoming communications means that advanced routing strategies can be applied to all messages, which can then be consistently handled by an agent – perhaps even the same agent that dealt with that customer last time or who they know to be expert in their own concerns. With UC in a contact centre, it’s easier for organisations to create a consolidated record of interactions, and with newer channels such as video, businesses can enhance the contact and offer even greater personalisation of the customer experience.
When Aberdeen Group surveyed the potential benefits that SMB organisations might achieve by deploying a UC approach to support their contact centre operations, the Top Three positives most regularly suggested by respondents were simplified customer interactions, the increased availability of contact centre resources, and being able to respond more effectively to customer enquiries. Other benefits listed included improved team collaboration and reduced costs through improved processes, shorter calls and improvements in first call resolution.
We recognise that some of the latest UC technologies have enormous potential, however they also bring with them considerable risks in terms of its complexity – both for the user organisation and for their implementation partner. Consider Cisco’s Unified Contact Centre Enterprise (UCCE) technology, for example. UCCE is a very powerful UC approach that allows organisations to seamlessly integrate their inbound and outbound voice communications with Internet applications such as real-time chat, Web collaboration and e-mail. Because it’s underpinned by Unified Communications, it has the potential to dramatically improve the customer experience – through agents being able to support interactions across multiple channels, sharing contacts to the most appropriate resources anywhere within the extended business, or by managing interactions based on almost any customer attribute.
UCCE has enormous potential, but it’s also an Advanced Technology and for many organisations there are considerable risks in taking on such potentially complex projects. Successful implementations of solutions such as UCCE are always about far more than just the technology, particularly with UCCE’s service oriented architecture approach encouraging the integration of previously disparate contact centre processes. That’s why it’s so important for organisations to work with specialist UC partners with all the expertise and skills needed to support all aspects of a major UC solution.
Both IT management and their contact centre counterparts need to understand the potential people, process and technology demands of major UC projects, 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 projects, 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 a success of such major projects. However, just because UC solutions such as UCCE can be challenging and complex 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.
Successful UC implementations depend on essential IT disciplines such as making the right architecture choices, a careful assessment of your security requirements, effective enterprise applications integration, as well as effective IT support. These issues are important to get right, and will also help to ensure that organisations have a high quality communications infrastructure in place that is not just 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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