Unified communications – keeping the customer in the equation 
Steven Tan
03/04/2008

Everyone is talking about unified communications. But, how this is defined and why companies are considering implementing it varies from enterprise to enterprise. Many unified communications strategies only focus on using applications such as voice integration and collaboration to improve employee productivity.

In fact, unified communications can be used for much more than this – to take full advantage of such systems, enterprises should be focusing on communications and enabling customer facing processes such as services, collections and sales.
This will ensure that they are utilising all the advantages and benefits provided by unified communications.

What is unified communications?

Before a business or organisation makes the decision to adopt a unified communications strategy, it would be useful to have a common understanding of what the term actually means. According to a Gartner report dated August 2007, “Unified communications offer the ability to significantly improve how individuals, groups and companies interact and perform.”

Unified communications consists of two distinct groups – communication applications and collaboration applications. The former comprises of business telephony, mobile devices, audio and video, unified messaging and desktop call control. The latter is made up of email, calendars, IM and presence, web conferencing and directory integration. Put bluntly, it offers a method to integrate communication functions directly with business applications – providing real-time and near real-time communications.

One example of how such a system has been implemented successfully is within contact centres. In recent times, contact centres have successfully developed the disciplines that enterprises can apply to their unified communications strategy in order to ensure that the customer is part of the equation.

How can unified communications positively impact on a business?

Unified communications is seen as having the potential to address perennial issues for all types of organisations, from multi-national corporations to single site, small businesses. A common problem companies of all sizes face is that of productivity. Companies are constantly being challenged to do more with less and to maximise every resource.

Through unified communications, individual users can save time by accessing both people and information more flexibly and faster through real-time instant messaging, multi-party calls and video conferencing.

By improving communications both within and across businesses united in a common goal to address customer requirements, organisations can directly impact their bottom line, resulting in the elusive ideal customer experience. This can be done by:

- Integrating customer information gathered across an entire enterprise, providing a much higher level of customer service.
- Being able to address high-value sales or service interactions straight away with the relevant expertise and by the most appropriate member of staff based on availability.

Through unified communications, businesses can improve productivity, streamline processes and deliver the ideal customer experience.

A logical starting point: the contact centre

Contact centres by definition are at the heart of unified communications. They embody the need for multiple communications methods with the notion of communications-enabled business processes and were created to address a specific set of customer-facing business processes.

Increasingly, particularly since the advent of standards-based communications protocols like IP and SIP, contact centres are using more of the technologies being broadly categorised as unified communications, such as email, IM and calendars. Contact centres already have the experience that enterprise can draw upon. It is logical to extend the lessons learnt by the contact centre industry to enterprise.

Companies are currently exploring how capabilities such as presence can make an impact as part of a unified communications strategy. This is something that contact centres are already using on a daily basis. Every agent, every day, logs in and establishes that they are ready to take calls by communicating their presence. They are letting the systems know, whether it’s a dialler or an automatic call distributor (ACD) that they are available and that they’re ready. So whilst the idea of presence is not new to the contact centre, it is new to the enterprise.

So essentially, the contact centre provides the discipline for unified communications since it has already defined the processes required to utilise all workers from across the enterprise. These could be people who are on the road a lot, work from home or are based in an office - unified communications is a way to extend customer contact to these workers. The challenge lies with bringing the discipline honed in the contact centre to a larger portion of the business.

Through unified communications, customer transactions can become a collaboration between the contact centre and the rest of the enterprise, and by using the tools already available, the contact centre can manage the entire interaction.

How can contact centre technology be applied within the broader context of unified communications?

- Call routing software can determine if a customer interaction should be handled via chat, email or requires a live assisted call – using various criteria, such as lifetime value of the customer.
- The contact centre can provide the tools to schedule knowledge workers, or determine availability to support customer interactions using rich presence, integrated with calendaring.
- Interactions between workers and agents can be monitored, enabling a significant improvement in customer service.

What should be clear now is that unified communications is not a thing, provided by a single vendor. Instead, unified communications is a way of approaching how communications capabilities can help streamline processes to achieve business goals. The concept relies on bridges being built among many types of enterprise applications and communications capabilities.

A single vendor can not provide all the components necessary to help a company successfully execute a unified communications strategy. There are, however, attributes that companies can look for, and in fact, should demand in their technology partners that will ease the creation of a successful unified communications plan. In order to allow an enterprise to create unified communications solutions designed to work with its own set of applications and technologies, adherence to open standards is key.

First steps towards building a unified communications strategy

As unified communications is a way of thinking about how to bring about positive change for your business, it is obviously not about sending out a request for proposal and selecting the least cost supplier; instead, organisations need to take the factors below into account in order to deploy a strategy that will deliver measurable results.

- Objectively assess your business challenges
- Evaluate how the features and benefits that unified communications can bring can help deliver on your goals
- Develop a strategy that starts with the customer and adds other company organisations based on the measurable contribution that can be made by including them in the customer communication chain and other business partners
- Determine which contact centre processes and discipline could effectively be extended to improve the overall customer experience
- Ensure that the contact centre technology partner that you work with has open standards as a core value
- Bring in complimentary technologies and partners as needed to ensure your success

By considering all of the above when starting to develop unified communication strategies, companies can ensure the best results for their business, including improving agent productivity, increasing customer satisfaction and ultimately improving the top and bottom lines. But, the biggest key is always keeping customers at the core of the strategy and applying established contact centre technologies, processes and disciplines to ensure best results.

- Steven Tan is Regional Marketing Director for the Asia Pacific and Middle East regions at Aspect Software.

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