PROFILEUC: what it means for you, your staff and your customers
Unified communications (UC) has yet to realise its full potential in call centres, says Ian Jacobs, senior analyst at Ovum. In an exclusive report, he examines the benefits and the challenges
UNIFIED communications (UC) has been one of the most talked-about concepts in business in recent years. From a technology point of view, however, it has suffered something of an identity crisis. There has been little agreement -- among consumers or manufacturers -- about what actually constitutes UC. Varying definitions, and its inherently amorphous nature, have diluted the UC “brand”.
The doldrums of the economy posed an even more pressing problem. Many of the highly-touted technologies could only offer soft benefits at a time when firms were demanding a clear RoI for every penny spent.
UC defined At its most basic, UC refers to the ability to manage all communications, whether voice, email, fax or instant messaging, through a single interface. Some of the technologies that fall under the UC heading include an integrated personal directory, IP softphones, click-to-call, presence engines and indicators, unified messaging, web (video and audio) conferencing and twinning to allow a single number for all devices.
The value of IP transformation has been rising The value that companies derive from their transition to IP improves as those technologies become more high value. It was only once IP telephony was in place and proving successful that call centres began to experiment with the technology.
IP endpoints (primarily IP phones, but also softphones and USB headsets) began to spread into call centres. The primary driver was cost reduction; the IP endpoints cut the equipment and infrastructure overhead. The value of IP to the company did, however, increase in the case of true IP endpoints which reduced or eliminated the need for complex and expensive CTI projects. This cut costs while also providing agents with better information, reduced key metrics like average handle time and, theoretically, provided a richer and more satisfying customer experience.
Call centres and businesses have, however, started to explore some truly higher-value benefits of IP: virtualisation of disparate in-house call centres into single organisations with unified administration and a virtual queue that could incorporate numerous agent pools; work-at-home agent models; improved scalability; expanded reporting capabilities and easier integration of multichannel interactions into a customer interaction organisation.
Additionally, presence engines and business-wise UC solutions offer the promise of a single unified business (including the call centre, branches, and back office). To achieve these high-value business benefits, enterprises continue to need business and process transformation services; companies that add these capabilities in house can differentiate themselves over the next few years. It is this transformation to IP-centric unified enterprises that facilitates routing 2.0 technologies.
Integration is key By integrating the business and the call centre, the value and RoI of UC becomes clearer. Call centre agents are accustomed to the notion of presence since it is inherent in call centre management and routing applications. When combined with technologies such as chat, it allows agents to seek help with tough service issues from managers, coaches and others inside the call centre. But agents often face situations where a request can only easily be resolved with the help of experts.
It is in these situations that some core UC technologies can provide rock-solid RoI. Presence engines are often the most visible UC technology and UC clients allow users to indicate their presence information. Depending on the processes dictated by the call centre and the business, the agent can then call, instant message or email that expert for assistance with difficult requests. The agent can also set up a conference call with the expert, transfer the call to them, or simply get information and solve the caller’s issue.
Ideal scenario Ideally, this process of using UC to pull workers into customer service situations helps solve callers’ issues in a single call. If UC helps to drive up first call resolution (FCR) has become an increasingly important metric, one heavily used as a proxy measure for how effective a call centre is at doing its job. If UC helps drive up these rates, then the RoI fairly easy to prove.
The value from this increase in FCR may even be more important than it seems at first: since customers now use numerous self-service channels to resolve their own issues, calls to call centres tend to be more complex and of higher value. Furthermore, FCR has a direct correlation to reduced call volumes; if a problem is solved at the first attempt, the customer has no reason to call back.
Improved FCR also has attendant, less tangible benefits.
Customer satisfaction with a company presumably rises when it can quickly and efficiently provide effective customer service. Higher customer satisfaction should lead to higher customer retention -- a key goal for most companies in a fragile economic environment.
Examples of this UC-based approach include agents at a retail bank’s call centre connecting customers interested in taking out a second mortgage to the most appropriate expert. It could also include an agent of a manufacturing company simply pinging someone in the shipping department to get the up-to-the-second status on a part being shipped to a customer. In some cases, routing 2.0 technologies would allow agents to contact workers in branch offices or in retail locations.
Rules of engagement While many companies allow, or even foster, ad hoc connections with call centres, more formalised products and processes allow for easier management and greater visibility into the service process. Numerous call centre technology vendors have created specific UC-based products to allow agents to identify and contact the best resource for assisting with specific calls.
But, despite the fact that RoI is theoretically easier to achieve with these solutions than with general UC, these products still face many challenges. The biggest is how, from a process perspective, to make these experts part of a customer-facing organisation. They workers need to be compensated or rewarded for their work, or other forms of incentives need to be offered to change the mindset from “credit controller” to “customer-facing employee.”
Processes must also be established to ensure that contacts are allocated fairly among the experts to avoid overloading any single agent. This problem can be exacerbated for particularly helpful or friendly experts, since agents will understandably try to contact that same expert any time an issue comes up. Additionally, enterprises must create the means for knowledge workers’ skills to be inventoried and rated in much the same manner as call centre agents. This could be as simple as a self-rating system, or could be a more complex evaluation process.
The experts must also be allowed to set some boundaries, such as what contact channels they prefer and when they can be contacted. For example, to more fairly distribute contacts, skills-based routing can be applied to connect agents with Expert A, but only in the morning. Expert B could be contacted on Mondays and Thursday afternoons, and so on. The flipside is that agents must also be trained on guidelines that dictate which experts they can contact under which conditions. In essence, companies need to set up collaboration rules of engagement.
Conclusion The technology that call centres choose will play a fundamental role in the success of a customer service strategy in coming years as the customer experience becomes more of a differentiator in rapidly commoditised market segments brought about by accelerated globalisation.
To remain competitive, companies must find a balance of technologies and processes to reinforce the relationship with the customer and provide superior levels of care, with services personalised for each type of customer and their specific needs across different channels.
Deploying UC will require new business processes which companies must align with call centre, knowledge workers and back-office departments. These processes must be well thought out and implemented in stages to avoid any disruption to existing customer service delivery.
PROFILE
Ian Jacobs is a senior analyst on Ovum’s customer interaction technologies team, covering call centre markets and technologies and has written many research studies on these subjects. Before joining Ovum, he held several senior-level analyst positions in the contact centre and CRM areas. Mr Jacobs has more than 15 years’ experience as a marketer, journalist and analyst in the enterprise software market.
This article is based on Ovum’s report, Routing 2.0: CEBP and BPR Beyond the Contact Center, written by Mr Jacobs. Additional commentary has been provided by Daniel Hong, lead analyst at Ovum. For more information, go to www.ovum.com