7 Ways Unified Communications Improves Contact Centres
Unified Communications (UC) plays a vital role in the development of a modern day contact centre, supporting staff training and collaboration, driving remote working practices, ultimately helping improve customer satisfaction and retention. The main improvements contact centres have experienced from adopting UC include:
1. Supporting remote working
For many years businesses have offered staff the option to work from home and now contact centres are adopting such practices. However, the problem is cultivating an atmosphere of trust and collaboration between remote workers and those in the contact centre. UC solves this with ‘presence information’, which enables staff to quickly and easily inform each other of their status e.g. ‘on a call’ or ‘away’. This means employees in the office can feel assured that remote workers are actively working and staff at home can easily access colleagues should they need help resolving an issue.
2. Managing call resolution
Usually calls are passed on to experts outside of the contact centre. This means, even if the call is resolved, the call resolution is not logged on the CRM system because the employee outside the contact centre does not have access. Unified Communications solves this with ‘skills-based presence’, which is used to conference experts into calls, so the contact centre can manage the process and retain control from call answer to resolution. Ideal for contact centres that are performance measured on first call resolution rate!
3. Managing remote workers
Presence enables managers and colleagues to place calls directly through the office communications system and by encrypting Internet connections remote costs are also minimised. Additionally managers can access extensive reporting options to monitor and measure the performance of all staff, regardless of location. Interactions can also be tracked from start to finish and data analysed in detail.
4. Viewing employee availability
As we all know being passed between agents is sometimes a necessary annoyance for anyone calling a customer service team. However, a UC environment can assist agents by flagging the availability of colleagues and providing immediate access to the right information from colleagues via applications such as instant messaging.
5. Multi-channel communication
Providing multiple channels of communication gives customers the option to select their preferred method of communication. With UC businesses can manage and control every channel of communication the same way. This ensures customer service is consistent regardless of the method of communication used.
6. Cheaper maintenance costs
Adopting UC applications can reduce maintenance costs by up to 20% and significant cost savings can be made through system consolidation by unifying customer contact channels.
7. Business continuity
UC is essential for business continuity for when disaster strikes e.g. poor weather conditions, public transport strikes or large public events. Unified Communications enables employees to access other departments and work from home just as they would from their desk in the office. Therefore, the customer service operation is uninterrupted and employee absenteeism is significantly reduced.
