Unified Communication in the Contact Center: New Technology and a New Culture

| Apr 4, 2008 | Contact Center Solutions | Advisory Report

| Analyst: Michael Barbagallo

Michael Barbagallo Senior Analyst, Contact Center Solutions

Summary

Contact center agents have always needed additional information from experts and have developed creative ways of gathering that information. Unified communications hold great promise in improving agents’ access to necessary knowledge in the heads of experts both inside and outside the confines of the contact center. Unified communications are among the tools that contact center operators are employing to address this issue. However, unified communications need to go beyond simply being able to see when an expert is available. The unified communications solution must guarantee access to experts and at the same time safeguard experts’ time. Furthermore, unified communications in the contact center go beyond simply implementing new technology. It requires vendors and their contact center solution customers create new corporate cultural paradigms.

Current Analysis Perspective

From the earliest days of contact centers operations, there have been incidents where agents have needed more or specific information or they needed clarification to respond effectively to a customer inquiry or resolve a customer’s issue. Traditionally, this required escalating the call. Escalation resulted in the agent seeking the required information from knowledge experts either within (in the case of expert agent) or very likely outside (in the case of, for example, billing specialists, software developers, hardware engineers, policy specialists, building inspectors, and insurance claims professionals) the contact center.

Contact center operators and agents devised a dizzying array of creative methods, both official and unofficial, to access expert information. There were manuals and knowledge bases created by experts, ticket escalation to experts through the CRM system, e-mail and instant messages to friends who could act as subject matter experts, and, in some cases, “sneaker-net” (by which the agent simply walked over to the expert’s office). Some far-thinking enterprises created second and third-tier helpdesks and assist lines staffed by the experts themselves. This let the agent call into the assist line and speak directly with an expert whose job included assisting the contact center. However, agents were very often left to their own devices to find solutions to their expert knowledge problems. Specialists, at best, found the questions from agents a nuisance. At worst, they ignored queries sent to them from the contact center.

In parallel to the evolution and maturity of these time-tested, but not always effective, escalation methods, the number and variety of means of communications within the enterprise also increased. Voice, desktop video conferencing, e-mail, instant messaging, chat, and a variety of conferencing technologies have become more readily available than ever before. In addition, unified communications solutions are helping make many of these various communication methods available from a single user interface. The layering of end user-defined rules over these communications channels lets users determine who is able to reach them, how, and when.

UC has made escalation simpler for agents and, at the same time, it provides experts and specialists more control over when and, more importantly, if they can be contacted. However, when it comes to leveraging unified communications to put agents in touch with knowledge workers outside the contact center, many companies are not ready to progress beyond the status quo. In some centers, there exist corporate cultural issues that vendors, management, agents, and experts must address. First, many companies consider the contact center separate from the rest of the company. It is a buffer, so to speak, between regular employees and customers. Moreover, companies provide extensive training to contact center agents on how to interact with customers. This helps agents provide the best face to the customer. Outside experts typically receive no such training. Putting customers in direct contact with them could create a perceived threat to the corporate image and goodwill if the experts are not as responsive to customer needs as a well-trained agent should be. Furthermore, contact center managers tend to be uneasy when releasing calls to anyone outside the contact center, because they cannot measure the results. As for the expert agents, they tend not to think of themselves as such. They consider themselves as software developers, building inspectors, insurance claim specialists, etc. They have responsibilities of their own and often consider calls from the contact center a nuisance. They may also believe that it is not their job to speak with customers, but the job of the contact center agent; therefore, they resent doing their own job and the agent’s job. Unified communications are making it easier for agents to gather information from outside sources. Agents can add expert agents to their instant messaging buddy lists, monitor expert agent availability via presence status icons, and easily turn an instant messaging session into a voice call. However, unified communications do little to change the basic conflict between the agents and experts. In fact, UC solutions may exacerbate the issue.

To address these cultural issues, the deployment of unified communications software in the contact center needs to be accompanied by policies that clearly delineate the responsibilities of expert agents, how they interact with customers, and how accessible they are to agents. This is to say, unified communications in the contact center need to provide more than simple access to outside experts. Expert agents should be incorporated into a contact center-like structure where they have the ability to change presence and availability information so they are reached when and how they prefer, while agents should be provided tools that let them easily identify alternate agents if a primary is unavailable. The unified communications software should be able to pass calls from the contact center to the experts in the same way as calls are passed to contact center agents. Unified communications software, when deployed in contact center environments, should also include forecasting and scheduling tools for the expert agents. At the same time, contact center managers must be able to monitor and measure all calls being passed to the expert via the unified communications software.

Unified communications are not the sort of technology that contact center customers can simply buy, install, and immediately start yielding benefits. Since UC can be a disruptive technology to well-established working relationships, great care must be taken to change the basic human-to-human interactions to make the solution work. Unified communications solution developers must ensure their strategy includes training and planning services that help contact center customers implement operational changes that will lead to a clear-cut ROI. Unified communications vendors need to assist customers in creating a more collaborative culture, one that makes a closer-knit team of agents and expert agents. Although it is the contact center operator’s ultimate responsibility for change in corporate culture, the vendor can provide assistance in the form of consulting, training development, best practices, success cases, and support.

As stated above, it is ultimately the customer’s responsibility to ensure the unified solution is used and accepted in a way that benefits agents, experts, and customers; improves communications with experts; and complements existing agent monitoring and knowledge management objectives. The company must create incentives for the expert agent to respond to agent requests. Companies should also ensure that expert agents do not receive requests from the contact center when they are unavailable, and agents should not to use unified communications software as a means of abusing their greater access to expert agents. In addition, both expert agents and contact center agents need to be part of their organization’s unified communications implementation plan from the first meeting to the final implementation. Training and orientation programs should include a complete presentation of the hows and whys of the software. Finally, the company must monitor the usage of the unified communications solution by both contact center and expert agents, provide addition training, reward successes, and adjust policies and procedures, to ensure the UC solution is an enabling technology and not a roadblock to improved customer service.

Implementing a unified communications strategy and solution goes beyond installing a presence application and training the users. In many cases, it involves a paradigm shift in the way employees communicate. Through the years, agents have developed ways of gathering the information needed to do their jobs and they will continue to do so. Unified communications can assist them in their quest. At the same time, providing a solution geared to contact centers that guards the precious and expensive time of the experts should provide a win-win for the agent, expert, company, and, most of all, customers.

Recommended End User / Customer Actions

• Enterprises in the market for new communications systems and software should formulate a comprehensive plan detailing and determining high-priority business and communications issues. They should then determine if the present state of the technology allows them to accomplish their immediate goals. They should not, by contrast, implement unified communications technology first and then try to use it to solve business problems. In other words, fit the technology to the business problem, not the business problem to the technology.

• Enterprises in the market for unified communications systems for their contact centers should consider corporate culture with regards to the contact center. They should begin creating a collaborative environment between the experts and the contact center agents. Policies on expert accessibility should be established with input from experts and contact center agents before the system is used.

• Enterprises thinking of installing a unified communication solution should look for a complete system. This solution should not only improve the accessibility and collaboration between the experts and the contact center agents, but also improve contact center performance through the forecasting and scheduling of experts’ time.

• Enterprises should create incentives that reward employees contributing to a more collaborative culture. In addition, both expert agents and contact center agents should to be part of the unified communications development plan from the first meeting to its final implementation.

CLIENTS ONLY

Recommended Vendor Actions

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