The Contact Center: The Logical Starting Point for Every UC Strategy

Your contact center can benefit from UC just as much, if not more than, the other departments across your enterprise. Your agents are on the frontline communicating directly with customers but, for 10.3 percent of the calls handled by your contact center, your agents also serve as conduits between your customers and subject matter experts across your enterprise. Incorporating your contact center as part of your company’s overall UC strategy can help you drastically increase your agents’ efficiency. It can reduce the amount of time agents spend contacting knowledge workers for answers to customer inquiries, and potentially decrease the number of interactions your customers require to have their inquiries resolved. Instead of frantically running down a call list to reach someone with the technical expertise to answer a specific customer question, UC empowers your agents to instantly check the availability of a knowledge worker and quickly get their input with a few keystrokes and the click of a mouse. For more complex customer issues, UC makes the call conferencing process faster and simpler. Agents may no longer have to call the knowledge worker, explain the customer’s situation, conference the customer into the call and introduce the customer before they can finally transfer the call. Rather, they could potentially transfer detailed notes about the issue at-hand to the knowledge worker along with the call, shortening the transfer process and preventing anyone from having to repeat information.

UC brings a number of benefits to contact centers, resulting in happier, more productive agents, and reducing call handling times and associated costs. But equally or perhaps even more importantly, is the value that UC delivers to your customers. Increasing first call resolution and decreasing the amount of time your customers spend on hold greatly impacts customer satisfaction. The more satisfied your customers, the more follow-on business they will conduct with your company and the more often they will refer your company to their friends, family and colleagues. Translation: higher customer satisfaction means greater top-line revenue growth.