As I was preparing my slides for a webinar on March 11 with Aspect entitled, “UC and the Contact Center - Why Now?” I started thinking – why now, indeed? When we talk about UC and the contact center, most of us think about expanding some of the tools we’ve had in the contact center out to the enterprise, as well as enabling “expert agents.” Expert agents are knowledge agents or subject matter experts outside of the contact center, which interact either directly with customers or with the contact center agents to provide the information needed to answer the customer’s question or resolve their issue, without the customer having to call back multiple times, thus resulting in First Contact Resolution.

I’ve been writing about expanding the contact center to the enterprise and using expert agents since the late 1990’s. In fact, I gave a presentation at a Call Center conference in 1998 entitled, “The Call Center Without Walls.” I also wrote an article about this for CTI Magazine (yes, Harry Newton’s magazine) and introduced the terms “casual contact center” and “casual” agents – otherwise known as informal contact center and informal agents. Back in the 1990’s we were talking about using computer telephony integration (CTI) to extend the contact center to the enterprise, and in the early-mid 2000’s IP telephony and IP PBXs came into the picture and made this scenario even more likely. The idea of expert agents and casual or informal contact centers is a great idea, but implementation was limited due to the technology, and more importantly, management and personnel issues. The overriding concern was how to justify knowledge workers who have important jobs and responsibilities taking time from their day, to assist contact center agents and customers.

Here we are in 2009, and we’re still talking about extending the contact center to the enterprise and making customer service the responsibility of the enterprise, not just the contact center. Why do I think it will finally happen now?

Many people think of unified communications as being the evolution of CTI, and in some ways I agree. While CTI was a first step in unifying computers and telephony, UC goes further by integrating computers, telephony, communications, collaboration, mobility, applications, business processes, and more. And UC provides presence capabilities. Contact centers have been using presence status for years; agent state is simply another term for presence. Contact center agents also have ways of chatting or interacting with their supervisors. But presence and chat capabilities weren’t available to knowledge workers outside of the contact center as they are now.

Between the predominance of IP telephony, IP networks, and unified communications tools (especially presence, IM, and collaboration) technology barriers no longer exist. While technology barriers have been resolved, personnel and management issues haven’t gone away.  Companies will have to provide incentives to their knowledge workers for cooperating with contact center agents, and for taking the time to provide information to agents and/or customers. Companies will also have to include some of the contact center technologies throughout the enterprise in order to track, manage, and record customer interactions involving knowledge workers. Vendors should make it easy for enterprises to do the integration.

There are still some obstacles to overcome, but vendors are providing enterprises with new tools and capabilities to meet the challenges. And there are now case studies and examples of companies that are tying in the contact center and unified communications, with more on the way. As companies find ways to be more competitive in these challenging economic times, customer service and customer retention will play an even more important role, Tying in unified communications and the contact center is one way to set your company apart while making your customers happy and loyal – now.