Go BackHow do you unlock the business benefits from a major Unified Communications project within your customer service environment?
by Bob Dalton, Managing Director, Intact IS (Integrated Services) Ltd
There's been a lot written already about Unified Communications - how it enables organisations to seamlessly integrate their inbound and outbound voice applications with Internet applications such as real-time chat, Web collaboration, and e-mail, and how it can help agents to support multiple interactions simultaneously regardless of which communications channel the customer has chosen - however, it's becoming increasingly clear that with such potentially powerful solutions, simply mastering the technology is only the first step in what can be a complex journey towards benefits realisation.
While your IT management might understand how the intricate details of different UC implementation components - such as the underlying hardware architecture, networking, messaging infrastructure and directories, SOA-enabled enterprise integration, security and contact centre software - all need to interoperate correctly, technology itself won't ensure that your operations can deliver the required levels of performance.
Changing how today's customer service organisations operate
UC-enabled solutions have the potential to dramatically change how today's customer service organisations structure themselves and operate. The ability to deliver each contact to the most appropriate resource anywhere in the enterprise, the precise segmentation of customers, and the active monitoring of resource availability effectively provide businesses with the ability to manage customer interactions based on almost any contact attribute. However, these are more than just technology developments as they introduce deep business process interaction changes at both the person-to-person and the process-to-person levels.
Businesses need to come to terms with the broader process implications of multimedia interactions routing through their organisations, and the combinations won't always be what they expect. Because UC enables the convergence of different channels of communications, there's every likelihood that internal expert resources will need to interact with e-mails and self-service transactions, rather than just voice calls, and that - in turn - a call into an organisation might result in an automated service reply or an expert IM or e-mail response. These new kind of cross-channel interactions present few technical challenges, however the underlying business process shifts may require much more thinking.
Such combinations open up real possibilities, providing end users with much more flexibility and ease-of-use, while customer service organisations can potentially take advantage of the operational efficiencies that can result from cross-business communications. It's these developments that help evolve UC from being just a technology challenge to a broader business improvement initiative that can open up new competitive strategies as well as enhanced operational performance and productivity.
Delivering enterprise-class UC implementations
Over the last few months our consultancy team at Intact has been busy working with Cisco and its partners, helping them to design, build and implement next generation multi-channel customer-facing solutions based around Cisco's innovative Unified Contact Centre Enterprise (UCCE) advanced technology solution.
When we talk to organisations that are at the start of their UC journey, we always stress the importance of consultative professional services and advanced project management in successfully delivering enterprise-class UC implementations. Given the complex nature of Advanced Technology solutions such as Unified Communications, Security, Datacentre Services and Network and Application Performance Management, we decided that we needed to be able to provide our customers with the highest standard of solutions delivery. That's why we took the decision to invest a significant amount of our own time and resources on securing our own ISO 9001 Quality Management, ITIL-based IT Service Management, Business Continuity and ISO 14001 Environmental Management Systems certification. We knew we needed this level of infrastructure to support our own expanding infrastructure, but we also wanted to have the right processes in place so that we could offer our customers the support they needed in key areas such as business process definition, gap analysis and in-depth project management.
We've also found that complex UC implementations are ideally supported by ITIL, the set of best practice concepts and techniques that help address the effective management of IT infrastructures, service delivery and service support. Originally a public sector initiative, ITIL has been successfully adopted by the corporate sector, and can prove a powerful methodology for organisations needing a structured services approach for their broader UC projects. In addition to specific UC technology services such as initial project design, directory development, security and SOA application integration, we're now providing customers with a range of additional consultative professional services including business consulting, project modelling, customer experience strategy and business performance measurement, that can help our channel partners and their customers optimise UC performance and benefits realisation.
Today it's becoming clear that, despite its complexity, UC-enabled solution have the potential to deliver significant performance improvements, particularly as the contact centre extends across the enterprise and incorporates more and more customer touch points. The right technology is an excellent starting point, but organisations also need to ensure that they have enterprise-grade project management in place to drive their UC implementations, as well right support infrastructure and SLAs to ensure the 24x7 operation of what are increasingly business-critical operations. As ever with major technology projects, the winning UC implementations will be the ones that find the right balance between process and project skills, effective resourcing and making the smart technology choices.
