Unified Communications: Lifeblood of the Contact Center

In a new study exploring unified communications in the contact center, Aberdeen Group examines the business reasons for adoption of unified communications, the relationship between unified communications and customer satisfaction, customer retention and year-over-year change in customer satisfaction, and how Best-in-Class usage of unified communications have provided business, business process benefits and operational efficiencies.

Unified communications must revolve around the needs of the business -- finding the right business process to UC-enable, and finding the right return on investment for the right departments. A small number -- 23% -- have some form of unified communications implemented but an astounding 50% of customers surveyed are or will be evaluating unified communications in the next eighteen months.

The report demonstrates a direct correlation between implementation of unified communications by Best-in-Class customers and the performance in three critical customer-facing performance measures: customer satisfaction, customer retention and year-over-year change in customer satisfaction.

End-user customer feedback has indicated that customers have already invested millions in existing telephony and VoIP technologies to support the contact center, and intelligent unified communications investment needs to complement and extend this existing investment. These same customers also demonstrate the high level of confusion as to exactly what unified communications is and what each of the software vendors label their collection of technologies.

The required actions for companies seeking to gain the most benefit from their implementation of unified communications include a commitment to identify the right business processes to UC-enable, implement policies and procedures designed to maximize effectiveness and efficiency of these cross-departmental business processes, establish a contact center unified communications strategy and approach, and implement metrics to monitor and measure contact center performance.

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