by John Desmond

The customer calls into the contact center on the phone. The agent is being measured today on successful first-contact resolution — or “one and done,” as some call it — as opposed to being measured on time spent on the call or number of calls in an hour and in a day.

Today the agent may be called the “expert agent” because he or she may have access to the expertise at the firm via text or Instant Messaging (IM). The expertise may have “presence” in the organization, visible to the agent taking the customer’s call. The call can be escalated, if necessary, to the correct level of expertise. The customer expecting immediate answers and results can be satisfied.

“Some of the new unified communications capabilities, such as presence, are making this possible,” says Blair Pleasant, principal of COMMfusion LLC and a cofounder of UCStrategies.com.

Instead of being a centralized silo, the contact center for some firms is moving toward being a powerful center of integration. The customer relationship now has the potential to tap into the expertise within the company on a collaborative basis in real time. If a higher-level expert is present, the expert can be engaged by instant messaging or a shared call.

Pleasant believes today’s contact centers need to meet the following goals:

• Improve customer satisfaction with first-contact resolution.
• Maintain consistent service levels during times of peak call volumes.
• Increase call volumes without hiring more agents.
• Hire part-time or informal agents to log in during busy hours to maintain service levels.
• Develop a corporate culture that is focused on customer care by making everyone in the enterprise more customer-focused, and involving more employees and knowledge workers with customers and customer interactions.

Gartner’s Drew Kraus, research vice president, agrees, noting that “one of the key trends, along the lines of what we are seeing with Microsoft working with Aspect Software, is the integration of presence technology and instant messaging into contact center software.” For the customer service agent to quickly determine who is available to support the call, and to get that second-level expert into the call quickly, “increases the likelihood of first-call resolution, which is a key indicator of customer satisfaction.”

Two very different software applications — the customer-centric contact center software, and the enterprise-centric IM and presence applications — are being brought together to enhance the customer’s experience, Kraus notes.

The move away from hardware-centric contact center applications to contact center software based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is providing new opportunities to have the contact center interact with business applications throughout the enterprise. Suppliers are responding by increasing the breadth and cohesiveness of their contact application suites.

IT Has Opportunity to Improve Customer Service

Astute information technology professionals today should consider moving collaboration applications into the contact center, and exploit the opportunity to take a leadership role to help their organizations achieve higher-level customer services, suggests Gartner’s Kraus.

“Get ahead of the curve by looking into how tools can be used today to improve customer service. IT people need to be focusing their skill sets on how they can insert these capabilities into enterprise applications to make their employees more productive. There is a real opportunity right now, because these systems are becoming less telephony silos and more IT-centric. It gives IT an opportunity to take a strategic role,” Kraus says.

A review of plans by representative contact center software suppliers clarifies where the market is today. (See sidebars.)

Aspect Software recently announced an agreement with Microsoft to design its Aspect Unified IP contact center products to operate closely with Microsoft’s platform for software-powered voice and unified communications. Microsoft also made an equity investment in Aspect; the amount was not disclosed.

“Contact centers today are not purely inbound or purely outbound,” says Gary Barnett, CTO of Aspect. “The agents in most centers we see today, particularly in the industrial strength centers, are working in much more of a ‘blended’ environment” — more closely, for instance, with collections or marketing departments.

“Second, contact centers are not just about phone calls. Many transactions start on the Web and end up with self-service; many start with self-service and end up with live agents; chat continues to grow, at a slow pace; and e-mail continues to grow, but more rapidly in Europe than anywhere else,” Barnett says.

Barnett adds that he sees “a lot going on in the area of performance management, especially in e-learning, training, quality management, and workforce management; all those things are getting more focus and attention now.” However, he notes, “Unified communications is the biggest megatrend we see in contact centers today,” and the agreement with Microsoft is aimed at moving that along.

“We’ve been impressed with the level of interest our customers have in this agreement. They are very interested in the Microsoft partnership, as they are thinking about their unified communications strategy, so it was good timing,” Barnett says. The agreement does encompass joint development, and will initially unfold within the Aspect Unified IP products, and later the PerformanceEdge products for performance management.

Prepare the Company for Unified Communications

While the promise of unified communications is a better support experience for customers, there are some risks involved. For example, organizations need to be prepared for the potential that instant access to higher-level expertise may not be a good fit for the organization.

Analyst Pleasant says, “Buyers need to think about not only the technology but how people are going to be using it. The expert agent whose job is not contact-center agent might resist using this. You need to think through how to make it work so that customers, agents, and employees are happy and want to work this way. Some people might say, ‘I don’t have time to deal with customers. It’s not my job.’”

For the future, Gartner’s Kraus envisions that more contact-center features, such as presence or telephony, are likely to be integrated into packaged or homegrown Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications. “If you can integrate the features into a single system, it reduces the infrastructure management for IT, and for the agent, it makes for a single, cohesive environment.”

Chris Harrick, senior director of product marketing for SugarCRM, the open-source package supplier that is seeing more uptake for its product from contact centers, sees a future of greater real-time collaboration, especially with social networking sites, blogs, and wikis. “You will be able to get the information and be an expert without needing years of experience. The contact center agent will be able to find the right people linked in through a social networking site. Having that richness of information quickly will revolutionize the contact center in coming years.”

The unified communications market is in an early stage today. Analyst Pleasant sees mass market adoption taking place in approximately four years. For now, CIOs and IT managers can look forward to a steady rate of support from their contact-center software suppliers for unified communications to enhance customer satisfaction and lower costs.

John P. Desmond is editor of Software Magazine. He can be reached at jdesmond@softwaremag.com.