UC Enabled Virtualized Contact Centers to the Rescue

As our lawmakers are working on new economic rescue plans to help resuscitate the ailing American economy, many of your chief executive officers and executive teams are looking for ways to create their own in-house rescue plans. These plans are based on new customer relationship management (CRM) strategies and focus on retaining and increasing the sales activities of your current customers.

As a previous manager of a contact center it is clear to me, as it is to you, that the call center is the front-line of battle to implement any enterprise’s CRM strategy.

Therefore, you, as a current customer service manager managing the troops and tactics at the front line, are probably receiving substantially more attention and questions. Questions like: how can we increase our revenue, retain customers, obtain new customers, improve efficiency and drastically reduce costs?

Lucky you!

The good news is that measurable benefits, specific to this challenging economy, can be gained from implementing a “real time” unified communications (UC) solution, focused on CRM strategies. A UC-based CRM solution will allow your enterprises to create “virtualized contact centers” and offer your customers a choice of multimedia interactions and self-service options. UC-enabled virtualized contact centers can come to you and your company’s rescue by producing results focused on the CRM strategies your executives want to undertake.

These strategies need to be strong in four key areas. First, the strategies need to utilize assets and provide quicker return on investments. Second, strategies need to increase up-selling and accelerate the sales cycle. Third, strategies need to improve agent productivity and enterprise workflow. Fourth, strategies can differentiate themselves with personalization to beat the competition.

Only a SIP-based UC contact center solution can effectively deliver results in all four areas. UC-based CRM contact center solutions provide measurable results in improving the retention of high value customers, increasing current customers’ sales volumes (revenue) and reducing operational inefficiencies (cost). As IP/SIP-based solutions, these solutions provide fully integrated and modular voice over IP (VoIP), IVR, e-mail, instant messaging (IM), presence and Web collaboration modules.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol, used for setting up and tearing down multimedia communication sessions such as voice, Instant Messaging (IM) and video calls over the Internet.

Creating a Virtualized Contact Center

Traditionally a call center has been limited to the building, floor and four walls supported by the company’s TDM voice-based PBX/ACD system. With these technology limitations, based on a hardware model over PSTN, the call center became a detached island in the enterprise. New software-based contact center solutions, built on SIP foundations, are bringing the contact center back to the company’s mainland and creating new “virtualized” contact centers without technology walls, network limitations or media boundaries. Next generation SIP-based CRM solutions provide new levels of scalability and customization. UC-enabled virtualized contact centers can support 10 to tens of thousands of agents at one contact center, deploying IP agents when and where needed, independent of physical location.

As software solutions, these are designed for data center deployment with high levels of reliability, resiliency and recovery. Built on global license models, users can be located (and relocated) anywhere with modular centralized applications for process consistency, cost savings and customization. A SIP-based virtual contact center not only optimizes your enterprise’s resources but also provides the right foundation for competitive agility. You can now have contact center agents working from different buildings, cities and even countries while acting as one entity. You will be able to deliver rich contact center functionality to home agents, remote agents, outsourced agents or part-time contact center agents working from company headquarters. The new contact center suites also have virtual routing engines that can adjust routing parameters and workflows in response to real-time information about the call center operating conditions, agents’ available skills or specific customer data. Take, for example, the scenario of a call center for a travel agency with CSR locations across the United States. If a snowstorm in Denver shuts down the main site for corporate accounts, then a UC-based virtual solution can automatically divert calls to Boca Raton, for example, where there are agents who have been cross-training in handling corporate sales.

This type of automated virtual functionality will allow your center to continue achieving critical service level commitments automatically, even as unexpected events occur in real-time. Some companies deploying new “virtualized” contact centers and utilizing intelligent virtual routing have seen a 20 to 30 percent improvement in contact volume capacity with the same number of agents.

Improving Agent Productivity and Enterprise Workflow

It has been said that the moment a customer contacts an enterprise it is the “moment of truth.” This is when the value proposition, brand and marketing promises of your company are tested. Less than stellar “CSR productivity,” via the contact center, and broken “enterprise workflows” will lead to an “F” on the test and customers heading off to competitors. Your customers and CSR agents require that the full capabilities and attention of your enterprise be available to meet their specific needs on the first contact. To meet this expectation your CSR agents require uncomplicated and immediate access to the resources, experts, solutions and methods to answer their own call for help when the customer goes off the standard menu.

New UC-based CRM solutions not only bring contact centers back into the company with significantly more flexibility but also bring the total enterprise “online” to help realize CRM strategies and tactics. With desktop presence tools—the ability to see who has the skills and is available to help—agents can find experts or other CSR agents who can answer the call for “help” from any location or any department in the enterprise. When done in real-time, at the time the customer is engaging your contact center, a higher percentage of “first contact resolution” (FCR) can be reached. This is made possible because SIP not only creates a virtual contact center but also enables presence and collaboration capabilities across the call center and your company. Meeting customers’ requirements in their first contact to your enterprise—versus time consuming multiple transfers, voice mails or call backs—will pay dividends in multiple areas.

FCR, achieved through UC-enabled virtualized contact center solutions, can be measured and has been shown to improve customer satisfaction. By making FCR a critical part of your company’s CRM strategy not only is customer satisfaction improved and operating costs reduced, but the enterprise achieves new levels of productivity and efficiency. UC-enabled solutions when integrated into an enterprise IT customer-workflow application can deliver significant improvements to workflow across your company. But its most important benefit is arming your front-line CSR agents with the weapons needed to achieve straight A’s for responding to the “moment of truth”.

Empowering and Enabling Personalized Consumer Strategies

Over the past decade consumers have increased their demand for personalization and multimedia interaction options with enterprise companies. Today, consumers expect your company to allow them to initialize contact whenever and wherever it is convenient for them and with the media option they prefer-- telephone, mobile phone, PDA, e-mail, IM or Web. The consumer’s only consistent requirement is that the services you provide are uniform, consistent, convenient and personalized, independent of which medium is chosen.

New SIP-based UC-enabled contact center solutions provide fully integrated and modular VoIP, IVR, e-mail, IM and Web collaboration modules. These solutions allow your enterprises to create cutting-edge UC-enabled virtualized contact centers. Now you can offer your customers a choice of multimedia interactions and self-service options. With blended multimedia routing, queuing and reporting engines, these UC-enabled SIP solutions ensure your customers are processed consistently, apart from the media chosen, and within personalized service level targets. Online media options such as e-mail and Web collaboration can play an important role in maximizing your organization’s accessibility, while helping to lower the cost per interaction. You are now able to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of handling multimedia customer interactions and easily build personalized consumer strategies.

UC-based contact center solutions also provide the right foundation for personalized up-selling and add-on sales. Based on SOA and open standards frameworks these UC SIP solutions can be easily integrated into a wide variety of vertical and horizontal IT business applications enabling integration into business workflow processes and policies. These IT applications, when integrated with the UC-based CRM solution (CEBP), will automatically provide your contact center agents the appropriate scripts for additional product offerings and discounts specific to the customer’s profile.

Adjusting at Market Speed with “Open & Flexible” Contact Centers

For most companies in today’s market, speed and change and are the new constants. Industries and markets are in perpetual motion, products are facing shorter lifecycles, customer’s expectations are increasing, global low cost resource skill pools are entering the labor market and new non-traditional competitors are changing the rules. All of these factors require your executive’s CRM solution strategy to have extreme flexibility at its foundation. Software-based UC-enabled virtualized contact center solutions built on SIP foundations provide the highest level of agility.

SIP-based customer interaction solutions embrace open standards. Their open frameworks and architectures support the evolution of an enterprise’s communications environment, effortlessly and cost-effectively. Through the utilization of published open interfaces and Internet standards, these solutions converge seamlessly with an organization’s existing PBX and IT infrastructure to maximize existing IT and communication infrastructure investments. In addition, SOA permits your contact center solutions to be easily integrated into a wide variety of vertical and horizontal IT business applications enabling easier deployment and integration into your business workflow processes. Over time this advantage may be the most important one giving your company a solution that is very close to “future proof.”

Companies, such as yours, can now focus on improvement plans, specific to customer relationship management strategies, knowing that UC-enabled virtualized contact centers will come to the rescue.

About the Author

Al Baker is a global vice president for Siemens Enterprise Communications, Inc., with international responsibilities focused on Siemens' UC-based CRM solutions business and over ten years of experience running product management and product marketing departments.