Enghouse UC

Contact center and unified communications: essential convergence

By 25 de noviembre de 2021No Comments

The importance of collaboration in the contact center

While the primary vocation of the contact center is to interact with customers, its needs in terms of internal collaboration are also very important: exchange of information between agents with complementary skills, exchange between an agent and his supervisor, coordination between supervisors, discussion with an expert external to the customer service team to meet a specific customer need, etc.

Contact centers, which traditionally operated in a somewhat isolated manner, must therefore increasingly open up to the rest of the company. However, the hybrid work situation with the teleworking workforce makes these necessary interactions often more difficult to achieve.

What the situation looks like today

It is no longer possible to poke your head to the side and ask a question of a colleague. The distance can make agents feel isolated or have difficulty communicating with colleagues whose help could be invaluable to them.

The impact on the quality of customer service and advisor productivity can be significant, and it is critical to put the tools in place to continue to collaborate effectively in this new hybrid world. This is where unified communications in the contact center come into their own.

UCaaS: the essential tool for collaboration in a hybrid world

The technology that has been essential for collaborative work for several years now is called Unified Communications (UC). It allows users, wherever they are and whatever device they use, to have a single interface to check the availability of their interlocutors and to manage all communication and exchange tools (chat, telephone, video, file sharing, etc.). UC solutions have established themselves as an essential element for seamless collaboration between distant populations living in disparate environments.

Moreover, the development of such solutions in cloud mode (UCaaS, Unified Communications as a Service) makes them even more relevant today because they offer the flexibility that the development of hybrid work has made necessary. A study by Million Insights also predicts that the unified communications market will grow by 16% annually until 2025.

What would be the difficulties in implementing UCaaS?

It then becomes natural to consider using a unified communications solution in the contact center to facilitate collaboration not only between agents but also with the rest of the organization. The difficulty, however, is that agents already use a specific solution to interact with customers and, although it is also increasingly consumed in cloud mode (CCaaS, Contact Center as a Service), they have to resort to a separate tool to manage internal services. collaboration is a drag on the fluidity of the consultant experience. When one of the essential criteria for measuring the effectiveness of a contact center is the average processing time, anything that slows down agent execution of tasks is an issue to be addressed.

In practice, agents often have to use two disconnected solutions or simply do not have access to a unified communications solution and have to settle for more traditional tools for internal collaboration.

Unified Communications in the Contact Center: the benefits of UCaaS / CCaaS convergence

Joining UCaaS and CCaaS seems obvious. This, of course, makes it possible to manage a single platform instead of two, thus reducing costs (administration, training, etc.). But above all, it facilitates and streamlines collaboration between the contact center and the rest of the company, which improves productivity and delivers a better customer experience by providing faster and more relevant responses.

The typical example is the advisor who does not have the knowledge to respond immediately to a customer. In a traditional contact center, he will have to put the customer on hold and try to locate a colleague or expert capable of providing the right information, with no guarantee of success. If unsuccessful, you will have to suggest that the customer call you back later.

In contrast, in a contact center that has integrated its unified communications and contact center solutions, the consultant will be able to stay in conversation with his customer, consult at the same time on the same interface the availability of experts, contact one by chat, obtain the information and communicate it directly to the customer without having to put him on hold, being able to continue conversing with him seamlessly.

A Metrigy study has shown that organizations that have integrated their unified communications and contact center solutions achieve better results in terms of agent efficiency and revenue generation.

The Enghouse Solution

In terms of concrete implementation, several integration models are possible. It is possible to build an integration between solutions from different vendors. The Enghouse Cloud Contact Center solution has, for example, an integration with Microsoft Teams, allowing you to benefit from the advantages in terms of fluidity of communication, without being able to dispense with the management of two independent platforms.  With the launch of our new Enghouse UC solution, we also offer a fully integrated option to reap the benefits of the convergence of these two worlds.

If you would like to learn more about how our unified communications solution can boost your company’s efficiency, just click the button.

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