Presence, smresence, what’s the big deal with Presence? Presence is all about connections. If you were to ask a user what presence is, you would probably get a lot of different answers: Presence is telling whether someone is available, online in the case of IM, or in a meeting until 3PM in the case of Microsoft Outlook, etc. Presence equals efficiency, especially for an end user. Contact Centers are the ultimate proving ground for a company’s ROI.

Presence allows anyone not just Contact Centers the ability to pull in enterprise resources to resolve any issue immediately. Efficiency increases when a company can eliminate phone tag, by letting users know, through device presence, if someone is on the phone or available to accept a phone call. Imagine the possibilities if you could integrate all forms of presence (IM, device presence and email) and federation. End users desperately need this type of UC interoperability.

Earlier this year Blair Pleasant wondered about the future of UC without federation. While Federation might be number one on many people’s list; I think she needed to include the importance of presence. Blair wishes for federation, but right now Presence makes my life more efficient because I am not playing phone tag, and I do not foresee the big 3 playing nice in the sand box so federation is way down on my list. Nothing ruins my day more than having left a voice mail at the beginning of the day and by the EOB I haven’t heard from my contact, only to hear that they have been in a meeting in my own building all day. Presence can make my day, by telling me through MS Outlook, that my contact has a lunch break at 1:00, so I will walk on over to the meeting and catch him in the hallway. A much more efficient use of my time than waiting on a return call from a voice mail message I left at the beginning of the day.

I would consider Presence Integration to be more important than Federation when it comes to UC interoperability between multi vendor platforms like Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, such as letting an end user know when the contact in your IM client is “in a call”. While many would scoff at that possibility, I call that the “Ultimate Presence Experience”, eliminating phone tag, ensuring reach-ability, eliminating email latency, and eliminating the frustration of how can I connect with someone now. I continue to lead the charge for efficiency through presence, and what better way for all of us to keep our New Year’s Resolution than with UC Interoperability and Integrated Presence!!

Tags: UC Information, Unified Communications Information by Mark Littlefield
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He’s singing my song! The “Holy UC, Batman..” article by my colleague Jay Brandstadter certainly struck a chord with me. For years, I have avoided falling into the jargon pit that both the voice and data industries seem to love so much; and there is good reason for this avoidance. When I work with resellers, whether VARs or telecom dealers, one of my goals is to help them understand the importance of consultative selling rather than product selling. To me this means approaching any sale from the perspective of the customer’s needs rather than from technology and products. So I try to speak the language of business… not technical jargon (of course, this encourages some in our industry to assume that I don’t understand the technology - too bad for them).

But to my point… it seems to me that the unified communications industry is so busy trying to define UC according to what a product or group of products can DO, that they’re missing a very important issue. THEY’RE CONFUSING CUSTOMERS! And when customers are confused, they don’t buy! Why not define UC according to what it means to a business - how it can improve business overall? It’s similar to defining a car as a vehicle with 2 or 4doors, 4 wheels, an engine, etc. So what? From a customer perspective, a car is a means of getting them from here to there quickly, safely and comfortably. THAT’s why they buy a car.

If I’m a customer, I don’t care if “UC” is about presence or mobility, or even integrating business processes with my communications system. I’m going to buy a solution (whether it is “real” UC or not) solely because it is going to make my business more profitable by reducing costs, making my employees more productive and/or improving customer service.

If UC is to grow as an industry, customers must buy solutions that we know are made up of products and software that we manufacture or develop…. and today’s customers are smarter than ever. Steve Burgess, a very savvy integrator and CEO of Guidant Partners, firmly says that the customer doesn’t care HOW it works, they just care that it DOES work - and that it makes a positive difference in their business. So I’m going to be so bold as to offer another definition for “UC”…. Unified communications brings together and utilizes communication tools and information tools to make workers more productive from wherever they are, provide management with the information and means to make better and faster decisions, provide better customer service and improved customer experiences, and overall help a company be more profitable. How are we going to do this? The person who signs the check to buy doesn’t really care how!!!!!!! Only the vendors who provide the products and the distribution channels who sell and install those products care “how”.

Let’s stop talking to ourselves and begin talking to the customer - please!

Tags: UC Information, Unified Communications Information by Pam Avila
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Aspect Software recently commissioned a study to look at opportunities to improve customer service through unified communications (UC). Aspect retained Leo J. Shapiro and Associates LLC of Chicago to conduct the survey of 50 contact center supervisors and 50 contact center agents at the end of 2007. The findings of the study clearly identify customer service stumbling blocks that could be overcome by the deployment of UC in the contact center.

The Aspect study found that, according to the supervisors and agents interviewed, 10.3 percent of all telephone inquiries handled on a daily basis required assistance from knowledge workers outside of the contact center. When these calls requiring outside help occur, the study reports that one of two things generally happen:

• Contact center personnel place the customer on hold while they seek the expertise required, then relay that information to the customer secondhand; or
• Contact center personnel attempt to resolve the customer issue to the point that outside expertise is needed, and then the customer call is transferred to the knowledge worker for resolution.

I submit that a third scenario is also possible - that the customer service rep takes the information from the customer and promises a call-back once the answer can be gleaned from the appropriate resources. In any case, these scenarios negatively impact two important contact center performance metrics; average call handle time, also known as average handle time (AHT), and first call resolution (FCR). An increase in AHT or a decrease in FCR can both be detrimental to the operational performance and customer service levels of the typical customer care center.

The Aspect-sponsored Shapiro study found that the average call was increased by approximately 2.5 minutes each time a knowledge worker outside the contact center was required to in order to resolve a customer inquiry. Although the study didn’t pinpoint how much of that 2.5 minutes was spent searching for the knowledge worker and how much was spent on the phone with the customer, we can reasonably assume that a good percentage of that time, perhaps as high as half of that time, was spent searching for and connecting to the knowledge worker outside of the contact center.

If that one-to-1.5 minutes spent searching for a resource could be reduced or eliminated through the use of such UC-enabled solutions as Presence, the cost savings and increased productivity could be significant. Think of the number of calls your own call center handles each day and what might be saved by shaving a minute or more off of ten percent of those calls. Although this is conjecture, it still serves to illustrate a point: UC in the contact center comes with a built-in return on investment (ROI) that is not only demonstrable; it is enough to make even the most hard-hearted CFO take notice.

Full details of the Aspect Software survey are available at www.aspect.com.

Tags: UC Information by Paul Stockford
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It all starts in the contact center.

That’s my contention anyway. When you look for the obvious launch point for unified communications in the enterprise, it has to be the contact center. Almost all discussions about UC in the enterprise include a mention of Presence, the UC concept that provides users with an overview of the availability and status of other knowledge workers in the organization and a means to efficiently tap into those resources as necessary.

If you think about it, the contact center is the most logical place for the initial use of Presence and UC in the enterprise. The goal of most, if not all, customer contact centers is first call resolution. In other words, the folks in charge of running customer service generally prefer to have a customer issue resolved in one call. There are two reasons for this, the first of which is customer satisfaction. As a consumer or customer, aren’t you generally happier if the company you call can resolve your issue in one call without repeated call transfers or without asking you to call back in order to speak with someone else later? Everyone’s time is valuable these days and no one likes to have to make repeated phone calls to get a question answered or an issue resolved.

Presence would allow an agent the ability to pull in enterprise resources from outside the contact center in order to resolve a customer call. Agents would be able to identify which internal subject matter experts might be available and the best way to reach them. While still engaging the customer, contact center agents would have the additional resources at their fingertips to keep the customer happy or at least resolve an issue without repeated call transfers or callbacks.

The second reason customer service professionals strive for first call resolution in the contact center is cost. Each time a customer service agent picks up the phone, it costs the contact center in terms of salary, benefits, etc., and if they’re paying for an agent to address the same problem with the same customer more than once, that is usually money down the drain. UC in the contact center makes absolute sense from a cost savings perspective. Here’s where we run into our conundrum, though.
If you’ve been around the contact center long enough you’ve undoubtedly heard the discussions about the strategic importance of the customer service center in terms of its value to operational success and profitability. To hear some people talk you’d believe that the business universe revolved around the contact center. If you haven’t been around the contact center and heard this talk, trust me when I tell you that it’s mostly lip service.
The truth is, the contact center is as important as all the pundits claim it is but the fact is that most businesses look at the contact center as a cost center. As you probably know, it is generally very difficult to get a business to invest in a cost center. Thus our conundrum: an investment in UC on the contact center would undoubtedly lead to cost savings and a tangible return on investment, but there is a general reluctance to invest in cost centers such as the contact center.
I think we may be able to find our way out of this potential quagmire if the industry in general follows the lead of the small percentage of companies who really do view their customer service function as a strategic advantage or differentiator and will invest in UC in order to provide their agents with Presence functionality. It’s going to take time and there will still be those executives who will drag their contact centers into the 21^st century kicking, screaming and protesting the whole way.

Any other ideas?

Tags: UC Information by Paul Stockford
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It’s that wonderful time of the year when people around the world make their New Year’s resolutions – things they’ll do differently, bad habits they’ll quit, good habits they’ll start, and so on. Here are some New Year’s resolutions related to unified communications that I would like to see in the coming year.

Vendors working together toward federation: One of the biggest obstacles to UC success is the lack of federation, or the ability for one vendors’ UC/IM/presence offering to work with another’s. While we’ve seen some good success stories of UC helping companies internally, the number of situations where companies can use UC to interact with customers, partners, and suppliers using different platforms and different vendors’ products is limited. If I’m on a Cisco UC system, I can’t see the telephony presence of my customer on an Avaya UC system, for example. Federation is number one on my wish list.

Vendors, analysts, and consultants agreeing on a definition of unified communications: We’ve all been harping on this for a while, but there are still multiple definitions not only of UC, but also of Communication Enabled Business Processes, which is confusing to enterprise customers.

Analysts and vendors agreeing on a way to measure the UC market: As an industry analyst one of my jobs is to analyze and forecast the UC market. I’ve been an analyst for many years, analyzing several different markets – the unified communications market is by far the most difficult market I’ve had to measure. There is no agreement within the vendor community as to what constitutes the UC market, and they have not been forthcoming in providing market data that could be used in a market analysis (most likely because we’re still in the early stages of the market and the shipments have been limited).

Vendors and resellers providing sales and shipment data for their UC solutions: While PBX market analysts can easily count the number of PBX lines that have been shipped, or in the email market we can count the number of email licenses sold, there is no single element to count in the UC market. I resolve to develop a way to measure the UC market, but I need future buy-in from vendors and resellers who will need to provide the necessary market data.

Resellers being more receptive to selling UC solutions, rather than “boxes”: I know it’s a hard transition for many resellers who have been successful selling telephony or convergence products, but the time has come to embrace UC, which means a new sales approach. This approach may involve taking a vertical focus or a longer-term solution focus, but it is necessary. Some resellers are making the transition more easily than others, but vendors will be changing the way they compensate partners, so these partners will have to accept this and get on board.

My personal resolution: I resolve to be more open to other people’s definitions of UC and CEBP – this is an evolving market, and it is too early to say what it will look like in a few years. Even though I have firm ideas about what makes a UC solution, there are others with different beliefs, and many of these should be taken into account. I resolve to listen to these other ideas and integrate them into my own when appropriate.

If we as an industry can make and keep these resolutions, it will go a long way to helping the Unified Communications market grow.

Tags: UC Information by Blair Pleasant
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