By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC
Strategies Expert
We
are finally seeing unified communications (UC) finally taking over customer
interactions. This means that every size organization, in every type of market
segment, must be prepared to support consumers/customers with the flexibility
of UC for all types of interactions. What is bringing new impetus to this shift
in business communications are three key factors:
·
Mobile
consumer devices - Multi-modal
mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, have expanded convenient and fast
direct consumer access to online, self-services, including various modes of
person-to-person contacts, online information access and transactions, and
pro-active notifications by automated business processes.
·
Interoperability
and integration between various forms of person-to-person communications and
business process applications – Because
there is increased flexibility required for contacts with mobile people, the
various forms of communication must now dynamically be controlled by the end
users, depending upon their individual needs and circumstances as contact
initiators or recipients/respondents.
·
“Cloud” –
based applications – As both
communication and business process software applications become location
independent, developing and integrating them in “cloud” environments becomes
critical to faster and lower-cost implementations and ongoing change
management.
Customer
services are rapidly moving from legacy call and contact centers to “Unified
Interaction Centers,” where online self-service applications are not only
minimizing the need for live assistance to consumers to get information or
perform simple transactions, but also facilitating more flexible access to
specialized assistance whenever needed. The result of such changes to customer
assistance is greater personalization, experience customization, and,
ultimately, customer satisfaction.
This
year’s Enterprise Connect brought increased focus on the important role of the
contact center in business communications, in this report
from the show. Customer services are now becoming recognized as high-value
applications and “use cases,” that are benefiting from integration with
“consumer BYOD,” UC-enablement, and “cloud” services.
Customer
services used to be locked in together in different technology platforms that
were difficult to integrate. As a result, only big organizations could afford
to invest and support implementing all the pieces involved with legacy
telephony call centers. One of the leading innovators in contact center
technologies was Interactive Intelligence (ININ), decided to build their
software infrastructure fully integrated from the ground up, calling it an
“all-in-one” software product. However, because, of contact center application
complexity and costs, many SMB organizations could not afford to implement such
contact center technologies by themselves.
The
challenge of supporting customer services has been greatly increased by the
advent of “Mobile UC” and multi-modal live assistance and
self-service applications, not just phone calls. So, while UC-enabled business
communications focused initially on internal organizations and collaborative
contacts, the big Customer Service markets were pretty much stuck on old
CPE-based call center telephony. Now, however, with increased consumer mobile
flexibility, “cloud” based applications are making big waves in all kinds of
customer service applications.
The Really Big SMB Market For Unified Customer Services
I
have always felt that customer services will really be the same for small or
large organizations. The main differences showed up in things like:
·
How big your market is
·
How much live
assistance and expertise will be needed by different customers
·
Software tools for
running operations smoothly, training customer-facing staff,
·
Management tools and
metrics to insure customer responsiveness satisfaction (“Experience!”)
·
Customization of
self-service applications for different types of applications, especially
“mobile apps.”
Interactive
Intelligence (ININ), among other leading customer service software technology
vendors, emphasized it’s strategic move of going after the
SMB market, since small businesses really need to use most of the same
technologies as larger organizations. There have always been more SMBs out
there than larger enterprise organizations, so with the advent of “consumer
BYOD,” there is suddenly a huge need for third-party expertise of Channel
Partners and Consultants to help develop, support, and manage the complex
technology of multi-modal customer services in “public,” private,” and hybrid
cloud environments.
The “cloud’ environment will
be particularly useful for implementing and managing integrations and
self-service customizations. That always used to an expensive and
time-consuming effort. Now, with all application technologies moving into
interoperable “clouds,” it should no longer be any big problem for any size
organization to move forward selectively with individual customer groups,
customer-facing staffs, and specific customized online applications, associated
with different forms of live assistance.
Bringing The Right Experiences To The Customer Service Table
As
confirmed in many recent market
studies, mobile customers are now expecting:
·
More access to mobile online
self-services
·
Pro-active mobile
notifications and alerts, rather than calling in or checking online
·
Greater flexibility in
choice of user interfaces (voice, visual)
·
Options for multiple
forms of “smart” access to live assistance when needed
Watch
for the growth of cloud-based “Unified Interaction Centers!”
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Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
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