By Ari Sonesh, CEO of CosmoCom

Unified Communications is receiving a lot of attention lately—and deservedly so. The concept is very appealing: all forms of communication integrated intelligently on a single platform, available from anywhere using any device, instantly linking everyone within an organization. But the discussion around unified communications seems to focus mainly on efficient, productive internal communications. We are missing an even more significant facet of Unified Communications: its ability to provide a stronger and more positive customer experience. Unified Customer Communications adds the benefits of customer loyalty and increased revenue, while providing the same efficiency and productivity gains and cost savings as its internal counterpart. Thus, the business case for Unified Customer Communications becomes even stronger and more compelling than the case for Unified Communications.

Progressive contact centers have benefited from IP-based unified customer communications for a decade. The emergence of the term “contact center” to replace “call center” reflects the evolution of Unified Customer Communications. It is tremendously useful, for example, for a contact center agent to be able to instantly see a customer’s complete communication history, including phone, Web chat or IM, email, etc. It is even more useful for other knowledge workers and customer-facing staff to be able to access the same view. This is unified customer communications at its best.

Merging communication channels
Unified Communications (UC) is about merging many different communication channels at the personal and organizational levels in order to make communication more efficient. It refers to the unification of all the forms of voice and non-voice communication, such as fixed and mobile phones, video, chat, email, voicemail, Fax, SMS, and collaboration tools such as conferencing and screen sharing. It also implies unifying the communication channel itself with other information, such as caller identity, caller state or presence, and caller location.

Unified Customer Communications (UCC) is about systematically offering unified communications to an organization's customers, so that customer interactions will be more efficient and effective. This not only creates cost savings, but also engenders customer satisfaction and loyalty, which brings revenue growth. UCC requires facilities such as self-help via the Web, interactive voice response (IVR) and interactive voice and video response (IVVR) that can be smoothly escalated to live help, multi-channel automatic call distribution (ACD), universal queuing, unified recording, unified reporting and unified management and supervision – all focused on the customer. This is a tall order, and a good high-level requirements list for contact center technology in the age of Unified Customer Communications.

But Unified Customer Communications requires much more than technology. UCC also requires unifying the business process across all communication channels, across all locations, and across all staff members. UCC includes the contact center, but it goes far beyond the physical or virtual boundaries of the contact center. Every employee can and should be part of the UCC process. Implementing UCC unifies the organization's workforce around its primary mission of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The objective of UCC is to create a unified customer experience that lets customers select any communication method and receive the same quality of service, supported by the same process, and conducted by people with access to the same information, including the history of communication sessions with that customer via any and all channels. A unified customer experience of a uniformly high level of service is what brings about the customer loyalty that every business wants and needs, ultimately leading to revenue growth. It is also more efficient, and therefore less costly, especially in terms of staff time.

Contact Centers are more known for “integration” than for “unity.” Implementing Unified Customer Communications in the contact center, and in the overall organization, requires unification within many different functional areas. Let’s explore some of the requirements and their capabilities:

Unified automatic call distributors: When a customer or anyone else contacts a corporation using any of the available digital channels, they usually don’t know the name of the person they want or need to reach. It takes an ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) to connect the caller with the right person in the organization. If it’s a problem that needs solving, for example, the call can be directed to the engineer who has the answer—anywhere in the organization. The challenge is to have a single set of queues and routing rules that apply to all communication modes, and skills-based routing across the entire organization.

Unified data access: When a call comes into a contact center, unified data access means that all of the data associated with the caller and his or her interaction history is available across the entire organization. Again, it’s not just the formal call center that needs this capability. The same capability could be used to provide an executive with background information on the journalist, analyst or investor who is calling. An engineer could see at a glance all the projects associated with a specific caller. Read: No more getting blindsided on the phone.

Interactive voice response with video: Anyone who calls using a video-capable telephone, fixed or mobile, or any other video-capable device, can have the same kind of experience he or she would get with voice, but with video too. Video provides “show and tell,” the efficiency of showing selection choices instead of just reciting them, and the communication effectiveness of providing information in both audio and video form.

Unified agent client: In a contact center, one agent client application should support all communication modes, including collaboration, should provide unified access to information, and should be accessible everywhere using any device. UCC means one application that can instantly link every desktop, notebook, and browser-enabled mobile device in a corporation to its customers.

Unified supervision: Contact center agents are and must be a carefully managed resource. The technology that is used to supervise contact agents—including monitoring, whispering, real time views, historical reports, and recording facilities—should also be available across all the channels and locations within a corporation.

Unified applications infrastructure: Organizations need to be able to roll out new applications (i.e. new call centers—or any other kind of application) fast. When technology is location-independent, relocation is no longer an issue. The network becomes the location, and the unifying technology.

This brief overview of the field shows that the concept of Unified Customer Communications implies a lot, both in terms of technology and in terms of organizational innovation. It has the potential the help us live our lives and do our jobs better, in easier and more enjoyable ways, and at a lower cost. But I believe its most significant impact is the organizational one. IP-enabled Unified Customer Communications has the potential to transform the entire enterprise into the contact center of the future, the contact center companies will need to survive and prosper in the 21st century.