There are several ways to plot a comfortable learning curve for contact center agents beginning to use UC capabilities. In my last post, I suggested considering a phased deployment for operations that have legacy PBX.  Another best practice with a consistent payoff is pilot testing unified communications deployment with a small team of users. This gradual approach produces two advantages that are worth the wait. The first is the opportunity to test and optimize functionality for broader agent use, and what might be an even greater boon to an effective rollout is earning the test group’s buy-in to drive up interest and user adoption. Fear of the unknown is no match for the contagion of enthusiasm. After phone-only users shift to an empowered UC platform experience like Microsoft® Office Communications Server (OCS), they quickly put the past behind them. And they may actually look forward to future technology advances that enable even better communications in their next-generation contact center.

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Every customer and every contact center agent have at least one thing in common – a singular focus on resolving an issue in one transaction. But even when the customer happily experiences a “one and done” outcome, agents aren’t finished until they’ve done their best to repeat that result with every possible opportunity. The challenge of this reality is that repetitive tasks can become tedious and even thankless for agents when satisfying the customer becomes difficult. This is often the biggest contributor to high agent turnover in the contact center.

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It’s often been said that arriving at the decision to migrate from an aging hardware-intensive communications architecture to a software-based unified communications solution can be a daunting exercise. Once your organization is ready to deploy the new technology, we’ve always recommended that you begin with thorough planning and preparation that factors in strategic organizational objectives and consider working with a partner who has experience deploying unified communications solutions. But what exactly might that process involve and how could it influence favorable results?

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We are beginning to see organizations trying to provide some social networking tools within the enterprise to enhance customer-company communications. With growth in collaboration platform tools, social tools don’t need to be one-off projects; they can be an integrated approach to your customer experience strategy. The concept of bringing “social within the organization” is probably a matter of when, rather than if. We have seen this evolution with email and then with instant messaging tools. They all started in the consumer space and most organizations were skeptical of their internal value. Today email is a critical business tool and most organizations have adopted presence and instant messaging. Current communication tools and collaboration platforms are already integrating these capabilities. One good example is the integration between LinkedIn and Microsoft Outlook. Another is the pervasive use of wikis or content management within SharePoint.

Within social tools, wikis and blogs have already been well accepted; we are particularly seeing a broad usage of wikis. But this is still a very structured use that is easy for most organizations to envision. The bigger change is with unstructured social tools – activity feeds, employee profiles, walls and statuses. These are being leveraged  in some organizations to create a bond between formal groups and special interest groups. Informal groups are being formed based on subscriptions and interests.

I am interested in seeing how well these tools get adopted by our clients. So when do you think your organization will introduce these tools and if you have already adopted them, how have they changed the way employees interact?

Successful software deployments are usually a result of thorough planning and preparation. IT departments and organizations should be well aware of the user adoption process, especially on a scale as large as OCS deployment.

During UC World’s live event, Bill Lynch, Senior Director of IT Infrastructure at Aspect, suggested providing easy, quick access to the information and resources employees need most as a key factor in their OCS deployment. Also, he attributed Aspect’s successful rollout to engaging vendors early, pilot testing feedback as well as a thorough communication and training campaign throughout deployment.

Is your IT Department prepared to go with unified communications?

Communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) leveraging unified communications and collaboration technologies are changing customer-company communications. CEBPs integrate communication technologies like voice, contextual presence awareness, instant messaging (IM), conferencing and social software with IT systems and applications to enable business process improvements.

In the contact center, “Ask an Expert” capabilities allow agents to reach out to knowledge workers outside that domain using presence, IM and voice capabilities. Agents who request an expert’s help are connected to the most knowledgeable person available through IM or conferencing. This immediate access to an expert significantly improves first contact resolution and consequently, customer satisfaction.

Integrating social media into contact center applications takes relationship management a step further by measuring the temperature of customer relationships, or relationship potential, using monitoring applications. These technologies feed information from the blogosphere and social networks like Twitter and Facebook directly into the contact infrastructure. For instance, searches for words that flag customer relationship issues and opportunities, such as “closing account,” could be attributed to a particular customer.  Action can then be taken through email, IM or another appropriate channel to resolve an issue or otherwise cultivate a positive relationship.

Another way that companies can use unified communications and collaboration capabilities to enhance the customer experience is through web-based self-service portals enabled by collaboration software like Microsoft SharePoint. Companies can provide a better self-service experience as their customers can use these portals to securely search knowledge bases to find answers to their questions. Customer benefits include access to richer expertise, the ability to drill down on a given topic, and faster issue resolution.

What technologies do you use to empower the contact center by reaching beyond it? What business processes could benefit from communications-enablement in your company?

The movement to respond assertively to an industry challenge that has hindered widespread unified communications adoption recently took a bold step forward. The newly formed Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) alliance of key technology leaders represents an organized, intensified focus on enabling standards-based, inter-vendor unified communications interoperability. With an expanding roster of supporting member companies, the potential for change is reaching critical mass.

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If participation in the UC World Symposium on May 19^th is any indication, the collaborative enterprise is on the rise. The three-hour online event brought together hundreds of industry luminaries, technology experts, and unified communications (UC) and collaboration users, from experienced advocates to the UC and collaboration curious. Participants exchanged knowledge, insights and ideas about the potential of the next wave of communications and social media capabilities.

In a session titled The Future of Communications in an Enterprise 2.0 World, Aspect executives discussed how unified communications and collaboration technologies like Microsoft SharePoint and Office Communications Server (OCS) are laying a foundation on which game-changing applications are built. Attendees gained a better understanding of how these applications leverage Web 2.0 and real-time communications to communications-enable business processes to drive results in areas such as mobility and the back office.

If you missed the UC World Symposium or want to revisit the experience, log in to the UC World archive. If you’re not yet part of the network, it only takes a minute to register.

Fully embracing Enterprise 2.0 capabilities may seem like it takes some extremely long arms. The potential for embedding communications into business applications and processes reaches far and wide, extending to the contact center, the back office and beyond. Customer care, mobility and websites and portals are all areas of considerable opportunity. And the real-time, collaborative power of communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) and social media to increase efficiency and productivity will only continue to evolve and profoundly influence these spaces.

So how do you decide where to begin in adopting CEBP and social software and media capabilities? What’s the best way to adapt them to your organization’s existing workflows or processes? One target for relatively easy, low-risk wins is any area where siloed operations present business challenges. Other likely, high-value opportunities are business processes stalled or complicated by human latency, or those that require different types of people with different sets of skills. Wherever business processes are bottlenecked, there exists the potential for huge gains from incorporating CEBP and social media capabilities.

What other starting points do you recommend for early success?

“Building a relationship” Chris Hughes says, “is the most important part for businesses to remember” when speaking on social media for business communication. To fully utilize the power of social media, he noted that the most valuable opportunity to take advantage of is the ability to reach customers, and potential customers every single day.

Another interesting insight is Hughes’ view on mobility. With 75 million of Facebook’s 400 million users logging in from their mobile device, Hughes feels that that number will continue to grow. “For FB mobile users to outpace traditional web users, smart phones must become increasingly widespread and prevalent, including to people who don’t own PCs today. I think realistically we’ll reach that point in just a few years. “

How do you think this will change the way companies communicate with their customers?