Communications today exist in many forms including phone, email, instant messaging, text messaging, voice mail, fax, pagers and many more. This proliferation of channels and methods has left organisations with a number of challenges. Here are just four of these:
- Customers increasingly expect to be able to communicate using various channels. How are you going to make sure you can manage the customer experience in the same way as voice calls and post?
- How can you manage the spiralling costs of managing and integrating the technology?
- How can you have shared contact directories across these different channels?
- Given the mobility and varied nature of the working day how can you know whether people are available to be contacted or whether they want to be?
The industry buzz term for solving this is “unified communication” and the platform on which this is built is integrated or converged network that is used for all these forms of communication. This is often referred to as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).
Converged Communications offer a more flexible platform for providing multifunction and multimedia communications inbound, outbound and within the organisation. It enables a whole raft of features to be incorporated into a communications system such as a central contact directory, linking calls to databases within a contact centre, effective routing of calls, the use of video, the seamless integration across geographies, the integration of customer contact technologies such as self service or call recording and provides a significant reduction in systems management costs.
These technologies enable benefits such as your customer contact advisors to work from home or geographically separate offices whilst being managed centrally. This gives the contact centre a wider pool of potential staff, and offers your employees more flexibility. It is invaluable to help you attract new advisors.
