For the past decade, I’ve been talking about the gap that exists between customer-facing teams and internal knowledge workers, and why customer service is not just a contact center job – but a business-wide obligation. At least that gap once existed, because unified communications solutions were not connected to contact center platforms, so these two parts of most businesses effectively operated as separate organizations.
From a business perspective, it never made any sense. Companies could gain so much value from connecting customer-facing teams with the rest of their organizations. Slowly, the big contact center vendors started integrating UC into their solutions, but none of them focused on selling to the entire business. Their focus was still contact center, with some UC bolted on just in case.
It’s true, customer service, sales, and marketing teams predominantly use a different set of tools than the rest of a business. But, in the interest of faster time to resolution and a higher degree of CSAT, enabling communication across the entire business makes so much sense.
It wasn’t until cloud grew into its own, and cloud UC providers started offering integrated UC and contact center solutions that the idea really took hold. Even then, in many case, it was driven by the ability to have a single vendor for all communications capabilities, which delivers its own set of benefits, or course, including cost savings and tighter integration.
The end result, though, is that any time a customer has a question that an agent or sales rep can’t answer, an integrated UC solution makes it simple to bring a product expert, developer, executive, or any other team member into the conversation and solve problems or answer questions immediately.
Businesses are starting to understand the value of unifying communications across the entire business: 75% say they already have or plan to consolidate their UC and contact center technologies. As long as the solutions have integrations with CRM and other business software, it’s really a no-brainer.
Considering I’ve been talking about it for so long, I’m excited to be hosting next week’s webinar, How Successful Businesses are Unifying the UC and Contact Center Systems. The highlight of the session will be Nemertes Research President Robin Gareiss, who will discuss the findings from her recent report, “Intelligent Customer Engagement, Supercharging Digital Customer Experience.”
With so many business applications and services running in the cloud, there really is no reason not to unify communications across your entire business. At the very least, you’ll save some money and reduce IT workload. But, you’ll also be able to give your customers a new level of service by promoting customer service as a business-wide responsibility and providing the tools to fulfill that mandate.
Join Robin and me on Tuesday, March 3 at 2:00pm EST to learn why smart businesses are doing just that, the benefits they are achieving, and best ways to ensure the transition goes smoothly.
Edited by
Erik Linask
