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In a recent blog post NoJitter talks about a survey by Information Week, of more than 400 IT decision-makers last April on the topic of Unified Communications adoption.
Unified Communications is a term that has many applications. Typically,Unified Communications addresses one-to-one communication where Interaction Management falls under the one-to-many category. However there are enough similarities between Unified Communications and Interaction Management to apply the lessons from the survey to the contact center industry.
The results from the survey raise an interesting question for the contact centers. How do organizations manage a variety of applications for their contact center agents without overwhelming them?
In a recent conversation with one of our panelists from an upcoming webinar, Jonas Nicholson from Direct Interactions mentioned that before adopting a virtual contact center solution their call center agents would have 4-5 applications running simultaneously for instant messaging, knowledge management, desktop sharing, etc. As a result their productivity levels were constantly deteriorating while their average handling times were increasing. By combining multiple channels of interaction within a single solution they have seen dramatic improvements in their call handling times. In addition to the reduction in stress on their agents their clients have seen an increase in productivity by as high as 50%.
The survey also talked about the barriers to fully using existing collaborative technology. And not surprisingly at the top was “End user base not fully trained”. You may recall from one of our earlier posts that for a traditional contact center, training contact center agents is a major challenge in terms of costs and complexity. Having different applications for knowledge management, CRM, chat management, desktop sharing , etc. can drive up training costs. Choosing a virtual contact center technology that combines all of these applications into a unified solution can reduce training costs by 60%.
So before you invest in another standalone desktop application for your call center agents, ask yourself what is the goal? Try finding the right contact center solution that combines most of the features together allowing you to reduce training costs and call handling time while creating an environment that allows your agents to be more productive.