The Benefits of Unified Communications

The primary benefit of Unified Communicaitons (UC) is identifying presence which can speed up many kinds of business processes. So, for example, instead of leaving phone messages and playing phone tag with a business associate, employees can look at the presence status of the person that they are trying to reach and if that person is available, they can instant message for an immediate conversation. If that associate is not available, they can contact someone else for help. If this Unified Communications platform included a call accounting system, the associate might be able to immediately tell who is and who is not available. This certainly increases efficiency as employees are spending far less time trying to get a hold of one another and, even more importantly, questions can be answered quickly so that decisions and actions can be taken immediately, rather than delaying until a return phone call is received. This allows business to resolve issues quickly and efficiently.

From the contact center perspective, UC empowers agents to locate experts to resolve customer issues that are beyond their scope. This allows contact centers to increase their first call resolution rates and reduce operating expenses by efficiently answering customer inquiries with one quick transfer. While this immediate access benefits the call center and customer service departments, the engineering and application development departments might not be so keen on being at the call center’s beck and call. And this is a legitimate argument. How would developers and engineers have time to do their jobs if they are constantly being interrupted to handle call center inquiries? And given that the time of the engineer or developer is worth so much more than that of the call center agent, it is difficult to reconcile the interruption. For this reason, there has been some lag in the pick up of UC in many business applications, but the potential is there and once the operational kinks are worked out of the chain, UC is likely to become a mainstay in many businesses.