Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Unified communications (UC) is becoming deployed as a tool by enterprises including contact centers as they realize a sufficient ROI from investments in them from both increased customer retention and productivity. To obtain more insights about UC especially in contact centers we conducted a Q&A with Mike Hollier, CTO of Psytechnics, which provides IP voice and video performance management and call quality assessment

 

 

Overall, there is still a continuing, albeit cautious, movement towards UC, typically as an overlay on IP telephony (VoIP). We are seeing a significant increase in the deployment of IP based video conferencing with more and more large enterprises deploying a managed telepresence solution and employees installing desktop video conferencing clients themselves. As more companies and employees try to improve their remote working experience, they are finding that UC gives them a better real-time offsite experience while helping them stay connected to their company and colleagues. Likewise, UC in the contact center improves call delivery while helping remote agents maintain their ‘presence.’

 

IP telephony or VoIP penetration is on the rise with more companies now integrating their IP telephony/VoIP systems to desktop applications. While such deployments are still nowhere near 100 percent, the trend is certainly moving that way. Once issues with the main delaying factors of budget and resources are resolved, we expect this trend to grow even more rapidly. 

 

Additionally, IP video conferencing, telepresence, and enterprise ‘broadcast’ video communications are becoming an even bigger part of the communications mix. These are being driven by three main factors; businesses’ goal to reduce their carbon footprint, the cost and time taken by corporate travel, as well as the growing trend of teleworkers. These issues are all serving to fuel UC industry trends while increasing UC deployment practices itself.   

 

 

While some enterprises have been reluctant to adopt UC amidst the current volatile economy, this has not been the case for contact centers. In such facilities, we have seen a continuous and steady increase in UC deployment. As contact center personnel handle more types of incoming calls, they now need to access multiple applications and solutions to address the incoming queries effectively. 

 

This is where UC is particularly valuable since UC can, for example, link presence, agents’ skill levels, and the available resources to more effectively address callers’ needs. This is beneficial for both the caller and the company. Callers get their issues resolved more quickly and the contact center can more easily achieve their goal of first call resolution while improving their company perception and customer experience. 

 

 

Most service providers and enterprise organizations have recognized, usually too late into the deployment, that the real-time applications behind UC (voice and video conferencing) have a unique set of operational and support challenges. When a user experiences ‘quality’ problems with a typical application, such as an e-mail or a CRM system, it is inconvenient and can be frustrating. However, when they experience a quality problem with a real-time voice call, i.e. the call suffers from echo, voice distortion, or too much background noise, it is not only frustrating, but usually ends up with the user hanging up and starting again. These real-time applications tend to generate a much more rapid, and emotional reaction when they don’t perform. Therefore, IT has to have a different approach to support users of these applications.

 

The main challenge is that there is a lack of tools available to manage users’ call experience. The tools that are generally available only focus on the network, infrastructure, and network based QoS (quality of service) metrics, none of which have anything to do with managing the users’ experience or the support of their confidence levels with this new technology. This feeds right into another challenge we’re seeing with UC installation; a lack of confidence with pre-deployment “sign-off.” There is an inability to prove that the network or installation is capable of reliably delivering real-time services since, as of now, there is insufficient service based evidence that this will work.    

 

One example of this is a major retail bank undertaking a project to rollout IP telephony across 700 locations, which stopped after the first 10 locations since users complained about voice call quality. The users were unhappy with the service levels, being unable to make intelligible phone calls. However, the IT operations team saw no problems since all their tools were reporting ‘green lights’ and the network was behaving as expected. 

 

This example highlights a typical problem with the different perception and expectations between users and IT, and their tools. In reality, while the network was performing as designed, the IP telephony application was not. There were incorrectly configured gateways introducing echo to calls, incompatible headsets, and codec configuration mismatches, all of which were invisible to the ‘normal’ network management tools. 

 

The measurement of users’ quality of experience (QoE) is now a necessity as more companies realize that QoS alone is insufficient. The ability to measure QoE, as well as network related QoS is fundamental to a consistent and acceptable IP telephony and video conferencing user experience, as well as delivering efficient operations and support. It is the combination of QoS and QoE monitoring and reporting together that makes for a good IP voice and video applications performance management strategy.

 

 

In the future, UC application within the contact center will allow for greater mobility and a wider range of services available to callers. Through UC, customers will be able to connect with contact centers through multiple multimedia services, discussion forums, wikis, and blogs.  It will also provide greater technological flexibility by allowing agents to route calls more reliably to specific departments or people based on topic using presence and connectivity knowledge. 

 

Overall, interest in, and adoption of, UC is on the rise. According to the Aberdeen Group, 59 percent of survey respondents that have VoIP in place are leveraging solutions for videoconferencing, 36 percent of them are using presence, and 34 percent of them are deploying unified messaging solutions. Moreover, 40 percent of organizations are deploying solutions that will allow them to simultaneously manage performance of VoIP, video, and UC applications.  With this growing adoption of UC, contact centers are right in line to keep up with the industry and customers’ needs.