Unified communications tends to become the long-term goal of a large amount of enterprises. Correctly implemented UC can significantly contribute to business process efficiency in various ways. Intra-company communication becomes more robust and effective, while also customer interactions across multiple channels offer convenience and increased transaction speed.
However, in most unified communications systems deployed currently, the experience is far from the ideal. Companies trying to implement UC often fail to understand the requirements of deploying such solutions. Buying and deploying some equipment that smoothly integrates communication channels is important, but it is not enough.
The most common problem that UC deployments fail to address is the customer representative training required to operate across different channels. A very illustrative example of unified communications fail is this chat discussion. The agent serving the customer in this example shows pretty typical behavior observed in carrier (and other sector) contact centers: he uses scripts that don’t always fit the discussion, he is not well-trained in his field (which becomes more obvious because the customer in this case is rather knowledgeable about the nature of his problem) and he is also quite inflexible. The fact that he is consistently urging the customer during the chat session to use phone support to continue troubleshooting is a typical example of horrible UC implementation. The channels in this example give the impression of being an extra tool the company uses to manipulate the customers rather than serving them.
More hilarious situations seem to appear lately, as some companies attempt to use social media to interact with their customers. I heard another story a couple of days ago from a friend, trying to contact a company by twitter. He expressed his problem and he was promptly asked to contact via the call center where the waiting time was more than 30 minutes. In both these examples, the company failed in the selection of appropriate human resources to support the new channel and/or usage of appropriate processes for the specific channel. The agents assigned to the alternative channels should be both well-trained in the company products, services and business processes, as well as in using the particular channel. In the ideal scenario, some of the most skilled agents of the contact center should be able to use more than one channel, providing a free load balancing mechanism among the UC channels in the process.
Unified communications success depends largely on intra-company culture. Every single member of the company (not only the agents) should be trained to appreciate how UC systems work and how to make the most out of them. UC unavoidably create a new environment, and everyone should adapt and finds their place in the new ecosystem. Teamwork is also necessary for success. There are many UC implementations that simply fail because the company employees cannot use them as they should.
Another common problem that contributes to unpleasant alternative communication methods is bad understanding of the technological characteristics and requirements of each channel. Most often than not, this leads to bad interface designs. There are countless examples of this issue, from “multi-lingual” websites that provide completely different information on the same issue depending on the language to “spaghetti” self-service interfaces. This is tightly related to the end customers themselves. The delivered system should be simple and intuitive to use. If one of the channels is far more efficient than the rest, users/customers will end up over utilizing it and ignoring the rest.
A lot of the UC failure deployments can be also attributed to vendors. Many vendors attempt to sell unified communications as a technological product, while it should rather be a solution. Unified communications is not about building a couple of gateways to integrate the communication channels. It is a far broader concept that relates to company culture, business processes, human resource behavior, technological products, strategy and a lot more. This is documented in more detail in this blog post.
The conclusion is that, if a company wishes to incorporate new communication channels, it should first get ready to actually use them in a constructive way. And this is not an easy task. Otherwise, it is better to just stick to the phone. It will be better for both the customers and the company.
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