Going forward, this will have an increasing impact on how successfully businesses engage with customers and their employees.
Spescom DataFusion is a gold partner to world-class communication platform provider Avaya, and the next generation user experience and the 3-click user experience are among the global trends it has identified for 2010.
The communications industry is already developing processes and enabling technologies that provide greater consistency across multimodal interfaces, whether customers choose to use smartphones, standard telephones or the Web.
Businesses, meanwhile, are starting to pay greater attention to how employees engage using new communications technologies. While still respecting privacy standards, they are beginning to track phone calls, instant messages and emails of their employees to facilitate predicting employees’ work needs and behaviours.
This is in the interests of increasing staff productivity and efficiency and, when it comes to customers, the effectiveness of interactions and quality of service.
A related development is the increasing realisation of unified communications and the 3-click user experience. With the increased use of SIP and session management, companies are able to build, deploy and support applications much more easily. The ideal of workers being enabled under a three click paradigm – in three seconds or less and three clicks – is becoming a reality. This means workers have access to more resources and applications, regardless of the device they’re using.
The practical impact of these developments is only just being realised. The way voice and data communications are structured, delivered and used by businesses around the world is changing. Where previously social communication platforms like Skype, chat services and instant messaging were used purely for social purposes, they are today increasingly being used to make business decisions.
The questions businesses need to be asking themselves is: how does this trend affect their operations and business risk, and what opportunities does it open up?
To start with, it means these new generation interactions need to be recorded and archived to limit business risk and meet legal requirements in terms of record keeping. On the other hand, knowing what communication channels customers prefer, and contacting them via their preferred means at convenient times will boost contact rates, increase sales and improve
customer service levels. In addition, understanding how these channels are being used by employees, will allow the company to better enable staff by adapting processes and leveraging new communication platforms for operations, logistics, sales and decision making.
Unified communications and 3-click enablement are closely linked, however. SIP-enabled environments help companies blend complex communications infrastructures and applications from a wide variety of vendors so they work together. This will see the advent of multi-vendor networks, where functionality is king, and brand-agnostic. It will also change the way the time and intellect of staff are applied.
With a unified front end, the workplace becomes more efficient, streamlined and effective. Gone will be the need to train employees extensively to use complex diverse applications and follow laborious processes. Specialised skills can be put to work doing what they do best, not learning about how the technology works.
Using technology to make a difference at a business level is important. Even seemingly simple technologies can start companies on this journey. For example, proactive outbound contact technology focuses contact centre agents on the business process, rather than the contact process.
