How to Optimize Business Process ROI with Unified Communications

Step No. 5: Educate employees/agents and foster culture for unified communications

Communicating regularly with employees and contact center agents is important to user adoption and a seamless customer experience. This stage involves the development and execution of adoption and putting a production support strategy in place, including a change readiness assessment, knowledge transfer, communications plan and user training.

After rolling out UC in our organization, we scheduled small group sessions for training employees on how to use the technology. We also had regular communications and updates on the implementation, e-mailing employees when we reached major milestones in the rollout. Our contact center staff quickly learned how to call other employees with point-and-click call functionality.

Step No. 6: Measure your progress in UC-enabled business processes and identify areas for improvement

A successful UC implementation will deliver reduced costs in telephony and maintenance. But to measure improvements in business processes, a company will need to gauge customer satisfaction to determine whether UC is really improving customer-company communications. Companies must measure customer feedback through post-call surveys, transactional surveys and call monitoring to pinpoint areas for improvement.

In our case, we found that the UC technology, coupled with unified contact center capabilities, reduced call hold time by 76 percent and improved customer satisfaction scores by 6 percent. UC helped us streamline our business processes, saving us more than $20,000 per month in telephony costs and reduce conferencing costs by $1 million in the first year of implementation. In our case, the cost savings were an immediate benefit of the deployment but any company that carefully plans a UC rollout with goals in mind should look at extending the UC capabilities to the contact center.

Clearly, UC has the potential to save significant costs, but it can also deliver ROI by improving communications with customers, streamlining business processes and, ultimately, changing the way companies communicate.

Gary Barnett is the Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Technical Services and Research & Development at Aspect. As CTO, Gary is responsible for corporate planning, product architecture, and product lifecycle management. He also oversees strategic partnerships and long-term product integration plans that support enterprise-level applications. As Executive VP, Gary ensures that customers receive the level of product support required to achieve their goals in collections, customer service, and sales and telemarketing. Gary also leads the company's technology development effort and is responsible for delivering all current and future Aspect solutions.

Previously, Gary served as president and CEO at Aspect. Before that, Gary was a founding engineer at Octel Communications. In 1987, Gary was a founder of Prospect Software, a company that pioneered computer-telephony integration in the early 1990s. Gary holds a Bachelor's degree from Western Kentucky University and a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky. He can be reached at info@aspect.com.