Today, contact centre technology is not only to communicate directly with customers— organisations also gain significant benefits from leveraging cloud-based unified communications technology.
Employees who are now working from home full-time may be reaping the benefits of unified communications solutions, but it has not always been the case that those workers were able to have the full corporate experience when it comes to daily operations.
In an exclusive interview with UC Today, Dean Holmes, Director of Product Marketing at Fuze, said that bringing together unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS) would allow questions from employees to be answered immediately and break down barriers and siloes between departments that hinder efficiency. He said,
“Bringing UCaaS and CCaaS together does this, in general, it just makes communication more efficient. Both administration and visibility are simpler as well”
Bringing contact center technology together with unified communications can also help managers see where staff members may need a little more help without giving the impression that they are looking over their shoulders.
“You don’t really want to play the watchdog, since it’s already a difficult time as it is. But when I can look at the tool and I can see that of the five or ten people that are on my team, one of them seems to be making less calls or meetings, or they’re not messaging as many people as they may have been previously… maybe I need to reach out and see what’s going on and how I can help.”
According to Holmes, regardless of whether you have employees in a contact centre environment or not, having such tools allows users to communicate in an engaging fashion with each other. “It makes it a lot easier to communicate, keep people engaged, and make sure everybody’s on task.”
Maintaining business continuity when you can’t be in the office
Prior to COVID-19, many organisations’ business continuity plans were based around situations such as an office having no power, or perhaps having a handful of people working from home at one time. The present situation now faced by companies is having the whole contact center “at home” and making sure there is infrastructure in place to ensure employees can keep working. From a user standpoint, Holmes argued, the first thing users need is access to the tools to do their job. They may not have had time to grab a laptop, and a desktop computer cannot be easily taken home and used.
“Making it easy for an agent to log in to the platform and get on to calls is key,” he said. “Here they have the ability to use a web client, like Chrome, log into Fuze, and do everything: take and make phone calls, and video conference with screen sharing capabilities. I can message and chat with everybody and have the exact same experience I have on my desktop client but on my web client.”
“So now, as an agent, I can go home, I can log onto any computer, and get my work done as I normally would”
But as important as it is that the agent work as easily from home as they can from the office, managers also have the visibility to see what people are working on and see that they are keeping up with tasks and what they should be doing.
“That releases a little bit of anxiety for a manager as well. The team is still taking the same number of calls; they’re still communicating across the platform and engaging in the things that they need to do every day. So, I can relax a bit knowing it’s business as usual,” he said. Cloud-based unified communications combined with contact center technology does, in fact, ensure things are business as usual— from anywhere in the world.
