Unified Communications: Soon a Standard in the Contact Center?

If you thought unified communications was just some passing fad and would never see the light of day in your contact center, you might want to think again.

A recent report from industry research firm Gartner lists unified communications, or “UC” for short, as being one of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009. And by strategic, Gartner means this technology will have significant impact on companies during the next three years.

Arguably, UC is going to be one of the biggest game-changing technologies the contact center industry will see this decade. What’s interesting though, is that there’s still no clear-cut definition of what UC is.

For some, it is a systems-based approach to integrating instant messaging, presence, Web conferencing and telephony. For others, it’s a method or system for integrating messages of different types (voice, video, e-mail, fax) into a single, unified inbox.

During the next five years, Gartner predicts, the number of communications vendors will be reduced by at least 50% through consolidation. This trend will be driven by two main factors: increased capabilities of application servers, and a shift toward off-the-shelf servers and operating systems for communications applications.

Because organizations will likely have far fewer vendors to work with, they will be seeking hardware that can scale relatively easily and software built on industry standards, in order to future-proof investments. This makes sense as a general business strategy -- particularly given the current economic climate in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Gartner also predicts that formerly distinct markets in the IT industry will converge and a massive consolidation in the communications industry is just around the corner.

So what does this mean for your contact center? Well, for one thing, you can expect the remaining vendors working in the contact center space -- following this massive round of consolidation -- to start rolling out “all-in-one” systems based on some variety of UC architecture. And to stay competitive, you‘ll likely need to invest in these new systems.

This will be a good thing if you’re looking to disperse your contact center operations and harness the advantages afforded through regional centers and/or the remote agent model. These all-in-one systems will include everything from ACD to IVR to workforce management to workforce optimization to analytics -- only they will be more tightly integrated than we’ve seen with past software suites. Plus they will be delivered predominantly via the software-as-a-service model, which has its own inherent advantages in terms of cost. Because UC is the next iteration of the virtualized contact center network, it is only logical that most companies will want to move in this direction.

The real advantage UC brings to the contact center is improved customer service. By integrating voice with other real-time communications applications such as instant messaging, presence and Web conferencing, contact center agents will be able to provide better, faster service.