Integrate your Contact Center with your Communications System

Imagine you’re a customer service rep at ABC Company. A customer inquiry falls into your queue, and you need an internal expert to help solve the problem. ABC Company has a traditional standalone contact center, which is siloed from the communications system for the rest of the company. Without integration, you’ll need to switch through various screens and navigate multiple departments to find the right expert, get the answers you need, and communicate the information back to the customer. This could result in a lengthy call and an unsatisfied customer.

But what if ABC Company has integrated their contact center (CC) with their unified communication (UC) platform? How would this scenario play out differently?

Before we explore the scenario of an integrated customer service experience, you’re probably wondering why it’s a good idea to integrate in the first place. To start with, connecting UC and CC solutions improves internal collaboration, increases productivity, and it all comes together to improve end customer satisfaction. Taking it a step further, choosing a single vendor for both provides a seamless integration and easier management.

Let’s dig deeper into these benefits.

Improve Collaboration

Contact centers have historically been siloed from the rest of the company. By integrating UC and CC solutions, companies can chip away at the silos and improve collaboration between their contact center agents and other areas of business. Contact center agents can easily connect with subject matter experts and other company departments to solve customer problems more efficiently. This ensures that information can flow more seamlessly throughout the organization, leading to many efficiencies and a more streamlined customer experience. In return, customer service agents can provide customer insights to other departments to better align customer-focused initiatives like campaigns.

Improve Productivity

Integration enables agents to reach others in the company quickly and easily. Having information more readily available frees agents to spend more time on productive and more strategic work. Supervisors can also more easily communicate with agents for coaching and performance tracking through the same UC collaboration platform the rest of the company uses. Increasing opportunities for managers and agents to connect benefits the company because more training and feedback leads to more skilled and productive agents.

Improve Customer Experience

Providing the best possible customer experience is the ultimate goal of any business, and UC/CC integration could put you one step ahead of the competition. You’ll connect the customer-facing agents with back-end experts quickly, enabling agents with more information to better serve your customer. With better collaboration and increased productivity, combined with advanced yet intuitive features, agents can deliver a more personalized and effective customer experience.

Why a single vendor?

Integrating UC and CC solutions from a single vendor ensures a more seamless integration and simplified management. The solutions should work together effortlessly, without any compatibility issues or software conflicts. This ensures a smoother user experience ─ both internally and with your customers.

Managing separate solutions from different vendors can be complicated, time-consuming, and more expensive. From different bills to different interfaces, using disparate solutions for unified communications and contact center can make doing business more difficult. In some cases, integration may not even be possible. When you integrate two solutions from a single vendor, you simplify management and administration through a single bill and support team. You’ll be able to focus on your core business activities, rather than managing multiple vendors.

Back to ABC

Let’s revisit the customer service rep from ABC Company. With integration, the agent can quickly and easily connect with a subject matter expert through a UC solution to answer the customer’s inquiry. In fact, the expert could even be conferenced into the call to help address a complex problem.  The collaboration that the solution integration facilitates results in a more streamlined process for the agent and a faster resolution for the customer.  

How Avaya Can Help

Integrating UC and CC solutions from a single vendor can provide many benefits for your company and your customers, and it’s especially easy to do in the cloud. Avaya’s award-winning UCaaS solution, Avaya Cloud Office® by RingCentral, and Avaya Experience Platform CCaaS solution, come together to create effortless experiences for employees and customers alike. Reach out to an Avaya representative today to learn more and start your customer experience transformation.