Implementing unified communications in the call center means negotiating a young and confusing vendor landscape and clearing a significant internal hurdle.
'You have to remember that call centers are one of the most conservative groups in all of business,' said Keith Dawson, senior analyst with San Antonio-based Frost & Sullivan, a market research firm. 'When there are exciting and beneficial technologies for them to use, they're slow to adopt. The hype, the buzzword has gotten ahead -- not of the technology but of the willingness and readiness of call center managers to do something different.'
It's a phenomenon not unique to unified communications, Dawson added. Unified communications qualifies as an exciting and beneficial technology, he said. Yet speech analytics and performance management, other technologies proven to provide real results in the call center, have also seen low adoption rates.
Unified communications in the call center promises to improve the customer experience by extending the customer service operation beyond the walls of the call center and into the greater enterprise through the use of presence and collaboration tools -- all from one platform. Under the model, when a customer calls with a question beyond the expertise of a call center agent, the agent simply identifies a subject-matter expert from within the organization, determines who is available, and then transfers the customer to the person best prepared to answer the question.
While there has been some adoption of unified communications within service operations, it's still in the early stages, according to industry observers. To date, most of the interest and use of unified communications has taken place outside the call center.
'Call centers will probably lag in adoption of unified communications, although some of the most important areas are the ability to see the availability of subject-matter experts and bring them into the transaction,' said Elizabeth Herrell, vice president and principal analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. 'The initial rollout in a lot of corporations is for pilots and special groups testing and evaluating -- knowledge workers, remote employees, groups that have need to collaborate regularly.'
There has been some adoption of unified communications in the call center, particularly with companies that have high-value customers or highly technical products, according to Michael Maoz, vice president and distinguished analyst with Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. Organizations that are ready to bring unified communications to the call center are generally turning to their infrastructure providers for answers.
'You see the beginnings,' Maoz said. 'The vendors are saying, 'How do we bridge this gap‾' We know there's a business case, but closing the gap between Cisco and SAP or Cisco and Oracle within product sets is no simple task. The likelihood for the short term is that communications providers will work with business application providers rather than one company own both sides.'
Yet the market for unified communications technology itself is an immature one, and the call center aspect only makes it harder to peg, particularly when it comes to the complexities in licensing call center software for the broader enterprise.
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