The Merging of Contact Center and Unified Communications, Part 2

Business owners today are now understanding that having a basic contact center as part of their UC system enables much better customer service, and are asking to add multimodal contact center features to the UC system. Why have another specific expensive contact center unit (either on-prem or another monthly cloud expense) if the UC system can handle the basic contact center features that would help a small business?  Because why not – the UC system already includes multimodal communication potential.    Some basic phone features include music on hold, callback when available, call queues, having inbound callers hang-up while in queue and still retain their position in line, built-in queue priority so specific customers can be prioritized above others in the queue, automated appointment reminders allowing your team to schedule calls and allowing recipients to confirm, cancel or reschedule, and routing rules (such as time of day routing or department routing). These all-important call center or contact center features enable better customer service and even make the small business look bigger to the outside world. All of what is described above can be routed to a business phone number, which as described above can be your desk phone and/or your smartphone and/or your laptop.  So you can handle customer service calls remotely as well. And some businesses also want their phone system to integrate with other commonly used business tools, such as CRM, help desk, property management or practice management software. This is an aspect of expensive dedicated contact center software that is also being brought into the UC realm, as UC starts to merge with CC. For example, customer information can easily be accessible to whoever answers the phone, even if it’s not a dedicated agent, in a small business, saving valuable time for the customer. The customer phone number can help pull up prior customer information so when the small business gets on the phone, they may already know what the customer is calling about. Also, if a customer service rep needs to find an expert in the company, then a UC tool with presence can help the rep get an answer fast.   We are seeing more and more contact center features start to become part of the UC phone system. There are many businesses that need some contact center functionality, but not like those required for large gigantic contact centers like large airlines or financial institutions might need. So we’ll see offers for smaller businesses emerge, where the features they need are just part of the overall system. If you are looking for an affordable business phone system that includes all the features you typically need, even contact center features and a desktop and smartphone mobile client, Sangoma’s UC platforms are for you.  To read the first part of this two-part Machi Minute series, click here!  

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