3 Trends Driving the Push for UC Integration

Julian Tiongson at Five9 shares insights on the trends that are driving the push for UC integration.

We have all witnessed a complete shift in how companies are doing business over this past year. For contact centres, that meant managing a remote workforce while trying to keep business running without any major hiccups.

Agents were sent home with headsets and computers to work from within their own homes. Agents had to quickly adapt as they no longer had the help of other agents or supervisors in the same office space.

The in-person interactions were now gone, as was the support agents once had. It was new and unfamiliar territory for many.

As we’re in another year of uncertainty, let’s take a look at three of the top trends that have been driving businesses to incorporate UC integration.  

1.Remote Work Environment

While this isn’t necessarily new territory for many technology companies, this was new for the contact centre industry.

Traditional contact centre environments consisted of large workspaces with agents all in one area, which made it easy to collaborate. If someone needed an answer, they could typically find someone within the office to help.

As companies shifted to handle a remote work environment, collaboration became one of the biggest question marks. How can businesses continue to collaborate and provide a similar if not better customer experience with the challenges of being remote?

That’s where the adoption of UC integration comes into play. It enables agents to access subject matter experts safely from within their own homes.

What was seen as a big challenge is being solved by integrating the contact centre with a unified communications system. Agents now have the ability to reach an expert when needed to help with their customer inquiries.

According to Microsoft, users of Microsoft Teams used their collaboration solution for more than 2.7 billion minutes each day in April of 2020, which was a 200 percent increase from the 900 million it recorded just a month prior.

The remote work environment doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon.  

2.Investment in Customer Experience (CX)

Customer experience continues to be top of mind for businesses. Happy customers lead to loyal customers. Sounds simple enough, right? However, no one could have anticipated what occurred this past year and many were not prepared.

With in-person interactions limited, consumers were no longer shopping in stores and forced the hand for businesses to invest more in digitally improving the customer experience.

Think of the contact centre as the front door to your business. As you walk into a store, you are accustomed to being greeted and asked how they can help you.

You are directed to the right place or even introduced to an expert in a specific part of the store. Companies and brands had to rethink how they could reproduce the in-person experience digitally and invested more heavily in technology to help provide that new experience.

According to a Salesforce report, 76% of service professionals prefer the phone for more complex cases. While contact centres have no issue handling phone interactions, the problem occurs with more complex cases that require knowledge outside of the contact centre.

The integration of contact centre and UC provides agents with the ability to transfer or conference in a subject matter expert in real time to help answer the more complex questions or issues – creating a more seamless customer experience.  

3.Continued Shift to the Cloud

Cloud adoption significantly increased over the past year as companies adopted a remote workforce. With 67% of organizations moving significant portions of their unified communications solutions to the cloud, it was long overdue.

Cloud-based solutions offer benefits that far surpass the scope of on premises solutions such as the ability to quickly, easily, and reliably go-live with even more functionality.

Today’s modern, cloud-based solutions also help eliminate the need to devote large amounts of IT resources to develop and maintain a custom integration.

While businesses are still faced with many uncertainties, these three trends are certain to help improve efficiency and increase business agility.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Five9 – View the Original Article

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Five9 provides end-to-end solutions with omnichannel routing, analytics, WFO, and AI to increase agent productivity and deliver tangible business results.

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Author: Five9