Integrating presence

18/11/2008 | By Julia White

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Currently most people perceive UC as ‘presence’ – the ability to see the availability of others, to click and then to dial them from the PC.

The increasing use of instant communication channels and instant access to services such as those which reside on the internet, has led to a culture of expectation that drives behaviour. This culture expects faster responses, especially in the areas of customer service, and as we move forward, communications that hinder this culture will become less prevalent, unless we can remove human latency.

Employees and organisations are losing the ability to manage the vast array of communications and devices they need to perform their day jobs, whilst juggling a hectic lifestyle that can negatively affect someone who is striving for a good work/life balance.

UC incorporates a variety of methods that, when deployed as part of a UC strategy, will enable you to work more intelligently and efficiently. It can drive cost savings through technical efficiency, allowing your business to improve customer service, make faster decisions and quickly and efficiently locate relevant resources.

UC delivers, via a single interface, a comprehensive range of communications services and associated information designed to reduce the delays and frustrations of communication between individual employees, the extended virtual organisation and external customers.

It empowers staff by freeing them from a complexity of technology, allowing them to concentrate on why they are communicating. By allowing people to work from home, the office, remotely or on the move, without compromising their ability to work collaboratively and effectively sharing the same information as their office colleagues, organisations can maximise their skills and enhance both employee and customer satisfaction.

Whatever your occupation, there are demands made on your time that can be dramatically impacted by technology that can enable communications to be managed from one place.

There are many interpretations of what is incorporated in UC but most companies see it today as two sets of requirements.

1. Those requiring ‘Visibility’ – simplifying methods of communications/reducing costs of playing phone and message tag/see people are available at a glance (IM/call or tag), leverage investment in applications by deploying easy-to-use applets that enhance the power of the desktop, ability to find people/documents and customer contact details quickly and easily regardless of location. This approach means that the company has a clear strategy for the desktop and how users will interact with each other and how this strategy relates to business process in both the front and back office.

2. Those requiring ‘Visibility’ and click to dial.

Customer service
The main business challenges today are finding people/information/and high-value items such as a portable cardiac machine in a hospital. In the situations where time is critical for decision∞making or providing high service levels, presence integration provides a capability that was previously impossible.

Eventually, from a customer perspective, once information is flowing between applications, customers receive notification on purchases/queries/current transactions by text or email, or they can call to discuss anything around the transaction with someone who has all the relevant customer information in front of them. 

The communications infrastructure for a contact centre, using Presence instead of skills-based routing as in a traditional call centre, will provide a new capability of ‘interuptability’ based on work flows and business process, rather than ‘availability’ as today. This means that application intelligence can make a decision based upon known workload and priority and deliver that piece of work to an agent to handle within assigned SLAs.  

Collaboration – simplify working together
There are four sets of technology investments consistent with customer challenges.

1. Empower Teams Through Workspaces
Solution: Single holistic environment for work and problem solving. Increase workplace performance and foster innovation and greater market responsiveness. Seamlessly work with others to get work done, whether connected to the corporate network or disconnected, remote or mobile. Work from a single pane in the context of team work. Promote controlled, pervasive access to collaborative workspaces.
 
2. Connect People Process and Information
Solution: A centralised place to provide self∞service access to automated workflow processes. This workflow process can be integrated with existing databases, LOB systems and applications to expose data to the people who need it to make business decisions. An enriched portal experience is possible via role-based personalisation and targeting of content, data and information. Seamlessly share access to people, processes and information across the firewall with external partners, vendors and/or customers.
 
3. Harness Collective Intelligence
Solution: A standard method of promoting subject matter experts to facilitate knowledge sharing amongst colleagues and to expose knowledge through a pervasive and accessible network by allowing users to find and connect with experts. Build community to promote sharing of ideas and information by leveraging enterprise-ready and secure social computing tools to form a searchable web of intelligence as part of the organisation’s collaboration infrastructure.
 
4. Reduce Cost & Complexity for IT
Solution: Simplify the cost and complexity of offering collaboration capabilities. Leverage existing products and infrastructure to keep IT costs down. Reduce time needed for managing, monitoring and maintaining collaboration infrastructure to allow IT to take on more strategic roles and responsibilities. Leverage extensible, standards-based, service-oriented architecture of the portals platform to develop business-driven applications for the organisation. Integrate with all systems and applications, regardless of vendor and platform.

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