Improving Customer Loyalty by Transforming Front-Office Operations with Cisco UCC
18. Dec, 2009 
2 Comments
The promise of Cisco’s UCC environment to transform front-office contact center operations is tremendous, but organizational leaders often find the decision a difficult one to undertake given the required investment and the complexity of implementation project. Upgrading from non-IP to IP-based call center technology irrespective of the vendor is a daunting investment, but the value for the organization isn’t realized from lowering technology operational expenses alone.
The majority of front-office operating cost is borne in call center agent labor cost, facilities, and administrative expense. Additionally front-office operations have a significant impact on the success of the organization and often either drives or impedes growth and profitability. As a result developing a business case for a front-office transformation involving a solution like Cisco’s UCC Enterprise product requires analysis of existing infrastructure costs, the new Cisco solution as well as the projecting the future transformation of the call center operation once the new contact center capabilities are available.
However, where strategies and their accompanying business cases often fall short in this arena is holistically considering the positive impact of a transformative technology like UCC on customer loyalty. The typical mistake is focusing only on cost and leaving out growth and the potential positive impact on sales and net income or the opposite outcome for doing nothing over an extended period. The typical challenge is that a holistic strategy requires top leadership to drive consensus across sales, marketing, customer care, and the supply-chain in order to gain long-term commitments (e.g. typically 5-years to coincide with depreciation of the investment) on improvements in customer loyalty.
When strategies for transforming customer loyalty bubble-up from the bottom of the organization rather than being driven down from the top leadership often departmental leaders attempt to use Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) models such as British Telecom’s OneVoice Cisco UCC solution or AT&T’s Avaya/Genesys solution to solve the problem without making a large capital investment. While this strategy often makes sense for small or mid-sized companies or departmental organizations it often has limited benefit for larger growing organizations.
Moving to IP-based technology creates opportunities for consolidating call center operations, optimizing utilization of agents, creating multi-channel contact centers operations, and deploying the latest constructs such as home-based agents. In the final analysis end customers benefit directly from these transformative strategies obtaining call center service that can be aligned closer to their intentions for calling.
Ed Fullman, Partner
Adam Smith Consulting
www.adamsmithconsulting.com
How does UCC stack up against Genesys? Where would you use Genesys over UCC?
UCC and Genesys often serve the same market, but certainly can have different values.
Often when Genesys is a more attractive solution is when a relatively geographically compact Avaya deployment or mixed Avaya and Cisco deployment has recently been done, and the client wants to consolidate and integrate, but not writeoff their current investment. Using Genesys you can combine a variety of hardware solutions together under a single Genesys routing solution.
UCC is often more attractive when most the existing equipment is fully depreciated or the call centers are geographically more disperse or if it is a large environment (e.g. over 2500 seats). While Genesys has done some very large deployments, UCC offers some unique opportunities to consolidate back office and front office telephony operations together into a single unified capabilities.
However, these scenarios are all very driven by seat counts and other traditional measures of call center complexity in order to arrive at a decision. The faster way to an answer is understanding what are the long-term transformational objectives and then analyzing the capabilities of both technologies to create that benefit. Often one of the technologies will have a clear advantage. For example, a merger or acquisition often creates a need to integrate call centers quickly in order to drive synergy benefits, a new product line and the retiring of an old product line will drive different needs, and a move to onshore from offshore in order to improve customer loyalty might drive another decision.