Art Rosenberg presents some of the keenest insights into the heart of things. Last week he posted

UC and "Customer Productivity" for the Enterprise
Excerpt...

Rich, Web-based customer services are continually increasing and displacing the limitations of the voice-only telephone as a first step for customer access to information and self-service applications. That’s a fact of life as consumers exploit the conveniences of both desktop PC’s and mobile, multimodal handheld devices for doing business over the Internet. The moment of truth, however, comes whenever customers need the added intelligence and flexibility of human assistance. That is where the power of UC will enable greater customer access to people resources, not only within an enterprise, but outside the organization as well.

From an “ROI” perspective, any technology that helps generate revenue more quickly or improves customer satisfaction and retention for future revenues will always be at the top of every business organization’s priority list. I would term this benefit of UC technology for customer contact applications as being an improvement in “customer productivity!”

Art makes some very key points. Areas upon which the real success of unified communications services will hinge.

Self-service applications are an absolute key to success. Whether dealing with the public in a retail setting or establishing unified communications tools inside the enterprise, the real key hits one of those awful corporate buzzwords - empowerment. Self-service empowerment is the real value of the Internet and the key to unified communications applications. Giving users the power to do what they need to do. Enabling easy access to informaton and services. Another factor will be enabling users to mash services together as they see fit.

A good example of this done well is the Sitofono and Grand Central mashup I described here. These two solutions empowered me to create yet a third solution to meet my own needs at the time. In short, they empowered me to do what I needed to do.

Art describes the idea of virtual customer asssitance. He touches on ideas of how service providers might create migration planning tools as one example.

Here's what I came away from Art's post with as the most powerful observation - '

It's about how we'll do business in the future. If we keep doing the things we've always done, we will keep getting the results we've always gotten. That's an old adage. When developing a unified communications architecture strategy we can ask one of two questions:
I think there's a huge difference here that signals, for some, another shift in corporate culture. Unified communications can redefine how we communicate. Done well, we can look to the future and build new tools for improved customer relations. Done poorly, we can use new tools to continue doing things the way we always have.

If we aren't agents of change, looking to the future and anticipating new modes and streams of customer service communications, why change at all?


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