When this situation occurs, the Level 1 support technician that has reached the end of their troubleshooting flowchart without arriving at a viable resolution for you must find a more experienced and/or knowledgeable technician to escalate the problem to. Preferably, a technician with specific expertise with your exact issue.

With traditional call center systems and processes, identifying and locating the right person to address the issue most efficiently, and thereby deliver the best possible customer service, is daunting at best. With unified communications, and presence, though, the contact center can be transformed into a paragon of efficiency and superior customer service.

In How Unified Communications Can Improve the Contact Center, the author states “Now, with UC, they can search a complete list of subject matter experts (together with their presence availability), and contact them via IM or telephone, in order to get the information they need, when they need it. Finding the right resource in this way may not only solve the problem on a single call but also lead to higher customer satisfaction, increased sales, and more successful cross and up-selling of products. No wonder many companies are already reporting over 100% ROIs on their UC investments!”

If you have a contact center or customer support department, you should definitely be looking at the ways that unified communications can streamline your processes and enable you to improve customer satisfaction while cutting costs.

Aspect recently announced that this December they will roll out Unified IP v6.6. According to the article “Aspect Unified IP 6.6 is designed to offer an ask-an-expert capability using the instant messaging and presence technology available in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. This newest feature enables Aspect Unified IP to seamlessly integrate to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 to specifically request real-time presence information.”