Only half of customer contact will be by phone in 2011

With only half of customer contact expected to be by phone next year, NEC Infrontia has unveiled a unified communications application suite targeted at call centre operators keen to integrate email and web-based customer interactions with phone-based ones.

The vendor expects only 54% of customer contact to take place over the phone by next year as email and web-based queries continue to rise. As a result, its Unified Communications for Business (UCB) offering is intended to provide customers with a means of supporting the newer channels without needing to change existing business processes.

Andrew Cooper, NECi’s sales director, said: "Early piecemeal unified communications investments have largely been met with disappointment, leaving behind communication silos unable to cope with the multimedia contact preferences of today’s customer. This failure has seeded a UC fear factor amongst many organisations."

But the firm’s UCB suite was intended to bring "order to this piecemeal approach to communications through intelligent process automation techniques", he added.

The offering includes Multimedia Queuing functionality, which enables staff to log onto live queuing information from channels ranging from instant messaging and chat to fax and email in order to help tackle backlogs.

Callers are also prioritised based on the last number that they dialled or the data they entered and routed directly using Calling Line ID to a preferred agent, the last one they spoke to or to back-up staff when things are busy. In addition, agents, operators and managers are provided with real-time views of the entire operation to ensure customers are dealt with by the correct person first time.

Other functionality includes the automation of a range of mundane manual tasks and the ability to generate customisable reports without the need for human intervention.

The product can be configured for specific requirements and will be demonstrated for the first time at the Call Centre and Customer Management Expo in Birmingham later this month.