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Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) company, has taken a step in bringing unified communication (UC) to the contact center environment. The company launched UC Connect , a product initiative designed to foster integration and interoperability between the Genesys (News - Alert) Customer Interaction Management (CIM) software platform and UC solutions.

 

With UC Connect, Genesys integrates its CIM platform directly with UC platforms including Alcatel-Lucent's MyInstant Communicator, IBM Sametime, Microsoft (News - Alert) Office Communications Server 2007, and Siemens Openscape.

 

With increasing use of presence, instant messaging and softphones, all of which can reside within the UC applications, allows the larger pool of workers to participate in and add value to a customer interaction.

 

By integrating UC platforms with the Genesys CIM platform, UC Connect solves various problems. The contact center integration with the back and branch office has been difficult because back office software and telephone systems were not designed to connect employees, whose primary job function was not customer service, to the contact center. Routing an interaction to a back or branch office resource, reporting on it, passing along the customer information or notes, and maintaining consistent processes were impossible unless complicated contact agent applications were deployed on the desktops of all knowledge workers.

 

Genesys UC Connect first subscribes to presence capabilities provided by UC platforms to determine the availability of "enterprise resources," like experts and back/branch office workers, and then mapping that presence to "agent-state," which is an indicator of an agent's real-time availability to accept interactions. Rather than displaying available enterprise resources to contact center agents by name, the Genesys CIM platform shows these resources' identities by skill sets and provides a view of their UC presence relative to the availability of the entire skill set.

 

Genesys UC Connect also integrates an Interaction Preview and Auction mechanism that sends an interaction preview to resources within a skill pool whose UC presence shows "Available" and renders this preview within the UC client. Only when a worker clicks "Accept" is the interaction sent to them. This shows that workers are available in real time without requiring manual updates to their UC presence.

 

"Today at Genesys we are working with various companies and partners to connect UC enabled Enterprise employees/experts to the customer service and sales operation and to accomplish this goal in a way that drives both operational and capital efficiencies, increases sales, improves customer experience and firmly aligns with our Dynamic Customer Engagement direction," stated David Sudbey, Executive Vice President of Strategic Solutions and Global Channels. "UC Connect represents our firm commitment to supporting our customers as they adopt new innovations and strive to find more value in them."