It’s official. Presence is “cool.”
You know this because kids use it all the time to chat with their friends and you hear the techies at the office go on endlessly about it.
You also know it’s cool because your parents think it’s all really very nice but aren’t especially sure what they’d do with it. So it must be cool.
Unlike consumers, where being “cool” is often king, companies will only adopt new technology when it is able to demonstrate real tangible business value. So, for them, it has to be “useful” too.
It’s not difficult to come across examples where the ability to utilise presence information could dramatically improve customer service. A recent financial transaction I was trying to complete via a contact centre could not be completed because the agent I was talking to was unable to locate an appropriately qualified representative to help me complete the transaction. Presence, of course, could have helped them identify a person with the required qualifications.
Many of the customers I talk to openly acknowledge the potential business benefits that presence could bring to them in the contact centre, but are often daunted by the potential organisational impacts that it may have, like introducing back office experts with little or no training directly into customer calls.
What customers are often looking for are ways to implement presence in the organisation and gain operational experience before tackling larger customer-service-related projects. For example, my recent customer discussions have included the following:
A company with a dispersed workforce that was beginning to rely too heavily on e-mail communication between staff, looking to use presence to bring back person-to-person voice communications. The ability to see a colleague’s presence indicating a voice call would likely be successful would have enhanced collaboration and sped up decision-making.
A company with a reception desk that was often unsure if an employee was available when visitors arrived to see them. Presence would be used to help ascertain availability and which communication method to use to announce the visitors arrival.
A company switchboard looking to use presence information to ensure the process of routing calls to employees was as efficient as possible. Presence information would be used by the switchboard operator to work out the most appropriate call treatment depending on the caller’s needs and the recipient’s status.
These examples may appear mundane and trivial to some, but what they allow these companies to do is implement this exciting new technology in a low-risk environment with defined and measurable business impacts.
As experience with presence increases and the organisation becomes more familiar with the concepts, it becomes easier to move on to the high-impact, service-related projects that can really transform a business’s interactions with its customers.
