Look Before you Buy – Skype in the Contact Centre

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With Contact Centre platform vendors quick to say they support Skype for Business, you need to make sure you understand what you are buying.

When a new technology emerges there is a period of experimentation that can be quite bewildering for purchasers – especially if it emerges quickly. Many claims are made and so prospective customer’s imaginations can easily mislead them as to what they will really be buying.

I was struck by this fact when reading about Skype for Business based contact centres. Although it can be argued that Skype for Business has taken its time to arrive through its various iterations such as OCS and Lync, it now appears to have broken a barrier and is being rapidly deployed in back offices around the globe for voice, as well as the presence and instant messaging that has been staple for many years.

Pressure will be put on contact centre managers by IT management keen to roll out Skype across the organisation. But the back office is not the front office where contact centres need to present best quality communications to customers. Organisations are only just beginning to look at this, but there are clearly plenty of offerings. Many established and new contact centre platforms claim to support Skype. At the same time commentators are writing about the potential to use integrated Skype in the contact centre to provide free calls, transition from IM to video calls with customers, and find and include in calls experts in the organisation using Skype for Business presence. A new age of collaboration is promised.

All is possible but simply saying that your platform supports Skype for Business does not mean you will get any of this.

Stephen Wright

Stephen Wright

Traditional CC platforms may simply use Skype as a voice path to a PBX, but all the CC capability is managed in the platform, so no Skype collaborative features may be available. Even where you have a heavily integrated Skype instance, getting the full capability may not be on the cards. If the initial call comes in via a traditional PBX, through Skype, you will not be able to transition the PBX based call to a Skype video call because the call will not be a federated call. And this is all before you start to discuss the differences between an on premise Skype for Business and customers who use Microsoft’s cloud solutions.

In a world where “Skype support” can mean many things, what you get will vary depending on how natively Skype is supported and how the connection is actually made with the specific customer interaction. There is a real opportunity to use Skype to improve customer service but the message is always the same. Understand what you need the contact centre to do to provide good customer service and then make sure that you know what the platform you are buying will actually support. Buyer beware!

With thanks to Stephen Wright at Azzurri Communications

Author: Rachael Trickey

Published On: 11th Aug 2016 - Last modified: 14th Nov 2018
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