The Power of Unified Communications - Part 2
Managing, automating, and streamlining communications is increasingly becoming a critical way for organizations to reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, and increase employee productivity (and satisfaction if done properly). To achieve these goals, it’s critical to not only deploy a modern Unified Communications infrastructure, but also to make smart investments in customizing business processes to leverage the power of that infrastructure. While there are meaningful benefits that can be derived simply by deploying a product like Microsoft Office Communications Server, the real opportunities to differentiate your brand and reduce costs come through the extensibility platform the product exposes.
With the release of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Microsoft introduced version 2.0 of the Unified Communications Managed API (UCMA 2.0). This API puts powerful real time communication capabilities into the hands of millions of .NET developers. For the first time, we no longer need to use specialized tools to develop and deploy things like automated call distribution solutions or automated response systems.
In Part 2 of the Contoso Retail demo, we worked with Microsoft to build an innovative solutions for the retail environment that was focused on delivering the following benefits:
- Costumer Satisfaction: Reduce the time for customers to get answers to product questions and allow them to have the products delivered as early as possible.
- Workforce Utilization: Allow Contoso to better utilize their workforce by leveraging presence-based routing to tap into idle associates across all of the retail locations.
- Brand Differentiation: Deliver a brand strengthening/differentiating experience for customers when they communicate with Contoso.
We’re incredibly excited about the opportunities this new platform enables.