Can Everyone Support the Contact Center?

Over on NoJitter.com, Shiela McGee Smith and Eric Krapf have written about Aspects new focus on unified communications in the contact center, and why thats a good thing. Aspect isnt the only company to tout the benefits of UC in the customer service arena; Avaya, Cisco and others have been beating that drum for a while.And plenty of analysts, myself included, note that the contact center is a great proving ground for UC, since minutes matter there, and theyre already being measured. Implement UC and you can prove its valuebeing able to find the right people at the right timeby showing faster response times and better customer satisfaction ratings.One oft-mentioned feature of UC in the contact center is the ability to bring ordinary knowledge workers into the customer service equation. Eric points out that more than 10% of all contact center calls require information from someone outside the contact center itself, and he notes that studies suggest that using UC to get that information can shave a minuteand $2off each of those calls. Which sounds great. Except when you stop to wonder what the cost of the call is to the person on the other endthe knowledge worker whose day is constantly being interrupted by contact center reps looking for product information and other customer-centric details.When I ask the vendors about this, they all acknowledge its a problem; Ive yet to see a clear-cut solution.