Do you sometimes have the impression that your contact center is an “island” in the sea of your company? Do your agents feel like they are “stranded", all on their own, relying on the proverbial “message in a bottle” to communicate with anyone outside of the contact center? Would your agents be in a better position to help your customers if they had immediate access to subject matter experts anywhere in your enterprise, combined with the ability to gauge who is actually available to support them in real-time? If your answer to one or more of these questions is yes, then read on. Today, many enterprises – large or small – are standardizing on a unified communications tool that is rolled out to all their employees. The intent in doing so is clear: these enterprises need to make it easy for their employees to reach out to each other and collaborate. Even better if they can help employees identify who is actually available in order to reduce the number of calls that end up in voicemail, follow-up emails, and/or interactions lost in the shuffle. If you are using the NICE solution, your agents have always had access to the real-time status of their colleagues in the contact center; contact lists, displaying agent state, have allowed them to confidently collaborate with other contact center users. With the NICE Connector for Skype™ for Business, the ability to see real-time status can now be extended to subject matter experts anywhere in the enterprise – as long as they are Skype for Business Users.
Instant access to experts anywhere in the enterprise[/caption] Our new connector allows you to flexibly create Dynamic Address Books that are integrated seamlessly in the NICE My Agent eXperience™ - MAX agent interface, as well as the NICE Agent for Salesforce® or Agent for Oracle® Service Cloud. Since the Dynamic Address Books are configured in the NICE administration interface for the Connector, there is no need to make changes in the Skype for Business user configuration. In the list, agents see the user status updated in near real-time. And our connector is bi-directional (in the sense that you can associate an NICE agent with a Skype for Business user) in order to keep the presence of each system in sync. This functionality avoids situations where the agent is handling a call (and therefore, from a contact center point of view, not available for other contacts) but would still show “available” in Skype. You can define which tool has the “Master” role so that when--for example--the agent handles a call with NICE, they will automatically become unavailable in Skype, ensuring that no Skype interactions distract the agent from handling the current customer contact. When the agent disconnects from the call and becomes available again, the status change is carried over to Skype as well. In situations where agents need help to handle a customer issue, they have immediate click-to-dial and click-to-email access from within the agent user interface, so they can reach out to “their” subject matter experts with confidence because they know that their chosen expert is actually available to help! From a configuration and management perspective, the credentials for all required systems (NICE, Active Directory and Skype for Business) are entered in a single configuration interface – easy! And with its MSI installer (that will run on any Windows based server running Windows 7 or later), with access to both the Skype for Business or Lync server and NICE.com domain, installing the connector is very straightforward. The NICE Connector for Skype for Business is supported with both Microsoft Lync 2013 or Skype for Business 2015 or later. Interested? Please get in touch with your Customer Success Manager or simply contact us!
