Unified Communications (UC) gets Socially-Aware!

Unified communications helps organizations meet challenges in this demanding economic climate. By combining all communication channels into a single, manageable interface, unified communications simplifies the way information is shared and improves collaboration both within the organization and with customers, partners and suppliers. And now, businesses across verticals can become even better connected by harnessing the power of social media within their UC strategies.

Socially-aware unified communications is all about leveraging the breadth and reach of social media as part of any organization's UC strategy. Among other tier-I solution providers, Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEN) offers flexible Media Integration capabilities like OpenScape Fusion which can be customized as required by specific business objectives and communication needs. Such integrations allow businesses including hospitality, travel and BFSI to tightly weave both public and corporate social media tools into their enterprise customer contact centers and unified communications solutions. It is then possible to incorporate real time information from Twitter to help agents deliver better service or sell more products.

For instance, by integrating such applications with Twitter, the Hotel contact center staff can leverage Twitter (and other micro-blogs such as LinkedIn) as another medium integrated into their UC experience within a common unified desktop, just like voice, IM, and video. They can send general tweets from the top of their UC client and direct tweets to their contacts from the twitter icon next to their name. And, through UC desktop integration, sharing of persistent and real-time social media via blogs, corporate wikis and content-persistent chat groups can improve cycle time of team collaboration by integration of user presence within media streams.

This could be taken a step further by enabling the staff users to automate their UC presence status updates based upon on the context of their tweets. For example, the application can monitor their twitter stream, pick up on the context of their tweet (e.g. “I am meeting with a client now”), and use that to change their presence status (e.g. to “in a meeting”) and their preferred device (to “mobile”). An application like this can even automate routine tasks based on the context of tweets – it can set up and launch a conference call based on the context of an employee’s tweets. For example, if an employee tweets "@josh and @karen we need to have a conference call at 2pm” it will set up and automatically launch a conference call with these three users at 2pm.

Article by Asheesh Pandia
The author heads Communications for SEN India

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