Collaborative Conversations: The new paradigm of enterprise communications

Extend unified communications over time and channels to optimize the performance of your business-centered community

Introduction 

Shifting market dynamics are altering the way companies do business.  In the face of tremendous competition, companies are seeking new strategies and tools that will help them do more with less. Therefore, there is a push for cost containment while also exploring new paths to productivity to boost profit margins. The challenge is keeping costs low without negatively impacting customer service or sales.

Success requires a commitment to optimal employee and operational efficiency across the enterprise. Most companies have already made investments in effective business processes and tools and have reached a point where they've maximized cost effectiveness.  For example, telephony and unified communications (UC) solutions - as well as CRM, ERP, and similar tools - are already quite sophisticated and will continue to grant cost savings, thus any latency in these areas is likely only due to the human factor.

Companies need to break down communication silos and optimize cross-functional efforts, and align investments in new technologies and service delivery with business objectives to help achieve organizational efficiency.  Management must ensure that employees understand the company's strategic directives and how they can contribute value, which requires that employees remain engaged, focused, and committed.

The challenge lies in ensuring better connectivity between all individuals and fostering an environment that supports innovation through employee engagement across organizations, business units, and companies, and this is where a new generation of communications applications can help.

The Importance of Employee Engagement

Employees who are not fully engaged generally have low performance and output, which can affect the end-customer.  When employees are truly engaged, however, they become a vital resource for business growth and profitability, and are more likely to offer innovative solutions to customers, provide better customer service, and reduce operational costs by improving overall efficiency.

While human resources strategies are key to improving employee engagement, the quality of collaborative working relationships is just as important. To that extent, IT managers can contribute to worker engagement by ensuring better connectivity and reducing latency in interpersonal communications.  Employing efficient IT tools will reduce employee frustration and make their contribution to enterprise performance more constructive.

Shifting Priorities for a Competitive Advantage

CEOs are focusing on new ways of distinguishing themselves from their competition, such as reducing costs and growing the top line, while improving employees' engagement with customers and the company. 

To be successful, companies must eliminate communication silos, improve cross-functional efforts, and go beyond traditional communication connectivity tools and promote engagement through collaborative conversations. Companies that can transform employee relationships and connections into enriched conversations spanning the whole enterprise via a variety of applications will empower employees, optimize the company's performance, and gain a competitive edge. 

The Benefits of Collaborative Conversations

The advantage of collaborative conversations is that they span an organization's front and back office so that employees gain a 360-degree view on any topic, which provides them with the knowledge to resolve customer issues and enables them to provide a more consistent customer experience. 

Alcatel-Lucent believes that successful organizations will surpass their competition by building a business-centered community where collaborative conversations that extend over time and channels become the new paradigm of enterprise communications.

Collaborative conversations are multi-party conversations that:

o   Span the entire organization

o   Enable seamless multi-channel communications  

o   Occur on any device, across any network - public or private

o   Provide a rich context such as extended presence information, historical data, and location base

Context awareness

True collaboration relies on contextual communications - threading the business context and valuable data across interactions/devices/networks to the integrated business value chain of employees, peers, partners, and the community at large - in order to leverage the power of conversations.

Context awareness will help connect the workforce, and allow employees to select the most relevant resources to participate in a conversation based on the business need. In essence, collaborative conversations combine unified communications and collaboration (UCC) with the richness of context-aware computing. 

Companies that seek to employ context awareness to collaborative conversations need not make extensive additional investments. Instead, they can integrate their existing collaborative applications with UCC tools that ensure that real-time communications are enabled everywhere, and always-on. 

Communication-enabled business processes

A communication-enabled business process (CEBP) is intended to reduce the human latency that exists within a process flow. CEBP leverages unified communications (UC) capabilities/services - such as reminders, alerts, notifications, escalations, etc. - by embedding them into the business process flow to eliminate response latency.

Benefits arise by enabling collaborative conversations within a CEBP application.  For example, deploying contextual presence in an existing business application is advantageous for individuals who rely extensively on this application to perform their job functions.  Presence indicates whether an enterprise user is available on the network, and gives employees real-time access to subject matter experts, back/branch office workers, and field sales.

By transforming knowledge workers into on-demand experts, organizations can effectively increase productivity, improve the customer experience, and contribute to the bottom line.  Productivity and satisfaction increase as frontline employees gain expanded access to information and support - and overall enterprise effectiveness improves as formerly disjointed processes operate according to a well-coordinated flow.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that optimizing employee performance and engagement will help companies realize a competitive advantage as productivity is improved, customers' needs are proactively met, and, ultimately, revenues are increased.

Therefore, it's imperative to gain visibility and control over all aspects of employee engagement throughout your business and across all channels and locations, and to tie infrastructure and communications applications together to deliver a context-aware communication experience to all employees. 

Collaborative communications integrate all interactions into a single knowledge flow - empowering employees to collaborate in real time to achieve innovative solutions to customer problems, process bottlenecks, or new product development.  Effective collaborative communication strategies reduce costs and improve customer loyalty - offering the long-term benefit of increased revenues from loyal customers, as well as reduced customer churn.