Collaborative conversations

By Stanislas Corporeau

Shifting market dynamics and a tough economy worldwide are altering the way companies do business. With companies chasing ever fewer consumer dollars, tremendous competition has ensued. Companies are watching their bottom lines and seeking new strategies and tools that will help them do more with less. Along with a focus on ‘top line’ growth there is a push for cost containment while also exploring new paths to productivity as a means for boosting profit margins. The challenge is determining how to keep costs low without negatively impacting customer service, sales, and innovation.

“Successful organisations will surpass their competition by building a business-centred community where collaborative conversations become the new paradigm of enterprise communications.”
-Stanislas Corporeau

Success in this business environment 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 probably reached a point where they have maximised their 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 (directly or indirectly), thus any latency that remains in these areas is likely only due to the human factor.

Companies also need to break down communication silos and optimise cross-functional efforts, and align investments in new technologies and service delivery with business objectives to help achieve organisational efficiency. Management must ensure that employees understand the overall strategic directives of the company, and where and how they can contribute value. As a key concept in value-based management practices, this depends on a dynamic relationship between the business and employees, and an assurance that employees remain engaged, focused and committed.

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

Employee engagement

Human capital is essential to enterprise performance and the bottom line.  For example, when job satisfaction ratings are low and attrition rates are high, the detrimental impact on the business becomes undeniable. Employees who are not fully engaged with the enterprise generally have low performance and output, which can affect the end-customer.  When employees are truly engaged, however, they become a vital resource that helps to enable business growth and profitability. They are also 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 long-term 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 the overall enterprise performance more constructive.

Shifting priorities

CEOs are shifting priorities to focus on new ways of distinguishing themselves from their competition through innovation. To this end, reducing costs and growing the top line will contribute to revenue growth, while improving employees' engagement with customers and the company as a whole will become a critical key performance indicator. 

For this strategy 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 (including voice, instant messaging, video and collaboration) will empower employees, optimize the company's performance, and gain a competitive edge. 

Collaborative conversations

The advantage of collaborative conversations is that they span an organization's front and back office so that the whole company engages with a customer as one unit. Collaboration across boundaries can help give employees a 360-degree view on any topic, providing them with the knowledge and confidence to resolve customer issues and enabling them to provide a more consistent customer experience. 

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

Collaborative conversations are multi-party conversations that: span the entire organisation - and reach beyond the traditional boundaries of an enterprise to connect core competencies and tie together employees, partners, customers, and other relevant expertise from the community; enable seamless multi-channel communications allowing, for example, a conversation to start on IM, escalate to a web conference (app sharing) session, and then add video and audio; occur on any device, across any network - public or private; and, 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 need to 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 optimise business processes by reducing the human latency that exists within a process flow. CEBP leverages unified communications capabilities/services - such as reminders, alerts, notifications, escalations, etc. - by embedding them into the business process flow to eliminate response latency. CEBP can be applied horizontally across various lines of business and different industries. The result is a more efficient, more automated closed-loop, which creates measurable business value.

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 across the enterprise into on-demand experts, organisations are able to more effectively meet the challenges of increasing productivity, improving the customer experience, and contributing to the enterprise's 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.

The bottom line is that optimising employee performance and engagement will help companies realise 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. 

Continuous and contextual conversations foster the innovation and customer loyalty needed to drive business success. 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.

Collaborative communications integrate all interactions into a single knowledge flow - empowering employees with the right tools and information to collaborate in real-time to achieve innovative solutions to customer problems, process bottlenecks, or new product development. Collaborative conversations also empower management to ensure business continuity, appropriately allocate resources and align employee and corporate goals with business processes to increase employee satisfaction and boost revenue.

About

Stanislas Corporeau is Alcatel-Lucent's Product Marketing Director. In charge of marketing new communication applications, such as smart deskphones and the next generation platform for enterprises, he was previously Marketing Manager of Alcatel-Lucent Contact Center Solutions and a Services business developer for large accounts.