I think that developers still aren t paying enough attention to human factors, although many times this is driven by the client paying for the application development. Too many touch-tone systems still have nine options on the main menu because the client isn t willing to reduce the options to make the system easier to use. I m glad to see natural speech recognition take off, because we can have many options available to the user without making the interface any harder to use. New systems and the complex user interfaces required to service the variety of media that unified messaging can present have the potential to dramatically decrease agent productivity through the learning curve. The challenge is to make the delivery of these systems as transparent as possible to the end user.
Unified messaging allows employees to work from anywhere and still be responsive to customers needs.
It has a great ROI in that it lowers the administration cost and increases user productivity. A less expensive, poorly designed touch-tone system may be relatively cheap, but it s not if everyone who calls in hates it and presses 0 or pretends to have a rotary dial phone just so they can talk to a real person. Messaging and communication applications are very important to a company s CRM strategy only if the company understands that customers expect to communicate in the manner which is most convenient at that point in time. A multimedia queue that handles the concept of unified messaging is essential for providing consistent levels of service across media types. One of our clients allows its customers to leave a voice mail message for callback.