After Eleven Years - The Mobile Customer Is Here and Needs UC

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

I think below is the first article that I (and my partner, Dave Zimmer) seriously discussed customer contacts based upon the potential of coming "smartphone" developments for exploiting unified communications (UC) for business. I didn't consider the future development of portable tablets, which could be used standing up or sitting down. However, I did focus on customers/consumers as the future targets for mobile (wireless) notifications and interactions, because that's where business benefits will come from (revenues, profits, etc.). Thanks to Steve Jobs and Apple, the smartphone and mobile tablets are household names for consumers.

Now (after eleven years), that smartphones have become a reality in both the business and consumer worlds, the role of unified communications (UC) for exploiting multimodal flexibility has to be taken seriously by business and government organizations, large and small, in planning to replace the shortcomings of traditional telephone systems. To further complicate matters, such a displacement can now be accommodated by hosted, cloud-based software services, rather than premise-based hardware systems. So, change is definitely coming but the migration strategies have to be selectively defined for specific business process applications (CEBP), as well as for all specific end user types involved in such business processes.

Obviously, this old editorial post needs to be updated to reflect what is now really available..

Editorial from 06-19-2000

Are They Standing Up

or Sitting Down?

Wireless (Mobile) Communications With Enterprise Customers

The convergence of universal wireless voice and two-way messaging communications will open up new avenues for electronic commerce interactions between an enterprise and its customers. With browser-enabled wireless smartphones or palmtops, users will have increased access to on-line information and transactions. This will include simple information retrieval ("pull") in text or voice, as well as timely information notification and delivery ("push").

As has been hyped so much in the press lately, the promise of wireless multimedia smartphones or palm devices will make Web-based information and transactions more simple and convenient for anytime, anywhere access. So users don’t have to be necessarily sitting down in front of a desktop/laptop PC; they can be standing up and even be moving around (carefully).

With more efficiently packaged bite-sized Web information designed for ubiquitous and convenient communications devices, the user audience for such information will expand significantly. Smartphones also allow for cross-media information access, so that, for example, really mobile users driving a car or moving about can have hands-free, eyes-free control of information and messages through speech input and output rather than using the screen and keypad.

Although there is still great speculation within the unified communications services industry about the limitations of both the small displays associated with wireless smartphones and the cross-media use of voice input/output, there is no question that the proliferation of these multimedia devices for personal communications will have an impact on how enterprise contact centers will have to support their customers for wireless (mobile) Customer Relationship Management (“mCRM?”).

Application Messaging and Transaction Services

Going beyond simple information retrieval to push information delivery, service providers can provide delivery of personalized information (text or voice) on a scheduled or immediate, event-driven basis to subscriber mailboxes and/or to wireless smartphones. Thus, for example, when important financial news is delivered by a message from an application process, it can be immediately followed up with an appropriate interactive transaction. Major online stock brokerages are already offering such capabilities today (e.g., Charles Schwab & Co. Inc.).

Like all forms of messaging, the key to application messaging is notification, which is a means of gaining the attention of the recipient for permission to enable real-time messaging access. (See last Monday's column on the role of Message Notification.) This process can be made more intelligent through personalized filtering and screening rules that prioritize such immediate access to the subscriber. If the subscriber is unavailable at the moment, a response or callback message can be left for later activation to confirm or complete the transaction.

Live Assistance

As has been well-established by experience to date with all forms of customer self-service applications, including traditional telephone-based Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology and the more recent PC-based multimedia transactions on the World Wide Web, the availability of live customer assistance, either via immediate conversational connections (text chat, voice) or through timely messaging response, is a prerequisite for successful tele-commerce. It is here, at the customer touchpoints, that exploding wireless usage will have a ripple effect on how the enterprise must conduct its e-business.

Traditional customer-enterprise interactions, telephone or Web-based, will be affected in several functional enterprise support areas by customers using wireless multimedia communications devices, including:

1. Self-service information retrieval ("pull")

2. Application messaging -- Automated real-time notifications, confirmations, information delivery ("push")

3. Consultative online customer assistance

4. Customer two-way messaging and callbacks

5. Outbound telemarketing

Space considerations preclude a detailed discussion of each of the above topics, but suffice it to say, that pocket wireless multimedia smartphones will have limitations for customers because of screen size and, to some extent, a lack of a full keyboard, but they will have important advantages because of immediate wireless accessibility and cross-media options. The latter will include functional service features such as plain text Short Message Service (SMS), Instant Messaging (text, voice), and "always on" accessibility.

With Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) service implementations, short message responses can include links to appropriate Web-based information or transactions. (Although there are shortcomings to the current WAP capabilities, concurrent voice connections and Web information access is an expected future for wireless usage.)

Personal Presence Management, Customer Contact, and Privacy

The SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) chip currently used in all GSM wireless phones is the smart card that identifies the user and enables personalization of wireless services. Such identification also plays into locating the subscriber’s device and determining its availability for contact. Thus, unlike traditional wired telephones, where there is no guarantee if it will be answered or who will be answering the phone, the customer with a personalized wireless smartphone can be pre-determined to be available for contact.

For example, the criteria for immediate message notification or call connection may be determined by where the subscriber happens to be. If the subscriber is not sitting at a desktop PC, delivering a document attachment is useless; however, notification that it is available is appropriate, and being aware of wireless accessibility is key. This kind of presence information will enable the enterprise to more quickly respond to a customer inquiry or request, in the appropriate format or mode (immediate live assistance callback/connection, informational message response, document transmission, etc.).

On the other hand, traditional outbound telemarketing may exploit such capabilities to intrude upon the user at any time to deliver a sales pitch. No longer will it be just the dinnertime sales phone call that will be a privacy invasion. It may be the delivery of a sales message alert or even a live pitch just because you happen to be walking by a store that has a sale on something that a marketing campaign has identified you as a prospect.

To add insult to injury, because of the current approach taken by wireless telephone services in this country, the subscriber receiving the telemarketing call usually gets to pay for the privilege rather than the originator of the call.

Free or not, it is clear that effective personal call/message management has to be the hallmark for universal communications accessibility, and wireless unified communications services will have to support convenient call/message screening to protect its subscribers.

Respectfully,

Rosenberg and Zimmer

The Unified View

UC Analytics Needed to Manage Multi-modal Contact Center Evolution

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Unified communications (UC) are slowly replacing voice only telephony in business communications, particularly for personalized end user mobility. That involves more than the business processes themselves through traditional telephony-based “call centers”, but also the performance of live customer assistance through customer-facing staff (agents, subject matter experts, field support, sales contacts, etc.). More importantly, with the rapid consumer adoption of mobile smartphones and tablets, there is also an increasing use of automated multi-modal self-service applications, supported by UC “click-to-call” options. Under the label of “analytics,” all aspects of customer interaction activities are being captured and analyzed to improve customer satisfaction, efficiency, and productivity.

While there is no question about the importance of understanding how customers and support staff are performing in various business processes, most of the contact center technology announcements coming from traditional telephony-oriented providers still focus heavily on the voice conversations between people and call center staff and using “speech analytics” as a key objective for customer service analysis.

On the other hand, there is also increasing use of analytics to monitor and track all kinds of automated business process applications in order to improve the efficiency and ease of use of such activities. Information Week recently surveyed business executives on the shift to “innovation” in supporting end user needs and making business processes (which has to include communication contacts with people) more efficient. The study highlights the importance for UC and CEBP, showing CIO responsibilities outside of IT for telecommunications as the highest (64%) domain of responsibility and interest.

The study also describes how “innovation” is taking over automating business process applications, particularly in online/self-service activities, and is relying on more comprehensive analytics to monitor, evaluate, and improve such processes from an end user interface perspective. Since UC is not limited to just speech interfaces with automated self-service applications, it is obviously going to be a powerful element of any automated application process, as well as providing access to available live assistance when necessary. However, even as consumers rapidly adopt mobile, multi-modal end point devices (smartphones, tablets) for business contacts and interactions, the analytics world seems to be slow to integrate voice telephony contacts as part of the brave new world of seamless UC.

Business Communications - What We Say Is Only Part Of What We Do

Capturing what people say during a business call can be useful, especially if it helps describe the customer’s state of mind and satisfaction with the business process. Analyzing conversations for keywords and emotions can provide insights into what the customer is doing and, if displayed in real-time to a customer-facing agent, can expedite better resolution of the operational issues involved. That’s like having a customer hooked up to a lie detector while discussing any problem that requires live assistance. But, do we need that much “analytics” data all the time?

UC, by definition, covers all forms of business contacts and interactions; so tracking all communication activities is an effective way to monitor all business communications, not just customer interactions. The practical definition of UC as a concept has been well stated for a number of years by UC Strategies, i.e., “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” After all, business processes involve internal staff, external business partners, as well as consumer/customers. So, we really need to be looking selectively at key business processes as the starting point for what communication activities with people the analytic tools need to be tracking.

With the increased adoption of smartphones for all forms of contact with people, especially for text based messaging (SMS, chat, social networking, email), voice conversations are slowly becoming less significant for interaction analytics. So, the fact that technology for capturing and analyzing voice has become very sophisticated, that does not mean that all other forms of business contacts should be ignored. In particular, automated business processes that initiate time-sensitive notification contacts with individual end users (CEBP), will not be having voice conversations with customers and will exploit text and visual interfaces of personal smartphones and tablets.

Self-service Applications and UC

I recently reviewed a report in Speech Technology magazine on contact center technologies that focused primarily on call management and speech analytics to evaluate and manage customer-facing agents. Referred to as Work Force Optimization (WFO), the article describes the progress of speech analytics as key to evaluating both agent performance and customer satisfaction. While this perspective is certainly valid for customer contacts via traditional phones, it is definitely not adequate for exploiting multimedia self-service application access by customers through multi-modal mobile devices.

In talking to an old colleague, Jeff Schlueter, marketing VP at Nexidia, a leading provider of Enterprise Speech Intelligence software, I raised the question of how speech analytics fits into the overall multi-modal mobile UC picture. His first response was that smartphones was all that he personally needed. Then I reminded him that UC is not just about person-to-person contacts and that enterprise applications needed to be integrated into the picture (CEBP). Obviously, their technology is still evolving and that perspective remains to be defined and developed.

Needless to say, speech analytics does become useful when speech is involved for information input, whether in a voice conversation or even when speech commands are used as self-service application inputs. Otherwise, tracking all forms of user interactions is necessary for monitoring and evaluating end user communication activities. That’s why business communications need the flexibility of UC as well as comprehensive analytic tools to track all interactions that may occur during the course of a business process.

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

Steve Jobs and UC

Copyright © 2011 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

October 5, 2011

Steve Jobs and UC

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

I had just finished posting this old article I wrote about the first iPhone announcement, when I heard the news of Steve Jobs passing. So, in a way this is a tribute to his vision of the mobile devices to support what end users really want to communicate and access information in a UC environment.

Steve Jobs will be sorely missed!

Here’s what I wrote about the first release of Apple’s iPhone back in January of 2007. The recent announcement of iPhone 4S (instead of the expected iPhone 5) didn’t get rave reviews except for the new “Siri” capability which enables speech input for a variety of functional informational and messaging tasks. However, it was a step forward in the right direction.

The new Apple bringing more innovation to mobile communications?

Well, Apple, no longer calling itself “Apple Computer,” got your attention, didn’t it?

The big splash it made with it’s iPhone announcement seemed to draw everyone’s attention to what we have been waiting for in UC - end-user demand. That demand will come from individual consumer needs (communications, entertainment, customer contacts) and individual work-related needs (desktop, roaming, traveling, mobile communications and information exchange). The common denominator between consumers and business users is the communications piece, and that’s exactly where application client software fits in with well-designed multimodal mobile devices and user interface form factors.

Industry pundits almost hysterically jumped on the Apple iPhone announcement, pointing out that most of the functionality is not really new, having been incorporated in legacy technologies like voice mail and cell phones. They also highlighted missing pieces like the lack of 3G cellular, speech interfaces for mobile users who might need it for hands-free, eyes-free situations, the fact that text input really benefits from a “hard” alphanumeric keyboard rather than a button-less screen, and that “visual voicemail” has been around for years for the few enterprise systems that moved beyond the desktop telephone TUI. However, they also grudgingly admit that the packaging was innovatively well done, the missing elements can be added in a variety of ways, and, last but not least, their device design success will be emulated by the competition.

“Different strokes for different folks!”

The bottom line for all coming mobile “UC smartphones” (a generic descriptor), is that they will come in many form factors and combination of features to support the different needs and preferences of the individual end user for business and personal contacts, including business applications, and consumer entertainment. Enterprise organizations will have to support such end user UC devices and UC in the same way they supported TDM/TUI telephony for universal phone access over the PSTN, except now it has to be multimodal communications over IP and wireless networks too.

The enterprise UC ball is in the business end user mobile smartphone court!

Ever since the IP telephony and messaging technology developers started touting “unified communications,” the enterprise market has been sitting on its hands wondering why, when and how they should start migrating to the converged world of UC. Well, the writing is on the wall, as handheld device designs become the center of attention for accommodating the complexities of converged communication applications, rather than focusing on just infrastructure cost savings to do traditional phone call and messaging functions.

In a recent column (before CES /MacWorld) I highlighted the role of mobile communications as a driver for unified communications in the enterprise. I pointed out that increased mobile accessibility would enable greater contact efficiency and therefore faster task performance by everyone involved in the business process. That would include people inside and outside of the enterprise organization, and to do that means making UC services universal, like good old PSTN telephony.

One of the key assumptions about such benefits from UC capabilities was that more and more people would be carrying personalized, multimodal, mobile devices that would be flexible enough to maximize real-time business communications in any form, not just voice. While UC is useful at the desktop with PC-based softphones and text messaging, UC will really pay off when users are “mobile” and need to switch modalities all the time.

Conclusion

The “UC industry” is making progress by consolidating infrastructure, application, and communication device needs. Until end users see everything at the interface level, they won’t understand the difference UC will make for them. Enterprise management must also see those benefits as well, otherwise there just won’t be much movement in UC migration based on cost reductions alone

Strategic Role of Unified Analytics for UC

2011 - Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

The Strategic Role For Unified Analytics In UC

Posted on August 13th, 2011 by Art Rosenberg

Note: I haven't been writing lately due to some serious health problems, but I still have been watching the UC world evolve.

Jim Burton just wrote a provocative blog on NoJitter entitled “The Next Phase in Communications.” It referred to the role of analytics in the evolution of UC. Labeling that capability as “UC-A,” it “adds analytics and metrics to business processes.” With that thought in mind, I see “Unified Analytics” as being key tools to both UC planning and managing effective and efficient business process performance wherever people are involved.

One of the biggest challenges for any size UC implementation is to plan for its selective use in high-value business processes. That includes knowing which end users will require which UC capabilities and which business applications will also be involved through CEBP integrations. So, this means understanding where both person-to-person contact activities need the flexibility of UC, as well as which business process applications need to initiate contacts with which people and how.

Unfortunately, no one may really know what is needed and where, when it comes to UC planning. Compound that with the sad economy and existing legacy technologies, it is hard to make a quantifiable case for UC benefits, either “UC-U” or “UC-B.” Although everyone talks about proper and selective UC implementation planning, there really have been no tools to do that easily.

As Jim points out, “contact center” technology has been improving its “analytics” capabilities for a number of years, primarily to evaluate customer satisfaction and customer-facing agent performance. Such analytics have started to move beyond just call handling to other forms of customer contacts and interactions. I believe the technology has reached a point where analytics can play a bigger role in UC implementation, by providing the tools to evaluate all current business processes and communications activities in order to quantify and prioritize UC planning for everyone in the organization as well as those outside of the organization that may be involved with a business process.

The timing for such a “universal” view of unified business communications is most appropriate as the rapid adoption of multi-modal smartphones means that ALL end users will be able to benefit effectively from the flexibility of UC and the integration with business process applications through CEBP. It is just that organizations need to know where best to selectively start their UC migration, whether via hosted, “cloud”-based services, traditional internal technologies, or a hybrid combination of both.

“Analytics,” like “UC,” covers a lot of territory that is continually expanding beyond the limitations of traditional telephony communications, but has not really penetrated the market much beyond traditional call center operations. However, it’s potential value from a number of management perspectives is starting to be recognized. The lack of standards and definitions for UC capabilities hasn’t helped the problem either. I think it is now time that analytic tools can help management understand who is doing what in all business process communications and lead the way to practical UC implementation planning.

Let's see what leading analytics developers like Verint come up with!

What do you think?

You can contact me at artr@ix.netcomm.com or (310) 395-2360

Avaya Gets UC Moving With Healthcare Mobility

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

At Last! Avaya Embraces “Dual Personna” Mobility For Health Care Apps

by Art Rosenberg

I know that one of my UC Strategies colleagues, Don Van Doren, attended the 2011 HIMSS Conference in Atlanta and should be able to report more details in how UC is making progress with health care applications. However, I was very impressed to see Avaya jumping in with both feet to exploit mobile devices for both hospital staff as well as mobile patient contacts to fully exploit UC for operational efficiency and effectiveness. (Never mind reduced telephony costs because of IP Telephony and SIP trunking!)

I have always seen mobility as the real driver for end user interest and benefits from UC and Avaya has finally connected some of the dots between the hospital environment, health care information systems, and patients who are not in a hospital environment but are key participants in operational performance issues. Given that the health care topic is at the top of this country’s financial concerns, anything that will help improve the performance of health care activities will get attention from everybody!

So, the headlines that got my attention are some of Avaya’s new solutions announced at HIMSS this past week. What’s important is that this is not just a start-up company with a bright idea, but an experienced technology provider with an established market share that is finally delivering something significantly better to the marketplace. (So, expect others to follow suit accordingly!)

• Mobile Device Checkout - Basically, this new function supports “dual personna” mobility on premise by letting hospital staff use their own, personalized mobile devices to be be automatically accessible through the hospital’s phone system and WLAN, by generating a temporary unique phone number. It allows for role-based-contacts, rather than having to know specific individual names and numbers, and it ties into a presence-based system for locating personnel. Yeah!
• Nurse Call Response - This solution replaces the need for a patient to contact a nurse’s station in order to talk the nurse responsible for her care, but will initiate the contact directly with the appropriate nurse either available or assigned such responsibility. This reduces the wasted time delay and frustrations for a patient who needs immediate attention. (The announcement did not mention any options for such call contacts to exploit the benefits of UC with visual information on a smart-phone device.)
• Patient Admit Coordinator - This “workflow” solution targets patients coming to an Emergency Room for treatment to be admitted to a hospital bed. Currently, such procedures are paper-based, slow, inefficient, and costly. (I know from recent personal experience!)
• Patient Appointment Reminder - This is not really anything new, but is a basic application that can capitalize on the multi-modality of UC for personalized notifications. It is particularly useful for health care and especially for senior citizens whose memory starts to suffer with age. It is also useful for other types of reminders, such as time to take a particular medication, or if an automated patient monitoring application detects a new problem, the need to see a particular doctor or take a particular medication suddenly becomes critical.

The above applications are tied to mobility of the individual end user, either as a contact initiator or a contact recipient, which in turn is tied to UC for flexible communications. I am sure there are other apps/solution examples in the health care environment, and some of these will also apply to other business activities, e.g., appointment reminders, CEBP applications, etc. So, I am glad to see some of the fundamental visions of UC that I and my colleagues have been pushing for several years starting to be realized in the real world.

What Do You Think?
Contact me at artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360

Avaya Opens Up Another Space For UC – Meeting New People With “Virtual” Group Conferencing

Copyright © 2011 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

February 17, 2011

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

I don’t know about you, but there is so much change going on with business communication technologies in the evolution to a “unified communications” (UC) environment, that it is hard to keep up with all the products and services that are being announced. This is particularly true because “UC” is subsuming all kinds of telephony usage and is being applied to every aspect of communication technologies with people, including network infrastructures, mobile multimodal endpoint devices, business process application integrations, and multimedia end user interfaces.

Because I don’t have the time to attend conferences or webinars at different times and locations, I rely heavily on the objective, first-hand reviews that my UC Strategy colleagues and other industry analysts who report on a variety of new announcements and discussions at conferences and presentations. This includes the big shift taking place from CPE hardware products and software suites to software-based and hosted “cloud” application services.

Who Will Control The UC Market?

Although I am interested in the technology startups that develop new UC capabilities that will directly benefit individual end users or enterprise management, I pay particular attention to the leading technology providers that already have large installed business organization customer bases. They will be the ones that can stay out in front of the evolving “business UC market,” providing that their products and services stay tuned into what different types of end users really need and want in order to flexibly initiate or respond to multi-modal contacts with other people and/or self-service applications.

From a telephony perspective, it’s all about migrating from the limitations and culture of legacy wired, desktop TDM telephony and conversational voice to mobile and multimodal SIP-based connections, where unified communication applications can take hold. Voice conferencing for group discussions and presentations long ago shifted to Internet web conferencing and webinars, so I was curious to see what Avaya’s latest announcement about web.alive in the enterprise space was bringing to the UC table. (Like many other new application product/service offerings, the names given to them are not very descriptive and “web.alive” is no exception.)

Web.alive Virtual Voice Conferencing

The “alive” label seems to be the latest buzzword to discuss real-time communications and interactions between people. According to Avaya, here’s what’s new for them for their web.alive offering in business group voice conferencing:

“The new purchasing options make Avaya web.alive available as a service through a monthly subscription for individual hosts or via annual concurrent user based pricing. Business organizations can also opt to install and manage the software on their own servers. The flexibility of purchase options enables any size business or organization to use Avaya web.alive for meetings, training, or sales and service opportunities involving both internal and external participants.”

“In addition to the purchasing options, new features and capabilities in Avaya web.alive include:

• New 3D audio engine for dramatic spatial audio that helps participants better identify and understand who is speaking and their location within the environment.
• 
  Built-in collaboration tools including desktop sharing and cooperative web browsing
  
• Avaya Aura SIP interface for integration with existing communications infrastructure enabling participants to join a collaboration session via the telephone or inside of the web.alive environment
  
• New templates that make it easy to design environments that meet the needs of a company or host.
  
• Downloadable SDK to enable customers or hosts to independently create and upload their own custom content.
  
• Analytics that provide the data to enhance collaboration, selling or learning efforts. For example, insight can be gained into traffic and conversation patterns, sales and presentation effectiveness, travel savings, etc. The notification engine can email contact center agents when customers have entered an Avaya web.alive sales or service.”
  

As you can see, Avaya is capitalizing on its experience, market share, in legacy in legacy voice telephony to upgrade telephone conferencing with greater operational flexibility, manageability, and lower costs. These are all useful benefits for business organizations that have to deal with remote end users, whether inside or outside of the organization. The latter is particularly important for supporting business partners and customers, who will be communicating with a variety of endpoint devices and services that are not controllable by the sponsoring enterprise. However, their traffic analytics technology can monitor any form of contact from the outside and automatically notify appropriate staff personnel (contact center agents, subject matter experts, operational management, etc.) if live assistance is needed.

So, What’s Really New?

From an end user perspective, which I really look for in driving demand and adoption of anything new in business operations, Avaya has facilitated easy access to any audience members who want to participate in group presentations and discussions. In addition to traditional “virtual’ web conferencing facilities, they allow audience members to interact on a “face-to-face” basis, but without the expense and effort of a video conference.

The web.alive platform also enables a variety of UC-based messaging activities that are controllable by the individual conference participants as either contact initiators or recipients within a common context of the web presentation. This pays off in less travel cost and business process performance time, as well as convenience for end users who are increasingly remote, in other organizations, and even mobile. This makes it ideal for a public, “cloud-based” service rather than a premise-based, enterprise responsibility.

A good characterization of what web.alive does differently is to allow end users of any type to participate in the audience and also selectively “collaborate” with other individuals in an online conference without necessarily having a relationship beforehand. That is what attracts people to attend trade shows where individual attendees can find new people to talk to and exchange information without scheduling a meeting first. All they have to do is be available and communication accessible at the same time, which means that contacts can also be made with “experts,” who are not necessarily attending audience members.

From a UC perspective, the ability to exploit email, IM, SMS, etc. for such new ad hoc contacts is a big plus, because two-way, real-time voice conversations are more difficult to do instantly all the time and appropriate for simple information exchange and collaborative work. Talking may also be inappropriate while listening to a group presentation or discussion. Such different contacts can be initiated separately and concurrently by the audience individuals involved, not just by the speakers or presenters.

The “immersive” use of 3D spatial audio and video avatars is an attempt at recreating the face-to-face conference environment, but the use of face-to-face avatars doesn’t do much for me. I would be satisfied with a real-time voice conversation and the display of information related to the subject at hand, rather than watching an avatar. (Although if you wanted to watch the reaction of a group of people in the audience who are not talking, the avatar approach might be one way to try to do that using some form of automated “group assessment” of facial reactions.)

What is most important from an implementation perspective is that Avaya is moving its real-time telephony technology to a supplementary, UC-based, flexible conferencing service offering that includes users from anywhere, including enterprise customers, with lower pricing and ease of integration with legacy phone systems. So take a look at it from the perspective of a step forward with UC in a group conferencing environment.

For detailed reports on Avaya’s web.alive demo, go to:

http://www.nojitter.com/feature/229218514?pgno=2

http://www.nojitter.com/blog/229215659


What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

iPads and Tablets Join UC

Copyright 2010 (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.


December 15, 2010

Will iPads and Tablets Replace Enterprise Laptops and Desktop Softphones for UC?

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

In the early days of UC, “softphones” (screen-based PC telephony), offered UC flexibility where traditional desktop “hardphones” were lacking. It is still a viable alternative for wired, location-based telephony.

However, mobile smartphones are making a huge dent in the consumer and business user markets for multimodal UC applications. That is, until the larger screen size of tablets came into the picture. Now, a user has a choice of two kinds of mobile devices, one convenient for the hand and one portable enough to carry along, but with a larger screen interface for better visual information access.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece on the subject of mobility and what the user experience would be like if the user was standing up or sitting down. Obviously, that experience will vary with the size of the device, the screen, and its impact on on the user interface. When worse comes to worse, and no screen can be looked at (e.g., driving a car), then speech interfaces come into play, and that is one good reason that mobility needs multimodal UC flexibility.

So, with UC convergence, business applications need to be endpoint device independent, not only in terms of screen-based interfaces vs. speech interfaces, but also based on the size of the screens for handheld devices , portable tablets and iPads, and wired desktop PCs. The choice will be based upon who the users are and what they need to do their jobs, whether premise-based or mobile. It is becoming intuitively obvious that most business users will want to use a single, personalized smartphone when mobile for both their business and personal contacts with “dual persona” access management and services (two addresses). In addition, they can also use a desktop device on a transient basis, using the current network address of their choice.

All this represents a significant shift in old telephony networks, but not to Internet communications, which have always been “virtual.” So, that’s what is shaking up the enterprise communications world while the migration shift slowly takes place. In the meantime, will multimodal PC “softphones” be replaced more easily by portable/mobile iPads and tablets when a bigger screen is needed for data output? How will the enterprise support such flexible mobile service with CEBP - based applications? Will the choice of mobile tablet become like the smartphones, that of the individual end users’ because of its support for personalized UC?

Variance in device screen sizes and form factors brings with it the problems of standards, impact on Operating Systems, as well as the user applications themselves. The success of Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) will be very dependent on resolving these issues, because outbound notifications and information delivery to individual end users will be based on greater (process-to-person) accessibility through user mobility.

Enterprise CIOs are already starting to look at their responsibilities for information access and delivery from both a mobility perspective, as well as from responsibilities to non- enterprise employees (business partners, customers). They all want multimodal information access, as well as multimodal, federated, contextual communication contact with appropriate people within and outside of their organization. Device independence is quickly becoming key to such flexibility and can’t be restricted to what the enterprise supplies but what it can support.

For a roundup of other major UC developments in 2010 check out the recent podcast of UC Strategies experts, particularly that on the coming role of UC tablets.

What Do You Think?

Contact me at (310) 395-2360 or at artr@ix.netcom.com

Getting Mobility In Step With UC

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

November 3, 2010

Free Mobile Backup Service For End Users Also Supports “User Choice” in Communications

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

While enterprises and service providers have been moving quickly to support their end users and customers with the latest and greatest UC technologies, supporting multimodal mobile devices (smart-phones) will be one of their biggest challenges. Why? Because they will be constantly evolving as devices and with their mobile OSs, must be mobile application-independent, and be highly personalized in a variety of ways.

Since mobile products and technologies are still evolving and everyone is still learning to deal with "multimodal mobility" vs. traditional desktop communications and traditional cell phones, there will be ongoing competition for different devices and associated services.

Wirefly Mobile Backup Will Help End Users Keep Up With Smartphone Evolution

Because one of the big problems with mobile devices is that they can be easily lost or stolen, end users will always need a way to easily replace what they already have. Coupled with the possibility that they may simply want to move to a new device or service, the first free, automatic, cloud-based mobile data backup service available to consumers from developer Spare Backup and Wirefly fills both bills.

Works Across Carriers, Manufacturers, and Operating Systems

Wirefly Mobile Backup supports all of the most popular smartphones in the United States, including Android, iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, and works across all major U.S. carriers, making it incredibly easy to transfer data to a new device when switching wireless providers. In addition, the Palm, Java, Windows Phone 7 and Symbian operating systems will be supported by the end of the quarter.

Wirefly Mobile Backup can also be used to protect the data from personal computers (PC). Up to five devices including one PC can be backed up on a single free account making it easy to protect, move and share photos, music and other important information between devices.

“People come to Wirefly.com when they are thinking about changing phones or changing carriers,” said Scott Ableman, Chief Marketing Officer for Wirefly. “By offering this great service for free, Wirefly has eliminated one of the major concerns people face when making this decision.”

Cell phone users can sign up for their free Wirefly Mobile Backup account at Wirefly.com/backup or via the Android Market and iTunes App Store.

Observation: This new capability will further support "user choice" flexibility in their mobile end point devices for both business and personal use. Enterprise IT will still have to focus on controlling information access security and managing customized mobile software application clients.

ININ Pushes CaaS For Customer Contacts

Copyright 2010 -The Unified-View. All rights reserved worldwide

October 24, 2010

Why Interactive Intelligence’s CaaS offering For Contact Centers Can Be A UC Winner

By Art Rosenberg

By now, you must have read some of the very positive analyst comments on Interactive Intelligence’s (ININ) Partner and Analyst conference in San Antonio, TX on October 11-13th. What was most impressive to attendees is how well-structured ININ’s contact center software applications were to cover both traditional call center and future multi-modal UC business communication needs.

What caught my attention, however, was the successful push that ININ was making in the hosted services market, they refer to as CaaS or Communications as a Service.

ININ Offers Contact Center Implementation Flexibility

The idea is now new, but ININ has taken the lead in making CaaS offerings more flexible in order to overcome the concerns of organizations that don’t know enough (yet) about whether they want to end up with a hosted contact center service or take some or all responsibility for support internally.

Given that customer interaction applications are moving into the new UC domain of “multimodal communications,” there is little internal experience available to make such a decision yet. So, the obvious approach is to “try before buy” with minimum cost and maximum flexibility.

What ININ has cleverly come up with is a VoIP integration option to start with a hosted service, but allows subsequent switching to other support alternatives based on actual experience with the specific UC applications involved.

Not surprisingly, ININ reports tremendous interest in their CaaS offering for contact center applications, particularly since they have gone out of their way to allow business organizations to retain local control over their telephony communications activities (CaaS with Local Control). This makes their offering practical for both the SMB market, as well as for larger enterprises that have larger telephone system investments to protect.

In terms of other contact center UC application functions, those are still evolving slowly but steadily, but will benefit from ININ’s “”all in one” platform philosophy for cost efficient application integrations. ININ’s approach is being enthusiastically supported by their business partners and VARs, who are focused on helping customers tailor different business applications to support both inbound and outbound multimodal customer interactions, typically managed and supported by “CRM” applications.

I am waiting to see them support the UC needs of consumers who will be using mobile smartphones for all forms of customer interactions and information services!

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Mobile UC Action From "Multimodal Notifications"

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

September 26, 2010

UC and Multimodal Notifications


By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

UC-based, mobile, multimodal communications will be changing how people both initiate and receive contacts from other people, as well as dire3ctly from automated business process applications. While person-to-person contacts will become intelligently based upon the status and preferences of the participating parties (”presence”), the contact initiator will typically be in the driver’s seat at first. Then, based on dynamic real world considerations, the mode of communication used become based on what works for both the initiator and the individual recipient(s). Because UC also encompasses human contacts with automated applications, the mode of interaction must be dictated by the human user, regardless of how contact was initiated, with one major exception.

While great progress has been made in speach recognition as a means of data input and user interface control, it has not made completely full voice conversation practical as a user interface for self-service applications. As recognized in a new book, “Advances In Speech Recognition: Mobile Environment, Call Centers and Clinics,” speech is effcient for user input, but not practical for large ammounts of content output which can most efficiently be reviewed on a screen. That is why I see tradtional telephone self service applications (IVR) being replaced with what I call Interactive Multimodal Response (IMR) applications on all forms of multimodal endpoint devices (smart-phones, iPads, tablets, etc.)

One of the key roles that mobility and UC flexibility can play is in supporting automated business processes that can initiate contacts with individual end users for time sensitive notifications. However, I see such applications doing more that sending notication information to a user. Instead, the applications will be able to initiate an interactive multimodal exchange with the recipient, but with the choice of input and output media resting with the human recipient.

Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) are going to heavily exploit such “multimodal notifications” because they can proactively initiate a self-service interaction without waiting for the recipient to take the initiative. Until now, telephony-based IVR was seen as the best way to handle self-services from consumer who, until lately, were not expected to have access to a real-time communication device other than a phone. With UC and mobile, multimodal devices, the future and value of self-services will expand significantly from online desktops and telephone IVR.

Multimodal notifications will also become another "gateway" for efficient customer care, since they will also provide the necessary context for efficient,“click-to-contact” live assistance, rather than a “blind” phone call.

Microsoft Wants To LYNC You!

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

September 10, 2010

What’s In A Name? Microsoft’s Lync Wants The End Users In Business UC

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

I was fortunate to participate in a discussion with my UC Strategies team and Microsoft about the big announcement of the next version of Office Communication Server. What was of most significance, is that Microsoft has renamed their software product (again), but, this time to one that will appeal to the individual end users, rather than to just IT management.

While UC technology infrastructure may be understandable and important to IT, the functionality of UC concepts is not so well understood by the people who should benefit most directly from using UC-based applications, the individual end users. As a result, the term “UC” means little to those potential end users, and, the integrations for UC, even less useful.

In a move to help remedy the problem of relating UC technology concepts to practical individual end user perspectives, Microsoft announced a name change for it’s latest version of its desktop Office Communications Server (OCS), which is a software platform for several real-time communication functions, including:

· Presence management (availability status information)

· Instant (text) messaging

· Conferencing

· Voice telephony

The new name, Lync, suggests not only a common process for accessing those real-time communication functions, it also implies interoperability with other forms of communication that are not “real-time.” So, as a user-oriented “gateway” to legacy telephony services, the name, “Lync,” suggests more than simple integration with traditional telephony contacts, but other multi-modal options for UC.

Microsoft Wants To “Lync” you!

To reinforce that user perspective, Microsoft suggests that “lync” can be used as a verb to better encompass what the end user can do with that particular application software tool, i.e., establish a real-time connection, in a user’s choice of ways, with a person or group of persons, if available. This flexibility will be particularly useful as users start exploiting mobile, multi-modal devices (smart-phones, iPads) and desktop “softphones.”

At this time, the Lync functionality defined for UC seems to be focused primarily on person-to-person contacts, where federated presence will be a consideration in initiating a real-time contact. However, as I have frequently stated, UC is more than that person-to-person communications, and contacts between people and automated application processes and vice versa are also part of the business communication challenge that requires the flexibility of multi-modal UC.

So, we should expect to soon see how Lync will be inter-operating with automated applications that need to initiate multi-modal “notifications” to specific individual users (CEBP), as well as how those recipients can respond to such automated, contacts. This will be of particular importance in customer-care applications that will exploit automated, time-critical, pro-active contacts for cost-efficient performance.

For now, we see Lync as a logical step forward, from an end use’s perspective, towards convenient communication flexibility and the “user’s choice” in both initiating a person-to-person contact, as well as responding to any contact from another person.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

UC Analytics

Copyright Ó2010 -The Unified-View. All rights reserved worldwide

June 7, 2010

The Coming Importance of UC Analytics in Multi-modal Business Operations


Art Rosenberg, The Unified View

The technology convergence of all forms of business communications between people has been labeled as “unified communications” or “UC.” What it really means is that individual end-users in a business environment can now choose any form of communication to either initiate a contact with another person or group of persons, or to receive and respond to such a contact in any modality (real-time, asynchronous messaging) or medium (voice, text, visual) that is available to them.

This flexibility is defined as “multi-modal” communications, and includes “trans-modal” communications capabilities, where individual users can dynamically change from their current form of communication to another modality more suitable to their immediate situation.

More flexible communication is largely being driven by the increase in mobile communications, which requires individual users to communicate under real-time limitations of their changing personal environments. Can they talk? Can they listen? Can they look at a screen? Can they push buttons for input? Rather than wait until they can communicate in any particular way, UC enables communication tasks to be done selectively and immediately in one form or another, thus reducing the inherent latency in business communications due simply to a lack of a specific network access connection or device interface.

UC not only provides general flexibility in traditional person-to-person contacts, but, when coupled with the growing use of multi-modal mobile endpoint devices (smart-phones, iPads), also enables greater end-user access to (inbound) and from (outbound) automated self-service applications. This shift not only reduces labor costs involved with a business process through direct online access to information and proactive process-to-person “notifications” and information delivery, but also provides overall efficiencies through automated, contextual, person-to-person contacts with others involved in the business process.

With real-time federated presence information and “click-to-connect” capabilities, UC brings the communication efficiencies long found only in customer-facing contact centers to all segments of enterprise business activities, including back-office operations, branch office activities, field support, teleworkers, subject matter experts, outsourced staffing, and efficient contacts with business partner organizations involved in a common business process.

The big question now is what responsibilities does the enterprise have for evaluating and managing such expanded UC-based activities and what tools are available for doing that?

Managing Multi-modal Communications

Enterprise organizations have always had difficulty in fully understanding and separately managing different forms of location-based, business communications activity, ranging from messaging to real-time telephone calls and conferencing. UC technologies enabling greater flexibility in crossing the silo boundaries of communication applications for different types of users will only increase the complexity of communication access and activity management.

Managing various shared communication resources across different modalities of communications is something new that enterprise organizations will have to learn and understand. In particular, the sensitive area of customer contacts and interactions will be a key target for new management reporting tools (“UC Analytics”), just as it was for traditional call center telephone activities.

The detailed analytical data generated by UC activities will be applicable to a number of enterprise management responsibilities, including:

· Operational UC requirements planning - Technology infrastructure, traffic capacity, support staffing, applications design, device interfaces. This will be an ongoing challenge.

· Alternative UC implementation strategies and operational cost implications

· Traffic activity management and support – User activity, network capacities, user devices

· Operational business performance analysis - Reporting the “What” and “Who” of business processes – what people and automated applications involved in communication activities associated with key business processes actually do and how efficiently

· The “Why” of business communication activity – Capturing and analyzing key information and communication content within business processes (person-to-person contacts/process-to-person notifications/person-to-process self-services) in order to understand what is causing the communication activity

Person-to-person contacts – Basic communication between individual end users, whether internal to the organization, customer-facing, or with business partners. This will provide insights into the communication efficiencies within business process workflows.

· Speech analytics - Harnessing the voice of the customer in voice calls and messages to gain valuable insight on everything from products and processes to competitors and market opportunities

· Data analytics - Mine data associated with voice calls such as contact metrics, productivity metrics, sources of contact/response delays, etc. to uncover scenarios positively or negatively impacting process performance

· Process and desktop analytics - How desktop activity and application usage as part of person-to-person communications is contributing to or impacting task performance and business process effectiveness

· Messaging analytics - Text, speech, asynchronous, real-time notifications/delivery, access to and from real-time connections (“trans-modal communications”), etc. This also covers all “unified messaging” functions available under the “UC” umbrella, where messages (text, voice) can be dynamically converted across media, depending on the needs of the recipient not just the sender of the message.

· “Trans-modal” communication activities

· Effective use of Presence Management information for real-time contacts

· Security and privacy issues

Process-to-person contacts – Contacts between an automated business process application and specific individual users. Such users may be customer-facing staff (contact center personnel), business partners involved in a shared task, or specific customers involved in a business process.

All such users can be contacted automatically and directly by self-service applications or can initiate contacts, with a choice of modalities, to enterprise personnel through such online applications. Generally referred to as Communication Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), such applications efficiently exploit the flexibility of UC to connect people with both self-service automated applications and/or with specific other people involved in a common business process.

UC flexibility offers the following capabilities to end-users:

· Outbound text-based “notification messages” generated by a business process application can be delivered via a choice of communication applications (Email, SMS, social network postings, etc.). Depending on the recipient’s presence status or preference, unified messaging options can convert such text-based notifications to voice messages.

· Responses from the recipient can be flexibly generated to a self-service automated application and/or selectively to appropriate qualified and available personnel in a choice of media and modalities (“Click-to-Contact”).

Business Process Analytics – UC Analytic tools can identify and evaluate all such communication activity for analysis of who, how, where, when, and why a business process has been affected by different people in the process.

· Trans-modal interfaces for time-sensitive notifications

· Proactive user contacts vs. on-demand access to applications and information

· Responsiveness of people to all forms of contact and automated notifications, which will be indicative of “accessibility” and/or “availability” and time priorities

· Such information can be used to locate and audit patterns of people-based communication delay and error in business process performance.

New model for UC activity data collection

The ability to capture and track all forms of contact activity and associated information content from personalized, user-owned, mobile, multi-modal devices (“smartphones,” iPods) is a new challenge for enterprise and IT management. This capability will require all business-related activity data from different communication applications to be collected, centralized, and consolidated for analysis and reporting.

“Business communications” will no longer be based on a specific communication device or the modality of contact, but will be focused on the identity of the contact initiator and the business relationship with the recipient. This now covers everyone who will be involved with a business process regardless if they interact with people or automated business applications. With this perspective, “UC Analytics” will be able to identify the “who,” “where,” when,” and “why” of business process performance issues.

Who should be responsible for UC Analytics?

Since UC Analytics will cover a broad range of communication activities, the responsibilities for using such analytics will vary across different operational management groups and by type of business organization. It has been reported that best results will come from using an objective business analysis group that understands the value of various performance metrics and can track those metrics to their sources.

Other aspects of UC Analytics, such as “Who” is initiating or responding to various forms of business process contacts, can be the responsibility of specific operational groups directly involved with the management of the processes in question. Contact center management of dedicated customer-facing agents and individual subject matter experts, as well as self-service applications, would be key targets for UC Analytics, as would customer relationship management (CRM) and back-office/branch oversight.

IT involvement will be useful primarily when it comes to ensuring that pertinent activity data is collected wherever it is generated and then consolidated for analyses. They will also be involved in determining the need for integration between data systems, the cost of implementation and support, and the choice of new technologies and their providers. However, line of business management must take responsibility for how the data will be used in properly evaluating operational business performance.

What’s available today? Verint takes the lead in UC Analytics

The nature of UC Analytics, which includes the performance of people involved in a business process, comes closest to traditional call center operational management tools. In fact, UC technologies can generate the greatest ROI when applied to customer services, facilitating both operational cost reduction and the generation of faster revenues from customers. This makes customer contact interactions a practical candidate for realizing maximum ROI from UC applications. However, the integration of all forms of customer communications for analytics is still evolving, e.g., social networking.

One of the leading providers of traditional call center workforce optimization technologies, Verint Systems has already started the migration of its comprehensive call center analytical tools to work in a “Customer UC” environment. This will include all forms of live assistance and automated self-service applications, not just traditional telephony and voice interactions.

Verint’s analytics-driven Impact 360 Workforce Optimization suite captures a variety of information on workflow and workforce performance, including interactions with individual customers and online business process applications. By capturing customer interaction content, especially in person-to-person voice calls where important information is usually lost in the workflow process, Verint’s speech, data, customer feedback, and desktop and process analytics applications can reveal the “Why” of enterprise communications and how well, or not so well, a specific operational activity is taking place.

As pointed out by Blair Pleasant in her article, Verint has adapted its technology expertise in call center analytics for workforce performance management to provide a practical basis for UC interactions with all types of end users involved in a business process, not just call center agents and customers. This will include all enterprise staff regardless of location (back-office operations, branch office locations), as well as external staff from supply chain, field support and business partners, outsourced agent staffing, etc.

Highlighting the adaptation of these technologies that have been driving customer service people and process efficiency and effectiveness in call center environments for years, are the recent successes some organizations have had in leveraging the analytic tools to drive even wider enterprise results and process optimization. This coincides with the realization that the customer service value chain extends well beyond the call center and addressing UC interactions more broadly and holistically across the business is vital to achieving customer centricity.

For example, a Fortune 500 insurance company faced an array of challenges within its back-office life account services group, ranging from lengthy and inconsistent turnaround time to excessive overtime and considerable rework. Implementing an array of back-office solutions from Verint’s Impact 360 suite, including forecasting and scheduling, workforce management, strategic planning, performance management, and desktop and process analytics, the insurer reduced turnaround time from nine days to just six, with bill processing nearing a four-day turnaround.

Similarly, despite a significant increase in staffing, the wholesale lockbox department of a financial services firm had not experienced a commensurate increase in productivity. Partnering with Verint to determine the source of the disparity, the firm was able to identify process improvement opportunities, develop a high-level capacity plan, and create schedules that best utilized available staff skill sets. As a result, throughput increased by 11 percent, operating margins increased by 38 percent, and headcount decreased by six percent, saving the firm over $600,000 a year.

These are examples of the potential value and reach of UC Analytics. By providing insight into day-by-day or even hour-by hour incoming activity, actual throughput, and employee productivity in virtually every area of the business, key organizational stakeholders can make rapid, fact-based decisions to increase efficiency, manage time more effectively, identify flawed or inefficient processes, train staff, match staff scheduling to actual demand, and achieve service level agreements with lower costs, backlog, and overtime.

Summary

UC Analytics is still in its formative stages especially when it comes to including all key UC customer interaction data. As pointed out in Blair’s article, there are some new UC-oriented analytics that are expected beyond Verint’s current offering, including all forms of device-independent UC contact, mobile interactions, as well as all inbound and outbound self-service applications (online, IVR, IVVR), and social networking activity.

With the increase in new communication activities, there will be new sources of data for UC Analytics in the enterprise. Verint’s “open” software solution to UC Analytics can offer practical benefits to an enterprise in many areas of business operations. Its current offering provides a logical and solid first-step towards a flexible, future-proof toolset for enterprise UC activity management reporting.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Latest Contact Center Trends and UC

June 7, 2010

Latest Contact Center Trends Point to “Mobile UC” Flexibility For Consumers

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

As telephony evolves from legacy TDM silos to mobile, IP-based connectivity and multimodal UC interfaces, the contact center world is trying to stay on top of the changes these are bringing to traditional customer interactions. As I have frequently pointed out, “Customer UC” will be a big source of enterprise ROI because it not only helps reduce costs, but also increases customer satisfaction and revenue generation.

However, that increase will be maximized most cost-effectively when consumers exploit the flexibility and efficiencies of mobile, multimodal communication devices like the new generation of “smartphones.” Market figures already show that such smartphones are rapidly being adopted by individual end users of all types as primary endpoints for more personalized and flexible contacts.

Leading analyst firms are now starting to project key contact center market changes that new communication technologies will bring by surveying customer organization perspectives about their technology migration plans from legacy TDM telephony that has dominated contact center activities in the past. The results of a recent market study by Frost & Sullivan was promoted by Interactive Intelligence at their Global User Forum last month to show the new directions that contact centers will be taking. The study “highlights” confirm that customer contact centers will be exploiting the benefits of UC to achieve individual “customer satisfaction,” as well as new, more flexible and cost-effective technology implementations through hosted network services.


Highlights of Frost & Sullivan North American Customer Survey

· Customer satisfaction back as a top priority – A full 50 percent of respondents were profiled as “customer-oriented,” with 35 percent profiled as seeking the “latest and greatest” applications, and the remaining 15 percent profiled as “cost-focused.”

· Growth of hosted services; increasing adoption by large contact centers – The fastest growing segment for hosted contact center adoption were respondents representing contact centers with more than 500 seats (from 35 percent in 2009, to 47 percent in 2010); among all size segments, a total of 30 percent indicated they would use hosted services in 2010, up from 24 percent in 2009.

· Rapid growth of social media customer interactions– Of respondents surveyed, 30 percent indicated they support social media customer activity and interactions on external social media sites (facebook, twitter, etc.), and 29 percent indicated they monitor and extract intelligence from this activity; of social media benefits, the top three cited were to “provide better customer service,” (75 percent), “drive sales,” (58 percent), and “drive customer loyalty” (54 percent).

· Growth of Web collaboration, text and video – Of supported inbound interaction channels, growth from 2009 to 2010 was highest for text/SMS (25 percent increase), video (15 percent increase), and Web-based interactions (8 percent increase).

· Consistent customer experience across channels continues to be a high priority across industries – The largest majority of respondents – 67 percent – rated ensuring consistent service across channels as a “very high priority” or “high priority.”

· Significant increase in proactive customer contact activity across industries – Of three types of outbound customer programs, the majority -- 65 percent -- indicated they would increase their “proactive, value-add customer contact” programs over the next two years; 43 percent said they would increase their “sales and marketing” programs, and 42 percent said they would increase their “collections” programs.

Why Multimodal Mobility Is Key To Efficient UC Customer Contacts

As I have frequently pointed out, UC flexibility is designed to support end user needs as either contact initiators or as contact recipients/respondents (Inbound/Outbound contacts). To maximize customer contact accessibility, an individual end user must be able to either initiate or respond to a business notification anywhere, anytime and in any modality.

Mobile access, coupled with UC interface options, offers just such flexibility and control for efficient communication contact with individual customers. Without mobility and UC, customers are stuck with the old limitations of location-based communications and no alternatives for selectively communicating under different environmental circumstances.

With traditional cell phones, mobility was provided, but only for a voice-based connection. Mobile users in particular are often limited in using voice, not only because of their “availability” to talk, but also because of privacy and ambient noise issues. Furthermore, when customers are contacted by an automated business process application, voice conversations are not as appropriate or efficient as a visual interchange (text, graphics).

While speech is efficient for simple user inputs, it is less so for information output. This is particularly important for the expected increase in proactive customer contact activity confirmed by the Frost and Sullivan study. Accordingly, UC flexibility is particularly strategic to mobile, self-service business applications, that can also be initiated by automated business process applications, better known as CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes).


What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Making UC Universally Interoperable

Copyright © 2010 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

May 18, 2010

UCIF to Do More Than Come Up With UC Infrastructure Standards

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Citing the need to fully leverage customers’ investments in communications systems and unite their global organizations, five global technology companies today joined to form the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF), an alliance dedicated to enabling standards-based, inter-vendor unified communications (UC) interoperability. HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Logitech / LifeSize, and Polycom, seek to unify the vibrant but fragmented UC ecosystem through this shared mission.

Unified Communications (UC) is complex because it represents a variety of different ways to make timely contact and communicate with people. Although, UC functionality is very software based, the multiplicity of UC-related technologies can’t all be provided by a single software developer. From an interoperability perspective, the number of technology standards needed to cover all the flexibility that UC interactions require are too many and too complex to define or implement easily.

Payoff of Interoperability

Obviously, both the technology definitions and concept perspectives of UC are important, but what is most critical is enabling all kinds of end users to benefit from having communication flexibility and efficiencies in their choice of contact and user interfaces. That flexibility of choice is now becoming increasingly critical because it is becoming the multimodal gateway to personal and efficient personal accessibility, due to the rapid adoption of mobile “smartphones.”

This choice will soon be universally available to all kinds of users, whether a “user” is initiating a new contact or responding as a recipient of a contact initiated by someone else, including a “proactive,” automated business application process (CEBP). It also should make little difference as to who the end user is – enterprise staff, business partner, or consumer/customer.

In fact, we see one of the biggest payoffs of UC will be the ability for individual users to exploit the use of mobile smartphones to be more accessible and interact directly on a personalized basis with any automated business process application. For all of this flexibility to be realized, on an end-to-end basis from any endpoint device with UC multimodal flexibility, there has to be universal interoperability across all UC infrastructure components that may be involved. The problem is that there are not enough infrastructure standards (yet) to cover the interoperability complexities of UC usage.

Benefits For UC Growth

Up till now, it has not only been difficult to describe what “UC” really means, but also, when it came time to plan an implementation of UC, there were no standards that could be used for selecting UC technology components and services. The various communication applications like IM, social networking, UM, and CEBP applications, were not really organized to be easily implemented and integrated wherever desired on an application design or end user basis. As a result, the promises of UC providing benefits to individual users (UC-U) or to business application processes (UC-B) were “blowing in the wind!”

With an “open,” cooperative group of leading industry providers and objective industry experts taking charge of organizing all the elements of UC, things like:

· Terminology and definitions
· Identifying interoperability needs and priorities for both real-time and asynchronous testing and certification
· Establishing easy to use interoperability testing and certification procedures
· Structuring the UC framework so that there will be a clear and objective differentiation of functional roles for UC-based applications
· Coordinating UC standards with standards of other communication applications
· Establishing appropriate metrics for evaluating various levels of benefits from implementing UC capabilities in different ways
· Support a common UC ecosystem that will subsume and not conflict with other standards-based technologies
· Etc.
can now become better structured for practical implementation planning for the technology providers, the market, the individual end users, the service providers, and the enterprise IT support staff.

We can expect the UCIF to help break the gridlock that currently exists between the communication technologies of the future and existing technologies that still work. This will benefit all individual end users and the applications they use, as well as business organizations of any size that must support specific application needs for those end users.

Opening The Doors to Mobile UC Services

It is well recognized that UC flexibility has its greatest payoffs to end users who are mobile and will be using a variety of multimodal “smart-phones.” In addition to helping to define all the necessary standards that the full spectrum of UC functionality will require, the UCIF can also provide an operational framework that will facilitate ongoing interoperability testing and certification of any UC software technology product or service.

This UCIF facility will be very useful to help drive and support new hosted and “cloud-based” UC applications, as well as to help expand “open” interoperability between Mobile UC services. The latter is particularly strategic, since the wireless carriers still seem to be trying to lock in dominance over their customer endpoint devices and associated mobile applications. Wireless mobility at the individual end user level must be a basic modality option for the UC framework.

Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) Formation Announced

In response to the critical need to make all UC applications more “open,” across the UC network infrastructure framework, and to satisfy a consistent UC “experience” for all individual end users, the formation of a new, “open alliance” of technology leaders involved with developing various UC technologies and services, was announced today. Named the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF), the group is open to membership by any organization that is developing UC technologies and is interested in supporting interoperability with other UC technologies.

Jim Burton, of UCStrategies.com, noted that:
“Even though vendors work hard to follow standards, standards are open to interpretation and it creates interoperability problems. The UCIF will help solve those problems by providing a venue for testing and working with other companies to ensure that products are interoperable before they’re delivered to a customer.”

“By working together, the UCIF will help make the UC market grow sooner than it would otherwise, with each vendor now able to get their share of a larger pie.”

The founding members have been joined by a growing roster of member companies including Acme Packet, Aspect, AudioCodes, Broadcom, BroadSoft, Brocade, ClearOne, Jabra, Plantronics, RADVISION, Siemens Enterprise Communications, and Teliris. It is still early in the game, so many of the important UC players have not yet publicized their intentions, but it is clear that for the UC market to move forward, ALL the serious players will have to participate and cooperate in this common goal.

For more details on UCIF membership participation, you can get more information and objective insights by UC Strategies experts at www.ucstrategies.com.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Here Come the UC Solution Integrators

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

April 20, 2010

Helping “UC Solution Integrators” Succeed In The Marketplace Beyond IP Telephony

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Introduction
Unified Communications (UC) is a term that is displacing “business communica-tions” because it is a concept and technology approach that integrates user inter-faces to support all forms of real-time and asynchronous contact and interaction with people involved in a business process. It is slowly replacing stand-alone business telephony technologies, integrating voice and text-based information. UC is particularly important in mobile environments, where the end user inter-faces, both for initiating or receiving a contact, must work flexibly and efficiently within the context of a business process, for each individual user’s needs at the moment.

As a result, the trend towards implementation of UC capabilities is opening new opportunities for traditional technology sales and support channels to assist business organizations in planning and implementing their individual migration from legacy telephone communications to integrated UC capabilities.

The key to success in this convergence will be strategic business partnerships with leading infrastructure technology providers and developers, established communications software and service providers, as well as application designers and implementation specialists that can work together to support all aspects of an integrated UC operational environment. UCStrategies calls such UC Business Partners “Solution Integrators.”

One major communication software provider, IBM, describes its UC strategy as being based on four pillars: an open end extensible platform capable of integrating with most leading collaboration and telephony products, technical expertise, industry knowledge and experience and, last but not least, a healthy ecosystem of business partners. IBM relies on business partners or Solution Integrators to build UC solutions on top of its UC platform and to provide the integrated functionality customers require. And, because IBM Sametime software integrates out of the box with many Microsoft productivity applications, solutions integrators of a wide variety of backgrounds can find new opportunities. IBM provides those partners with access to the technical expertise and integration tools they need to succeed, providing the added UC integration expertise that is lacking in most internal IT organizations, while giving business partners a key role in one of IBM's newest segments of its software business.

In order to recognize the enterprise business sweet spots for UC, it is important for every UC Business Partner or Solution Integrator to fully understand all operational perspectives and priorities for the different benefits that UC will bring to a business organization. This includes individual end user needs for communications and interactions with people both inside and outside the organization. Any UC solutions implemented for today’s modes of communication must also be ”future proofed’” for tomorrow’s communications.

Telephony Integrations – one of the key starting points for UC

Today’s enterprise UC migrations typically start with enabling more efficient and effective ways to initiate real-time phone contacts with other people, both inside or outside of any size organization. This may be done “contextually” from “click-to-call” information, coupled with availability information (presence), in a personal contact directory, provided through messaging contacts (email, IM, voice mail, SMS, etc.), or for selective access to live assistance within automated, self-service business process applications (Web, IVR applications).

Cost efficient, SIP-based IP Telephony that can integrate easily with other UC communication applications, is slowly but surely replacing legacy TDM PBX telephone systems. A big obstacle in migrating any organization to a UC environment is the challenge of ripping and replacing the many existing and expensive telephone systems that still function effectively for person-to-person voice conversations. Integrating existing telephony investments with business process applications and other UC communication applications software (email, voice mail, conferencing, IM, telephony presence, SMS, social networking, and mobile, etc.) has become a short-term target for UC payoffs.

IBM has made a concerted effort to bring its Business Partners on board to help integrate their customers into a UC services environment. There is a range of services business partners can provide. The greatest customer value – and the greatest revenue opportunity for business partners resides in - first, improving business processes with horizontal unified communications services and, ultimately, UC-enabling specific business processes in vertical industry application scenarios.

What’s The Opportunity For UC Business Partners?

The evolving UC capabilities and technologies provide new opportunities and challenges to enterprises. Because most enterprise IT organizations typically have neither the evolving knowledge and experience for integrating converging legacy telephony with other UC technologies, they need lots of hands-on help to even start moving forward with migrations to real UC solutions. In addition to the challenge of integrating and interoperating with legacy telephony systems, most UC solutions will include:

• All forms of messaging and multimodal endpoints (“unified messaging”)

• All forms of voice and video conferencing

• Integrations with business process applications (CEBP)

Business organizations, large or small, will need hands-on support for planning, configuring, installing, integrating, and UC-enabling all the hardware and software pieces in the UC solution picture. This can’t happen overnight because UC technology elements are still evolving and slowing the migration from legacy telephony silos. There are a variety of ongoing issues that enterprises need help with from Solution Integrators due to the nature of UC solutions:

• Existing communication technology investments still work and need to be included when appropriate in the day-to-day operations.

• UC is not a not a single product, but rather a set of interoperable communication capabilities that may be distributed differently among a variety of commu-nication facilities.

• Implementation priorities will vary from organization to organization, especially in terms of business process functionalities and priorities, then may change as business activities change.

• End users, from both inside and outside of an organization, will need some training in the effective use of basics of UC communication functions, as well as in specific business process applications that are customized for specific UC situations and end user situations.

• New mobile endpoint devices and interface designs will play a large role for enterprise application implementations.

• Communication technologies will need many, selective technology integrations with business applications.

• Such integrations will require strong partnerships and implementation planning/coordination.
These are all areas that UC solution providers must take responsibility for dealing with in helping customers implement UC applications. The question then becomes how will UC Solution Integrators gain that expertise?

What IBM Has To Offer UC Business Partners


The voice or telephony industry is changing drastically. In looking for a strategic partner, UC Solution Integrators or Business Partners have to start thinking about the end results that their customers are really looking for long term, which may require skills that the Solution Integrator doesn’t currently have now. Solution Integrators in the UC arena, particularly those who specialize in voice communications, need to partner with leading providers of integration technology that provide robust and flexible integration platforms to help customers extract more value from what they already have and to give Solution Integrators the technological springboard to help those customers evolve new UC applications when they're ready.

Because of its heavy experience with standards-based, open software, along with its strong role in developing messaging and application software, IBM is well positioned to assist its business partners move into the various areas of UC, especially in the business process perspective of UC activities.

IBM provides the necessary platforms and tools to enable Business Partners to easily develop and integrate customized, but flexible, business process UC applications. In addition to its UC platform offerings, notably Sametime and Sametime Unified Telephony, IBM provides a range of tools for its Business Partners, includ-ing:

• Comprehensive Integration Software Tools – Toolsets for designing and im-plementing customized, applications with voice and visual interfaces for both desktop and mobile endpoint devices.

• UC Experience and Training – Experience is what UC Business Partners re-quire in order to help their customers move forward with practical UC imple-mentations, and IBM is clearly experienced in using its own technologies inter-nally. IBM also provides opportunities for partnering with other IP telephony Business Partners and specialists in order to provide comprehensive UC com-ponent solutions. In addition, IBM offers integration training, market training, and end user UC interface training.

Practical Steps to become a UC Solutions Integrator/Business Partner:

UC is not a single product or application and evolves from the support and partici-pation of different application specialist skills. UC will become an ongoing source of business from existing customers as UC software technology continually changes to match specific evolving customer needs. The following are steps that are recommended for potential UC Solutions Integrators:

1. Identify your current “expertise” within the technologies of UC, e.g., business process analysis, applications (telephony, IVR, contact center, etc.), IP telephony integration, business process integration, mobility;

2. Identify customer UC needs and associated skill requirements;

3. Learn additional UC skills required by your customers, or

4. Partner with others who already qualify in those other skills; and

5. Develop your additional skills as needed, leveraging the UC resources avail-able at UCStrategies.com, or from specific vendors. For example, IBM’s Partnerworld is an excellent place for IBM partners to help grow their businesses.

As the UC industry changes, so too do the skills for Solution Integrators and Business Partners. Working with vendor companies that provide these partners with the tools they need to succeed is crucial. As a sponsor of UCStrategies’ UC Summit, IBM is investing in helping its partners prosper.

What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

UC Meets CEBP

Copyright © 2010 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

April 14, 2010

UC Is More Than “Person-to-Person” Contacts – Think “Proactive Self-service Applications!”

By Art Rosenberg

The telephone brought the power of real-time voice connections to people in distributed business operations, but with today’s UC capabilities, voice is just one of the options for both real-time and non-real-time contacts for both business and social contacts.

Conversational voice phone calls, however, also maintained the need for live assistance to be involved with exchanging information and manually completing business real-time transactions. Although self-service applications could be implemented using a Touch-tone telephone keypad and speech output, the voice user interface, as well as any information, had to be kept very simple. In the growing Internet world of self-service online information access, speech can only be used for simple outputs. More complex or voluminous data still need the efficiencies of stored text and visual graphics.

In order to fully exploit the power of automation self-services to a business process, the business process itself must be able to initiate real-time contacts with people, rather than simply wait for a person (customer, partner) to make the first move. The flexibility of mobile devices, coupled with UC’s “click-to-call” and unified messaging capabilities, will enable time-sensitive automated applications to proactively initiate timely business contacts (notifications) and associated self-service applications, with people, without the necessity and expense of live assistance required by voice interfaces alone.

CEBP and “Click-to-Contact” Assistance

UC’s presence-based “click-to-call” options can provide access to voice or visual conversational live assistance “on demand” in any automated application, regardless of how the application was initiated. This makes such applications more useful to a greater variety of application processes and the various end users of those applications. More importantly, UC facilities, integrated with Communications Enabled Business Process applications (CEBP), can significantly expand opportunities to automate business processes involving customers and customer-facing staff. This will reduce operational costs, improve operational performance, and speed up revenue generation.

The real benefit and the potential for true competitive advantages resides in striking the right balance between the pieces of a business process that can—and should—be automated whenever possible, and those where human judgment and intervention, on demand, can guarantee the best outcome.

This will be particularly valuable for automating more accessible and flexible self-service business processes with mobile and personalized, handheld smartphone devices. Integrating them with CEBP and UC options, rather than keeping them limited by the inefficiencies of inbound voice calls and traditional Telephone User Interfaces (TUI) of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications for information output, will expand the role of self-services and minimize the need and costs for live voice assistance.

This is the “hot spot” where data technology providers like IBM and Microsoft will be exploiting UC integrations with voice connections.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.