Mobile Self-service Apps Need Assistance

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC Strategies Expert

I recently attended Interactive Intelligence’s annual global conference, Interactions 2013, where a highlight was their “cloud” based platform offering for mobile customer self-services, Interaction Mobilizer. ININ has recognized that the solution to supporting mobile customers with smartphones and tablets is to not only maximize the use of customized, multi-modal, self-service business applications (“mobile apps”) offered selectively to customers, but to also simplify integration of such applications with flexible choices for accessing live assistance.

Mobile self-service applications provide to major benefits to contact center operational performance:

1. They minimize the need and expense for live assistance
2. They provide greater “contextual” information to agents for more efficient and effective customer experiences, if and when assistance is needed

What has to happen with mobile self-service applications is that they must update traditional online applications designs for mobile device use, as well as facilitate direct access to live assistance to mobile users with their choice of contact mode from within the mobile application. That would eliminate the need to have a customer leave the app to always dial a toll-free number and go to a waiting queue.

Many online apps already offer customers the option to use IM and “text chat” for customer assistance. They can also send emails with questions and problems. What integration with contact center telephony technology brings to the table is the that when customer runs into an issue with the self-service application, they can immediately speak to a qualified representative or request a callback when such a person is available and get immediate confirmation of that request. No mobile self-service application will ever always be 100% adequate to satisfy every customer need, so the option for flexible live assistance must be always be offered to fill the gaps in the dynamic needs of every mobile consumer.

The future of mobile self-services

Visual self-services will effectively, slowly, but surely, displace the limitations of legacy IVR applications by enabling more information to be efficiently delivered to smartphone and tablet screens. That doesn’t, however, preclude using the efficiencies and convenience of voice user interfaces (VUIs) for user inputs, as has already been well demonstrated by Apple’s Siri, and other “virtual assistants.” Such options will be particularly necessary when mobile users are walking or driving a car and must be “hands-free” or “eyes-free.”

One of the other major benefits of increased consumer communications mobility is that it opens the door to greater accessibility for pro-active, time-sensitive “notifications” and reminder messages, which, in turn, can be linked contextually to “self-service” applications or to “click-for assistance.” This not only reduces the need for expensive and unnecessary live customer assistance, but will also simplify flexible customer choice to access to such assistance whenever necessary.

At the recent 2013 UC Summit, our survey of invited VARs, SIs, and Consultants showed very high interest in supporting Mobile UC for customer services for business clients. However, in a quick audience poll after my presentation, only a very small percentage of the attendees were involved in helping customers with current IVR applications. So, the multi-modal, mobile self-service future looks promising, and the comprehensive tools that Interactive Intelligence has developed will be very critical to fulfilling that promise!  

For more insights about the big shift of customer services to mobile customers, read my post on UC Strategies.com.

http://www.ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-strategies-views/mobile-multi-modal-customer-self-services-less-talk-and-more-action.aspx.

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

ShoreTel Joins Mobile UC At The Desktop

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC Strategies Expert

Whether you like it or not, all your employees are consumers too, and they are all going to be carrying around their own personal smartphones at work. They may also be carrying tablets in place of bulky laptops to access “cloud”- based applications when on the go. The issue now is, - how can that fact of life be accepted to improve multi-modal business communications while also minimizing communication costs.

The need for flexibility in business communications has always been driven primarily by end user mobility. Legacy desktop communications handled such flexibility needs with separate and expensive voice and visual endpoints, connections, and software applications. Multi-modal wireless smartphones and tablets have made UC enablement both necessary and practical. Now that such ubiquitous mobile devices can do almost everything that the desktop endpoints do and more, the BYOD question arises about the need for having different endpoints for an end user who may need both wired and wireless connections.

Following in the footsteps of the many consumers who have already abandoned their residence wired phones and home PCs in favor of more flexible mobile smartphones, we can now expect a similar trend to take place for business users, whether working in an office or from home. However, the problem with using those just mobile devices in place of wired desktop phones and PCs is that:

1.      Battery life won’t support prolonged usage for either long phone calls or extended online application access.

2.      Voice quality is not always good

3.      Handset control of “hard phones” is ergonomically better than screen-based control

4.      BYOD considerations require “dual persona” controls over call/message management

ShoreTel’s New Desktop Hard Phone For Mobile, Post-PC Employees

Recognizing this need for business end users, ShoreTel has just announced it’s new desktop offering, the ShoreTel Dock, coupled with ShoreTel Mobility, to allow BYOD employees to use their mobile smartphones and tablets as “portable PCs” that can also work with “smart” hard desk phones in an office or at home. Because they are multi-modal devices, the smartphones and tablets take over the roles of the desktop PC in terms of access to “cloud” based applications, “softphone” screen-based telephony options, and multi-modal messaging functions.

Those mobile devices can now also benefit from using a very low-cost desktop hard phone add-on that takes care of the inherent limitations of the mobile devices mentioned above. It also retains the familiar and simple options for initiating and receiving phone calls that legacy  “hard” desk phones have long offered.

While the multi-modal mobile devices handle all forms of communications, ranging from text messaging to Instant Messaging to voice and video connections, ShoreTel’s Dock and ShoreTel Mobility enable easy visual access to those new communication functions. The Dock still has the familiar Message Waiting Indicator light, which is controlled by their voicemail application, but therefore doesn’t reflect any other forms of messaging activity. Given that the multimodal smartphones and tablets are really handling all kinds of incoming calls and messages, it would be nice to see that MWI light tie in with a more comprehensive display of all the different kinds of messages that are “waiting,” not just  “Visual Voicemail.”  Voicemail messages are no longer necessarily more important than other modes of messages and notifications!

They Didn't Forget "Dual Persona" Call Management!

ShoreTel has also incorporated “dual persona” capabilities in its call management functions for both incoming and outbound calls. This allows job-related calls to be managed separately and differently from personal calls on the same device. Although traditional phone calling by keying in a phone number will not disappear overnight, it is also obvious that “contextual” contacts from a directory display, a text or voice message, or from a document that is linked to a particular individual or group of individuals, is the way of the presence-based UC future.

ShoreTel seems to be moving quickly to a UC-enabled desktop with its integration with Microsoft Lync, while also preserving familiar telephony procedures and user interfaces for desktop business users.

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

UC Opportunities For VARs, SIs, Consultants at UC Summit

April 11 2013

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC Strategies Expert

As I highlighted in my recent post, UC is becoming a key factor in next generation contact centers that must now support mobile consumers. This direction was reinforced at the very successful Enterprise Connect show, where Voxeo, an innovative provider of self-service application development technology, was judged “Best of Show.”  While person-to-person business communications are still important, there are huge benefits to be realized from the fact that consumers are rapidly becoming both mobile and multi-modal, and will want well-designed mobile self-service applications rather than always trying to get or enter information through a person.

Of course, what makes self-service applications work better, is the flexibility in mobile user interfaces that are is supported by smartphones and tablets, as well as practical options for seamless access to live assistance when needed. The technology tools for implementing such capabilities are still evolving. Business organizations will require assistance in planning and integrating the new communication technologies that are complex and require experience that is not readily available within most IT organizations. This is, of course, particularly true for smaller SMB organizations that never had large IT staffs in the first place. However, ALL organizations, large and small, have to support the new demands of their mobile consumers/customers, using multi-modal smartphones and tablets.

Finally, the “clouds” are rapidly becoming the universal framework for all communications and business process applications. For my perspective of customer interactions in the “clouds,” see my recent white paper for Echopass, a leading provider of managed contact center services.

Big Opportunities For VARs, Consultants, SIs as Channel Partners

While communication vendors are rapidly moving into the “cloud”-based services space, they are also frantically looking for channel partners who can support user organizations on an ongoing service basis. This opportunity will be highlighted at the upcoming annual “UC Summit” taking place on an invitation basis for VARs, Consultants, and SIs in La Jolla April 28^th – May 1^st.

This will be a unique opportunity for channel partners to extend their relationships with both vendors and other channel partners in order to benefit from the changes that UC and mobile communications are bringing to business communications. In particular, I will be presenting the case for helping business organizations implement mobile, self-service applications that will be dominating the next generation of contact center activities.

For more information and an application to be invited as a guest to this unique conference, please check out this link. 

http://www.ucstrategies.com/ucsummit/2013/

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

“Unified Customer Services” For Digital And Mobile Consumers

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC Strategies Expert

We are finally seeing unified communications (UC) finally taking over customer interactions. This means that every size organization, in every type of market segment, must be prepared to support consumers/customers with the flexibility of UC for all types of interactions. What is bringing new impetus to this shift in business communications are three key factors:

·        Mobile consumer devices - Multi-modal mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, have expanded convenient and fast direct consumer access to online, self-services, including various modes of person-to-person contacts, online information access and transactions, and pro-active notifications by automated business processes.

·        Interoperability and integration between various forms of person-to-person communications and business process applications – Because there is increased flexibility required for contacts with mobile people, the various forms of communication must now dynamically be controlled by the end users, depending upon their individual needs and circumstances as contact initiators or recipients/respondents.    

·        “Cloud” – based applications – As both communication and business process software applications become location independent, developing and integrating them in “cloud” environments becomes critical to faster and lower-cost implementations and ongoing change management.

Customer services are rapidly moving from legacy call and contact centers to “Unified Interaction Centers,” where online self-service applications are not only minimizing the need for live assistance to consumers to get information or perform simple transactions, but also facilitating more flexible access to specialized assistance whenever needed. The result of such changes to customer assistance is greater personalization, experience customization, and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.

This year’s Enterprise Connect brought increased focus on the important role of the contact center in business communications, in this report from the show. Customer services are now becoming recognized as high-value applications and “use cases,” that are benefiting from integration with “consumer BYOD,” UC-enablement, and “cloud” services.  

Customer services used to be locked in together in different technology platforms that were difficult to integrate. As a result, only big organizations could afford to invest and support implementing all the pieces involved with legacy telephony call centers. One of the leading innovators in contact center technologies was Interactive Intelligence (ININ), decided to build their software infrastructure fully integrated from the ground up, calling it an “all-in-one” software product. However, because, of contact center application complexity and costs, many SMB organizations could not afford to implement such contact center technologies by themselves.

The challenge of supporting customer services has been greatly increased by the advent of “Mobile UC” and multi-modal live assistance and self-service applications, not just phone calls. So, while UC-enabled business communications focused initially on internal organizations and collaborative contacts, the big Customer Service markets were pretty much stuck on old CPE-based call center telephony. Now, however, with increased consumer mobile flexibility, “cloud” based applications are making big waves in all kinds of customer service applications.

The Really Big SMB Market For Unified Customer Services

I have always felt that customer services will really be the same for small or large organizations. The main differences showed up in things like:

·       How big your market is

·       How much live assistance and expertise will be needed by different customers

·       Software tools for running operations smoothly, training customer-facing staff,

·       Management tools and metrics to insure customer responsiveness satisfaction (“Experience!”)

·       Customization of self-service applications for different types of applications, especially “mobile apps.”

Interactive Intelligence (ININ), among other leading customer service software technology vendors, emphasized it’s strategic move of going after the SMB market, since small businesses really need to use most of the same technologies as larger organizations. There have always been more SMBs out there than larger enterprise organizations, so with the advent of “consumer BYOD,” there is suddenly a huge need for third-party expertise of Channel Partners and Consultants to help develop, support, and manage the complex technology of multi-modal customer services in “public,” private,” and hybrid cloud environments.

The “cloud’ environment will be particularly useful for implementing and managing integrations and self-service customizations. That always used to an expensive and time-consuming effort. Now, with all application technologies moving into interoperable “clouds,” it should no longer be any big problem for any size organization to move forward selectively with individual customer groups, customer-facing staffs, and specific customized online applications, associated with different forms of live assistance.        

Bringing The Right Experiences To The Customer Service Table

As confirmed in many recent market studies, mobile customers are now expecting:

·        More access to mobile online self-services

·        Pro-active mobile notifications and alerts, rather than calling in or checking online

·        Greater flexibility in choice of user interfaces (voice, visual)

·        Options for multiple forms of “smart” access to live assistance when needed

Watch for the growth of cloud-based “Unified Interaction Centers!”

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Moving To Mobile Customer Service

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC Strategies Expert

Customer service is changing dramatically as consumers become more mobile and have greater direct access to online information and services. Organizations, both large enterprises and small businesses, will all be affected by the impact of multi-modal smartphones and tablets on traditional telephone-based interactions.

As confirmed in many recent market studies, mobile customers are now expecting:

·        More access to mobile online self-services

·        Pro-active mobile notifications and alerts, rather than calling in or checking online

·        Greater flexibility in choice of user interfaces (voice, visual)

·        Options for multiple forms of “smart” access to live assistance when needed

The contact center of yesterday must start planning now to accommodate the new technologies that support such interactions for both mobile customers and customer assistance staff, wherever they may be located. Migrating contact center applications for mobile customers will be most cost-efficiently facilitated by moving to “cloud” based hosted and managed services, but “Customer BYOD” needs will also require self-service applications to be designed for device-independence and offer more flexible choices for user interaction interfaces.

Telephone calls are not going to disappear, but voice conversations are being subsumed by other forms of inbound and outbound contacts, including social network postings, text chat, and video calls. As reflected in a recent market study, customers prefer interacting with online applications first, before requiring access to live assistance.

Providing good customer experiences will be key to customer satisfaction and operational support efficiencies, so providing a unified analytics view of all customer contact activities will be critical in designing both personalized self- service applications and live assistance on demand.

Stay tuned as your call center of yesterday evolves into a “Mobile Interaction Center.”

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Telework Dumped By New Yahoo CEO

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

I admit I was very surprised to read about Yahoo's new CEO, Marisssa Mayer, stopping employee's from working away from the office because it doesn't support good "collaboration." Like around the water cooler or at lunch, etc.?

Read comments about this at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/25/richard-branson-yahoo-marissa-mayer_n_2759243.html

This story reminds me of a similar experience that I had in the early days of developing online time-sharing services for the ARPAnet, a precursor of the Internet and the World Wide Web. One of the application developer's (Clark Weisman) wife was experiencing a difficult pregnancy, which required her to be completely bedridden for the remaining weeks of her pregnancy. That meant that he had to be at home to take care of her, and therefore might not finish his project as scheduled.

Since the basic SDC Time-sharing System (TSS) was already working for remote access by teletype phone lines, I suggested to the project management that it would be practical to simply put in a new phone line at his home and he could then complete his project online, while taking care of his wife. Management's first reaction was that this was a project that required time sheets to be filled out, attesting to the employee's doing the required work in the office. They were concerned that there would be no way to insure that the employee would be working for the time required.

I pointed out that not only would the normal work hours be put in, but, because the work was being from home, there would probably be more hours expended. Further, there would also be evidence of actual activity recorded by the time-sharing system while online work was being done. Grudgingly, management acceded to my recommendation, and, as I predicted, online work started very early each day and ended late at night. The wife had a successful delivery of a daughter and the online project was also successfully completed.

Of course, there will be "different strokes for different folks" when it comes to what kind of work needs to be done in an "office" environment, so it will be a mixed bag for individual workers as to when they can and cannot work while physically away from a group. So, it's not so much whether it is in an office, but what kind of work is involved and with whom. 

The means of accessing information, interacting with people and online applications has become more flexible with mobile UC, and it is therefore very surprising that Yahoo has taken such a Draconian step. I just heard a news program that suggested that this action was taken as a way to get some employees to quit their jobs and thus reduce the payroll without actually firing anyone directly. Oh, well! 
 
   
 

Mobile Consumers Want UC-Based Customer Services, Not “Collaboration!”

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View – UC Strategies Expert

Organizations interested in unified communications (UC) have focused on how their employees communicated, because such communications could be easily controlled. That is, until multi-modal mobile devices provided greater communication flexibility to end users and brought “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Device) considerations into the picture. However, “Consumer BYOD” is also changing how businesses interact with their mobile customers, but in different ways.

While major communication providers have expanded their “UC” role to include “collaboration” (“UC&C”), that label should not apply to customer interactions and services. For more perspectives on this subject, please check out my post on the UC Strategies website.  

Two Views of Mobile Customer Services

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/UC Strategies Expert

If you have been reading technology reports lately, what you will notice is that many UC industry experts are now focusing more on UC for customer services as better source of business ROI rather than just the productivity benefits of employee  “collaboration.”

All business communications have been impacted by user mobility, with organizations trying to adjust to the realities of employee BYOD who want to use a single smartphone (or tablet)  for all their multi-modal communication contacts. The same view is starting to be recognized by the contact center industry about what I have been calling “Customer BYOD.” UC enablement there is an even bigger challenge for supporting customer services, because it affects not only mobile customers, but also customer-facing support staff.

Call centers used to be pretty simple because both callers and agents used a single common form of interaction with voice, the telephone. It got a little more complex for the agents when customers initiated contacts with email and chat. However, contact centers “siloed” these activities, so that while agents had only one modality to deal with, they still shared the same customer information to handle the interactions. With mobile, multi-modal smartphones and tablets, customers can now interact in a variety of communication modes and even easily change modes dynamically, as their mobile circumstances dictate. The question is, can the customer support agent be able to keep up with what a customer can do with a mobile smartphone or tablet?

Start With What The Customer Can Do With a Mobile Smartphone

In any business operation, the customer typically comes first!

So, it is necessary to look at the impact of Mobile UC from a customer’s perspective as the starting point for what the customer-facing organization will face to meet new mobile customer needs. Those needs range from online self-service applications to mobile notifications and alerts that are personalized and authorized by customer recipients to selective contacts with live assistance.

One reason to list the different things a mobile consumer/customer can do when interacting with a business organizations, is to identify the primary means of contact interfaces and options for dynamically switching seamlessly to other connections on demand. That is essentially the key benefit for UC enablement that can be applied to business process applications.

1.  Contact initiation – Unlike traditional telephone calling, where the caller needs to know a specific telephone number, mobile users can benefit from starting with access to an online website, using browser search facilities. Depending upon the user’s current situation, e.g., driving a car, sitting in a meeting, etc., the user can dynamically choose the medium of input and output most appropriate at the moment, i.e., speech or other input and output.

2.  More self-service applications – Once online to a desired website, the mobile user can explore appropriate options to access various types of information and to perform various self-service transactions. 


3.      More selective live assistance – Most customers will only need live assistance on an exception basis, so whenever they reach such a point, that is when they can initiate a contact for live assistance. Most importantly, such assistance can be much more selective and contextual; that is, the customer can choose the mode of contact that is needed, and the context of whatever has been done with self-services, will better determine the skill level required for such live assistance. 

     The fact that a mobile customer is now more accessible and flexible with a smartphone means that the response can include a choice of different options for any real-time connections with live assistance.

4.      More proactive notifications – With more automated business process applications in play, there is now an opportunity to increase operational efficiencies and improve customer satisfaction, by proactively notifying customers of personalized situations that are important and time-sensitive. This will not only reduce problems caused by awareness delays, but can also increase operational efficiencies and people productivity. (Health care, financial, legal, government, and travel vertical markets are good examples.)

The bottom line is that customer services will not necessarily start off with a traditional phone call, but can involve a voice or video conversation when deemed necessary. Needless to say, the real-time connection may be made through new WebRTC protocols, rather than legacy PSTN connections.

How Will Customer-facing Agents Be Affected?

There will also be several things that will change the way that live customer assistance for multimodal, mobile customers will occur because of Mobile UC. These will affect both inbound and outbound contacts with mobile consumers.

1.      Inbound contact mode – First line agents or experts will have to be prepared to interact with a customer in the customer’s mode of contact, voice, IM, text/voice message, chat, video, social network post, etc. Their desktop must provide multi-modal communication capabilities, just like a customer’s smartphone.

2.       Agents won’t have to respond in the same mode – Unless it is a real-time conversation with voice or chat, agents will be able to use different forms of response to a customer contact. Incoming video calls can be responded to with just voice, voice messages can be retrieved and responded to with text, chat can be escalated to voice or video, social network postings can be responded to personally, etc.

3.      Real-time outbound contacts to mobile customers will contextually exploit recipient availability (presence) – Traditional phone call notifications will increasingly be replaced by automated notifications, as noted earlier. Live contacts will be enabled once an automated contact is made and the recipient then wishes to interact with a live person in their choice of mode (Voice, Video, Chat). Therefore, agents must be prepared to communicate dynamically with what the recipient wants, including change modes from chat to voice to video.

4.      When video is involved, agents won’t necessarily have to be “on camera” – Traditional call center agents and “home agents” benefit by not having to be seen, just heard. So, even though video can be exploited, it can be optionally and selectively used in conjunction with a voice conversation. In particular, it will be most frequently used to exchange information, e.g., demonstrate how to do something, show the status of something, etc.

5.      Any real-time connection with a customer can be escalated to an “expert” or authorizing manager – UC enablement will facilitate escalating the customer connection (inbound or outbound) from the agent to an  “expert” or a manager to satisfy the customer needs. As with any access to live assistance by a mobile consumer that can mean responding when such resources are available in a choice of response modes.     

What I described is the future of next-generation interaction centers that will support live assistance, as it will impact customers and the agents that must provide assistance in a mobile, multi-modal world. I haven’t discussed the role of “cloud” based customer services and self-service applications, which will also facilitate management of mobile customers and home agents.

    

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Social Media Needs Mobile UC For Notifications

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/UC Strategies Expert

As defined by Wikipedia, “Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.” This definition applies primarily to any form of business interactions, rather than for personal socializing.

However, as people increasingly exploit mobile smartphones and tablets for accessing the Web and for multi-modal communications flexibility, we need to expand that definition to include Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) applications that will initiate contacts with end users through social networks. This is something that IBM is pushing strongly as “Social Business.”

Social networking is primarily a means of posting user-generated information and comments to a virtual community of interest. Members of the community have an option to be notified when a new posting occurs, as well as an option to post a response to the new posting. So, it’s not quite like person-to-person(s) email. However, as is already starting to happen with new capabilities from social networking services, end users are being given options to switch modalities to respond to the person of a particular post, by email, IM, or a real-time voice or video connection. (WebRTC should prove very useful for this!)

So, what we now have is a growing open communication arena based on community content interest relationships, where unified communication (UC) integrations can provide flexible interactions with people in the community, not through a traditional personal address book or organizational directory for person-to-person contacts.

Mobile Social

According to the Wikipedia write-up, mobility is playing an increasingly stronger role in allowing community members to participate while mobile, i.e., by being proactively notified when a new posting of interest has occurred. In effect, mobile communications reinforces the speed of social messaging activities across a common interest of any size community. However, once an individual user is mobile, they will need the flexibility of UC to be notified and respond in the medium that is most appropriate, i.e., speech, text, or even video.

As I have frequently discussed in the past, UC enablement facilitates greater flexibility in initiating and responding to communication contacts with mobile people, and mobile social networking is no exception. Tablet usage increased from 3% to 16% in 2012 and mobile users spend 30% of their time with social networking. Once a user becomes actively engaged in a particularly interesting topic and opts to be notified of new posts, the capabilities of smartphones will allow multi-modal real-time notifications of new post or replies to significantly increase. That’s where the challenge of BYOD comes into play.

The result of such increased social networking activities can be applied to both personal social networking communities or to organizational business groups, and seamless “dual persona” capabilities of smartphones and tablets (e.g., the new BlackBerry “Balance” smartphone software) will be able to keep mobile social networking activities properly separated. However, there will always be the challenge for individual end users to manage their mobile time efficiently. So, as with any form of real-time contacts, social networking notifications must be manageable by the many mobile recipients in a community.

IBM’s Push For "Social Business"

Aside from mobile access to social network posts, there is a bigger role for social networking for business contacts. As note in this very interesting discussion with IBM’s John Del Pizzo, Program Director, Social Communications, and Head of Product Management, IBM Sametime & Sametime Unified Telephony, IBM is using social networking to interact more easily and efficiently with anyone in a community group, inside or outside of an organization.

In a way, it is like “skills-based routing” used in traditional customer call centers, except now it is not a voice phone call connection that has to be made first, and it will be usable by anyone in the community group. As John describes it, “We call it ‘The shift from reach to relevance.’ It’s not about the one-on-one interaction with the people you know that you can reach. It is about the relevant people who can help you regardless of where they are in the organization.”

So, add social networking to the UC enablement list that will impact business communications.

    

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Mobile Customer Service Means More Than Multi-channel Connections

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC Strategies Expert

It’s bad enough that “unified communications” (UC) is still a confusing term for many people, but I am now seeing “multi-channel” customer service also adding to the confusion by some industry analysts describing “mobility” as a “channel” or ignoring “cloud” services as a practical means of implementing customer interactions. Another source of confusion comes from pundits not differentiating access to self-service business applications with communication applications for contacts with people. The communication applications are really “self-service,” too, since customers don’t need someone to initiate a phone call, send an email, post a social comment, or start an IM chat. That’s where UC enablement provides simplified interoperability between the two types of applications.

While there are different modes of contact with people and interactions with self-service applications available to mobile consumers who have smartphones and tablets, each mode is a different “channel” from the user interface and endpoint device perspective. The fact that the network connection (wired, wireless) is the same or different for any type of interaction makes little difference to the user experience (unless it is too slow!).

How Remote Customer Service Is Changing

Customer service is changing dramatically as consumers become more mobile and thus become both more contact accessible as well as have greater direct access to online information and services. Organizations, whether large enterprises or small businesses, will all be affected by the impact of multi-modal smartphones and tablets on traditional telephone-based customer interactions.

As confirmed in many recent market studies, mobile customers are now expecting:

·        More access to mobile online self-services

·        Pro-active mobile notifications and alerts, rather than calling in or checking online

·        Greater flexibility in choice of user interfaces (voice, visual)

·        Options for multiple forms of “smart” access to live assistance when needed

The contact center of yesterday must start planning now to accommodate the new technologies that support such interactions for both mobile customers and customer assistance staff, wherever they may be located. Migrating contact center applications for mobile customers will be most cost-efficiently facilitated by moving to “cloud” based hosted and managed services, but “Customer BYOD” needs will also require self-service applications to be redesigned for device-independence and offer more flexible choices for user interaction interfaces.

Telephone calls are not going to disappear, but the traditional need for voice conversations is being subsumed by other forms of inbound and outbound contacts, including social network postings, text chat, and video calls. As reflected in a recent market study, customers prefer interacting with online applications first, before requiring access to live assistance.

Customer Service Experience Is Becoming More Critical For Business Performance

Providing good customer experiences will be key to customer support, satisfaction, and retention. As applied to self-service applications, it will make a big difference in handling increased mobile consumer needs by minimizing the need for live assistance. So, a unified view of all customer contact activities will be needed in designing both personalized self- service applications and providing live assistance on demand. This is where the benefits of “cloud” based applications and contextual data storage will cost-efficiently support the dynamic needs of multi-modal customer service management.

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

"Portable UC" Tools When You Have To Sit Down

January 23, 2013

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC Strategies Expert

Back in the early days of UC, I wrote an article about end user communications needs when “standing up or sitting down.” This was when mobile business users had only laptops and cell phones to communicate when away from their desks. I was then thinking about the user interface experience when an end user is on the go, but still needs communication and information access while away from their PC and telephone desktop.

I later blogged about the role of wireless tablets for UC, when mobile users need larger screens for online information access from portable devices, better than could be provided by small, handheld smartphones or heavy laptops. The “softphone” interface of tablets without keyboards, however, although very flexible, doesn’t really lend itself to fast, error free performance in quickly handling incoming phone calls, messaging or video exchanges. With the recent “UC Keyboard” announcement by PC desktop accessory provider Logitech, initially for use with Cisco’s Jabber soft client, they have updated a standard USB keyboard with new “hard keys” to directly control nine basic real-time communication functions.

Logitech’s UC Desktop Accessories – More “Nails” In The Desktop Phone Coffin

Although desktop “hard” phones are relatively easy to use, they don’t really do too much for a multi-modal UC environment. What made them “easy” to use, especially for incoming call control, were the simple feature buttons for telephony control functions. As those telephony functions became integrated with “contextual” intelligence (“click-to-call”) and multimedia UC enablement of PCs and multi-modal smartphones, the call controls became more complex and difficult for fast, ease of use. It was time to bridge the gap between the simple button set of TUI controls and the screen-based “smarts” of UC-enabled software interfaces. That is precisely the gap that the Logitech “UC Keyboard” fills for desktop PCs and portable wireless tablets.

Besides simplifying inbound call control functions for a desktop PC, the Logitech offering also extends such controls to audio and video conferencing with its basic nine “hard” control keys. To further expand its UC capabilities when you are sitting down to conference with remote participants, Logitech also offers a portable, HD-capable webcam for video conferencing. 

At our recent UC Strategies Experts podcast discussion with Eric Kintz, Senior VP and GM at Logitech for Business, he indicated that their solution would eventually support a variety of wireless tablets that are starting to replace portable laptops for mobile users. While not as “mobile” as handheld smartphones, portable, wireless tablets have a strong role for mobile users in sitting down to do business, including using all forms of communication interactions. The tablet market is exploding rapidly for both business users and consumers, and is therefore in need of convenient, UC-enabled services and user interfaces.

Business Use Cases

There are obviously several types of business activities where end users can benefit from the increased ease of use and operational efficiency that Logitech’s new portable UC Keyboard and webcam offer. In addition, remote teleworkers, as well as mobile consumers, who have to stay in touch wherever they are, will like these devices as part of their personal adoption of tablets. I consider Logitech’s offering as part of the “BYOD” syndrome, where all end users will decide how they want to control their communication interfaces.

As I have long been advocating, one of the biggest targets for UC enablement and therefore for the UC Keyboard offering, will be around the “Interaction Center,” where it will be critical customers to integrate online self-service and mobile applications with on demand, multi-modal contact with live assistance. Customers may be sometimes mobile, standing up or sitting down, customer service agents will probably always be sitting down, and field support personnel will probably always be on the move. Therefore, having the flexibility for supporting these different end users consistently across desktops and mobile tablets, will benefit everyone involved in a customer service process.

Vertical markets,where fast and simple communication controls for shared PCs by employees will be of interest, include:

·        Health care

·        Financial services

·        Retail operations, where personnel are moving around

·        Education

·        “Hot Desking” for any business where some employees don’t have permanent “office” desk

This first offering only integrates with Cisco’s Jabber (IM and Presence), but we would expect that Logitech will eventually provide support for other popular UC clients (MS Lync, Avaya). The lack of adequate standards, of course, is still a big part of the problem, but with the advent of WebRTC, things will get better.        

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Mobile Customer Services Need UC

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC Strategies Expert

UC is not just a single product or service, but is a combination of device independent, communication applications that can be used for both person-to-person contacts, as well as for direct user interactions with automated business applications. According to analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, 65% of consumers are now demanding self-service around the clock, rather than waiting to connect to a call center agent. (Surprise, surprise!) Because of the rapid consumer adoption of multi-modal smartphones and tablets, where the flexible choice of user interfaces from a single mobile device is more necessary than at a wired desktop, Mobile UC is therefore becoming more important to customer interactions with self-service applications before talking contextually to a live person. 

Mobile consumers are all grabbing the latest and greatest multi-modal smartphones and tablets of their choice, but business organizations are just starting to realize its not just “employee BYOD” security that they need to be concerned about. With mobile consumers increasingly accessing online, self-service applications, coupled with UC-enabled “click-for-live-assistance,” as well as time-sensitive, personalized alerts and notifications, the customer service bar has been raised for traditional contact center responsibilities. This will not only make overall customer services more accessible, flexible, and cost efficient, but it will increase customer satisfaction by providing more direct access to information. 

Although virtualized, “cloud” based business and communication software applications have already been increasingly implemented for internal use by employees, moving mobile customer self-service applications to the “clouds” can provide greater operational flexibility and business performance benefits than legacy, premise-based call center technologies. 

Where Will Mobile Apps Live? In Public and Private “Clouds!”  

Self-service “mobile apps” that organizations want to offer mobile consumers for business needs must have the following characteristics:

·        Have to be accessible from anywhere

·        Have to accommodate all popular consumer mobile devices

·        Have to have minimal impact on the user’s device, i.e., be extremely “thin” and not normally require downloading any software application changes to an endpoint’s software “client.”

·        Have to support mobile user choices for multi-media input/output interfaces (UC enabled)

·        Be consistent with existing, online applications

·        Where required, provide for authentication and encryption of any data or transactions that are involved in the application. This will be applicable for those applications that will available only to authorized customers.

·        Provide easy access to relevant community social networking between customers

·        Last, but not least, be UC-enabled for a mobile user to flexibly escalate from any self-service application to access live assistance in any form of contact

(I’m sure there may be more requirements for different vertical market applications, but this is just a top-of-mind basic list for what the customer will want.)

Given that “mobile applications” will be software based, they will constantly be changing and evolving. In addition, “consumer BYOD” means that there will be a variety of mobile and desktop devices and operating systems that must be served by a set of consistent versions of online applications. So, it won’t be just one software application that must interface to the customers and their smartphones, tablets, or laptops, but a matched set of every application that must also share the same databases in common. This makes the challenge of developing, supporting, and managing all self-service applications a lot more complex, and demands that such applications be centralized and location independent for mobile use.

Clearly, this means that “cloud” solutions, whether public, private, or hybrid, are the only practical approach to the challenge of universal BYOD. However, multi-modal mobility requirements also means that all self-service applications, whatever the medium chosen the end user, has to be UC enabled in order to allow flexible contact with live assistance on demand. This will be particularly important, as mobile customers using online self-service apps, will often require the kind of technical assistance that employees get from a “Help Desk.”    

The New Role For Channel Partners and Consultants To Help Organizations Plan and Implement Customized, Cloud-based, UC-enabled Mobile Applications?

While there are many business benefits to be gained by providing UC-enabled mobile self-services through cloud-based applications, the real challenge is in how to do it. Not only is it complex, but also most organizations will never have the IT resources to take on all the ongoing responsibilities for developing, integrating, and maintaining all the customized software involved.

Although we can all envision the future of business communications and the role of self-service applications, the technology tools must still be strategically applied by expertise which is not readily available from internal IT resources. Such expertise therefore has to come from support organizations that are already familiar with operational needs, as well as knowledgeable about new UC-enabled technologies from more than one vendor.

Forget the days when a phone system supplier had all the piece-parts for “business communications.” Today, vendor channel partners, along with independent consultants, are becoming the trusted advisors for implementation planning, technology support, and ongoing management of UC-enabled applications. They won’t replace all the responsibilities of internal IT staffs, but they can provide the basic services needed to move old, premise-based and desktop applications into the complexities of UC-enabled, mobilized applications from private, public, and hybrid  “clouds.”

Most telephone system vendors, as well as the public carriers, have seen the “writing on the clouds,” and are quickly moving to support the next generation of IP telephony, video, messaging, mobility, and UC through hosted/managed services that are “cloud” based. Not only are they developing the necessary software tools for such transitions, but are also helping their VARs and channel partners become qualified to implement and support customized business communications through “cloud” based application services. Take a look at a recent podcast discussion with 8x8 on this subject.

Watch this Mobile UC evolution continue to impact the customer service market in 2013.