Copyright 2010 (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.
Finally – VoiceCon Changes It’s Name!
By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
Ever since the “UC” concept started to gain traction in business communications, I had been bugging Fred Knight to let go of the emphasis on voice telephony reflected in the name of their very successful “VoiceCon” conference. I also was suggesting that enterprise text messaging technology providers like Microsoft and IBM bring their customers to this show to start delivering a common technology message of convergence, flexibility, and UC interoperability to the market place.
Well, today, on the 20th anniversary of VoiceCon, they announced a name change at the show to “Enterprise Connect.” To learn more, go to www.voicecon.com/is-enterpriseconnect.
This simple name change will help open business communication doors wider to include more than a flexible choice of person-to-person voice/video or messaging connections, but to also include “application process-to-person” and “person-to-application process” contacts that exploit the efficiencies of automated (self-service) business processes across all forms of communication interfaces.
Maybe we will see the next name change take us from the real-time traffic-centric label of VoiceCon’s popular blog site, “No Jitter,” to something more pertinent to the UC vision of flexible, interoperable, multimodal user interfaces.
Congratulations on the name change!
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
IP Telephony Dependent on UC, Mobility, and CEBP Apps
Copyright 2010 (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.
UC, Mobility, and CEBP Integrations Driving IP Telephony Implementations
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
The industry press has been filled with recent reports about Nortel customers being faced with the challenge of having their legacy Nortel phone systems converted to future Avaya systems. Avaya appears to have done a good job of taking on the responsibilities of an incumbent telephony provider by quickly laying out a PBX migration plan for them to do so cost effectively.
However, what Nortel customers are really facing reflects what all enterprise organizations are dealing with today. That is, the new role of “intelligent,” software-based IP Telephony as a foundational component of mobile, multimodal unified communications (UC) that integrate with enterprise applications to “optimize business process performance” and effectiveness.
The question that Nortel and other customers really must answer is this: Can your incumbent telephone system provider help deliver new, UC-based IP Telephony “applications” that will be used by your next generation staff, customers and business partners? Furthermore, is your communications infrastructure flexible enough to adapt and integrate with your industry’s standard business applications now and in the future?
Partnering IP Telephony with Mobile Web Services and Online Applications
To meet these ever-evolving demands by the next-generation end user, Web services and online applications have since jumped in to improve visual interactive application access at the PC desktop. However, until the advent of handheld broadband smartphones, such efficient solutions have not been conveniently available for use when users are mobile and away from a desktop PC. Needless to say, consumers were thus left out in the cold until now for improved and more efficient automated customer care based upon visual self-service application interfaces!
UC is not just a matter of making the costs of telephony cheaper, but also of making voice communications selectively more effective and complementary to other forms of visual and text-based communications and information access. This is where new UC capabilities like presence management, coupled with “click-to-call” capabilities, will make voice and video conversations and conferencing efficient supplements to the many forms of real-time text messaging (IM, SMS) and information exchange that are now available to consumers.
The new responsibilities for business communications and operational interactions must include the different business process application needs of end users from both inside and outside of the organization (business partners and customers). So, the real challenge for both large and small businesses is how to exploit all the pieces of UC, including IP Telephony applications, cost efficiently.
Mobility Will Become a Big Influencer For CEBP Integration
Mobile accessibility is not only a big factor for enabling UC flexibility for traditional person-to-person contacts via voice or text, but it will also facilitate application process-to-person and person-to-application process contacts that can exploit real-time, multi-media exchanges between people and information from automated self-service applications. In addition to being able to make immediate contact with mobile users, and, depending upon the person’s situation and information content, the choice of visual or voice application interface can also be dynamically determined by the individual users.
Automated business process applications that can effectively initiate any kind of direct communication contact with a person can efficiently replace the expense and delays that result from requiring humans to perform such contact tasks via phone calls. Such capability has been labeled as a “Communication Enabled Business Process” or CEBP and is of particular value where time-sensitive situations have to be dealt with immediately. It is useful to quickly and automatically notify people of an urgent problem or as a reminder to take action to avoid problems, and get immediate confirmation feedback as well, e.g., reminders for taking medications, an appointment, flight change notifications, etc.
Mobile, multimodal smartphones will now enable customer care contacts to be more automated, while still allowing flexible, on-demand customer access (“click-to-call”) to live assistance (voice, chat), whenever necessary. Again, ”contextual” access to available live assistance can be efficiently provided on-demand, based on the dynamic needs of the customer and qualified resource availability.
“Different Strokes for Different Folks?” Software-based Architecture for Mobile UC Flexibility!
End users, whether enterprise employees or consumers will no longer be satisfied with the limitations of the legacy telephone user interface, and will start exploiting the benefits of UC flexibility and integrated visual and voice user interfaces. Now that consumers have had a taste of multimodal mobility with innovative smartphones, they are starting to expect freedom of choice in how they initiate and receive contacts from both people and business process applications.
The key to extending communication flexibility and interoperability will rest with making communication applications functionally software-based, hardware independent, and with standards-based open interoperability. That requirement is particularly applicable for the increased use of new mobile smartphones that are already being used to communicate with all kinds of mobile applications under varying user circumstances.
Whether a user is initiating a contact or is the recipient accepting a contact, the choice of how a UC contact is made will depend upon each individual’s circumstantial situation.
· Sometimes contact is requested with a specific individual vs. anyone who is qualified, accessible, and available
· Sometimes the contact required is an immediate voice conversation
· Sometimes a user can’t talk (noisy, privacy)
· Sometimes they can’t hear (noisy)
· Sometimes they need to send information to be viewed in the context of a voice conversation
· Sometime a user can’t read or type (driving)
· Sometimes the response to an asynchronous message requires a voice conversation, real-time IM exchange, or a change in the message medium.
One Example of Telephony Providers Responding To UC Change
Leading telephony system providers recognize that the flexibility of communication interfaces is becoming critical, and they are converging their new IP Telephony offerings with other text-based communications. One example of this is NEC.
According to Jay Krauser, General Manager of Sales Support and Engineering, NEC Corporation of America:
“The users we are developing products for today may use texting more than voice and email combined. They’ve used any number of social networking and online collaborative tools for many years. They’re tech-savvy and mobile, and whatever business user interfaces we put in their hands need to fit a highly evolved work style.”
As an example, Krauser referenced a hospital setting where the software-based communications infrastructure integrates with patient data using the HL7 standard to give workers in any role - operator, administrator, nurse or doctor - access to the clinical, financial or other administrative data quickly and on-the-go. Automating notifications to mobile devices to advise clinical staff of a change in patient status ultimately speeds patients through diagnosis and treatment to where they’d rather be, which is home.
NEC put its IP Telephony technology where its mouth is when the company announced last month that its software-based Unified Communications platform, Sphericall, is fully integrated with IBM’s Lotus Foundations platform. When installed, it is literally a part of IBM’s software package and shares resources with IBM’s text messaging applications.
This is a step forward in integrating all the key communication applications of UC together as a single, interoperable product set. NEC’s other major partner, Microsoft, is also a candidate for such close-knit interoperability through its Exchange server for email and unified messaging and its OCS Office Communications Server for Instant Messaging, presence management, and unified conferencing.
Who Will You Trust To Provide New UC-based IP Telephony Applications?
It should be pretty obvious that UC functionality that includes more than traditional person-to-person voice contacts will require new, heavy-duty capabilities from the other technology providers involved. Those new technology offerings are still evolving, so reputation and direction must be part of your evaluation. Because the various UC technologies involved are generally developed by different suppliers, there will be different combinations of UC software applications available as alternative solutions.
1. UC will depend heavily on text-based interfaces for both messaging and application information, so the two big players in the business email and IM industry, Microsoft and IBM, will have to be part of the team that can offer customers a complete UC solution. Their offerings will be most important for UC integrations for presence management, unified messaging, CEBP, etc.
2. Well-established, experienced, IP Telephony providers who can offer both a new software-based platform along with integration capabilities to work with a variety of existing PBX and IPBX systems, will be a safe bet for implementing a new IP Telephony solution.
3. Traditional contact center capabilities will have to be accommodated with what I have labeled as “Customer UC” functions, which provides increased contact and interaction flexibility for customers who will exploit multimodal smartphones.
4. While legacy IVR solutions were very limited in their role of self-service applications, providers, who have already exploited them innovatively in the context of Vertical Market applications, will most likely be able to use their experience more effectively within the expanded context of a multimodal mobile smartphone environment.
5. Future-proofing an IP Telephony investment will require that it be based upon open industry standards, support for mobile device independence, and integration with third-party business process applications. These will support communication innovation that the next generation of users of IP Telephony and UC will require.
6. With the move of IP Telephony into a software-based environment, it has opened the door to providers who can also offer the use of that software as a hosted service (SaaS) or, in the case of communication services (CaaS). That option is rapidly gaining traction in the UC marketplace and can provide an alternative mode of implementation with lower capex costs and greater opex flexibility.
Will Your Incumbent Telephony Provider Be Able to Deliver Your UC-based IP Telephony Applications?
In planning your move to the future of mobile, UC-based IP Telephony applications, it may be questionable whether a traditional telephony provider is really ready to tackle the fast-moving new demands of multimodal and transmodal Mobile UC self-service applications required by your customers. One new source of technology for telephony applications is based on using speech to simplify end user information input, but using speech recognition to convert it to text, which is more efficient for application processing, storage, retrieval and user interface management. For this reason, it will be appropriate to consider other reputable technology providers who are moving more quickly to deliver innovative UC solutions that will support voice with speech recognition as application inputs, but also exploit visual output for practical online user interface efficiencies.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
UC, Mobility, and CEBP Integrations Driving IP Telephony Implementations
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
The industry press has been filled with recent reports about Nortel customers being faced with the challenge of having their legacy Nortel phone systems converted to future Avaya systems. Avaya appears to have done a good job of taking on the responsibilities of an incumbent telephony provider by quickly laying out a PBX migration plan for them to do so cost effectively.
However, what Nortel customers are really facing reflects what all enterprise organizations are dealing with today. That is, the new role of “intelligent,” software-based IP Telephony as a foundational component of mobile, multimodal unified communications (UC) that integrate with enterprise applications to “optimize business process performance” and effectiveness.
The question that Nortel and other customers really must answer is this: Can your incumbent telephone system provider help deliver new, UC-based IP Telephony “applications” that will be used by your next generation staff, customers and business partners? Furthermore, is your communications infrastructure flexible enough to adapt and integrate with your industry’s standard business applications now and in the future?
Partnering IP Telephony with Mobile Web Services and Online Applications
To meet these ever-evolving demands by the next-generation end user, Web services and online applications have since jumped in to improve visual interactive application access at the PC desktop. However, until the advent of handheld broadband smartphones, such efficient solutions have not been conveniently available for use when users are mobile and away from a desktop PC. Needless to say, consumers were thus left out in the cold until now for improved and more efficient automated customer care based upon visual self-service application interfaces!
UC is not just a matter of making the costs of telephony cheaper, but also of making voice communications selectively more effective and complementary to other forms of visual and text-based communications and information access. This is where new UC capabilities like presence management, coupled with “click-to-call” capabilities, will make voice and video conversations and conferencing efficient supplements to the many forms of real-time text messaging (IM, SMS) and information exchange that are now available to consumers.
The new responsibilities for business communications and operational interactions must include the different business process application needs of end users from both inside and outside of the organization (business partners and customers). So, the real challenge for both large and small businesses is how to exploit all the pieces of UC, including IP Telephony applications, cost efficiently.
Mobility Will Become a Big Influencer For CEBP Integration
Mobile accessibility is not only a big factor for enabling UC flexibility for traditional person-to-person contacts via voice or text, but it will also facilitate application process-to-person and person-to-application process contacts that can exploit real-time, multi-media exchanges between people and information from automated self-service applications. In addition to being able to make immediate contact with mobile users, and, depending upon the person’s situation and information content, the choice of visual or voice application interface can also be dynamically determined by the individual users.
Automated business process applications that can effectively initiate any kind of direct communication contact with a person can efficiently replace the expense and delays that result from requiring humans to perform such contact tasks via phone calls. Such capability has been labeled as a “Communication Enabled Business Process” or CEBP and is of particular value where time-sensitive situations have to be dealt with immediately. It is useful to quickly and automatically notify people of an urgent problem or as a reminder to take action to avoid problems, and get immediate confirmation feedback as well, e.g., reminders for taking medications, an appointment, flight change notifications, etc.
Mobile, multimodal smartphones will now enable customer care contacts to be more automated, while still allowing flexible, on-demand customer access (“click-to-call”) to live assistance (voice, chat), whenever necessary. Again, ”contextual” access to available live assistance can be efficiently provided on-demand, based on the dynamic needs of the customer and qualified resource availability.
“Different Strokes for Different Folks?” Software-based Architecture for Mobile UC Flexibility!
End users, whether enterprise employees or consumers will no longer be satisfied with the limitations of the legacy telephone user interface, and will start exploiting the benefits of UC flexibility and integrated visual and voice user interfaces. Now that consumers have had a taste of multimodal mobility with innovative smartphones, they are starting to expect freedom of choice in how they initiate and receive contacts from both people and business process applications.
The key to extending communication flexibility and interoperability will rest with making communication applications functionally software-based, hardware independent, and with standards-based open interoperability. That requirement is particularly applicable for the increased use of new mobile smartphones that are already being used to communicate with all kinds of mobile applications under varying user circumstances.
Whether a user is initiating a contact or is the recipient accepting a contact, the choice of how a UC contact is made will depend upon each individual’s circumstantial situation.
· Sometimes contact is requested with a specific individual vs. anyone who is qualified, accessible, and available
· Sometimes the contact required is an immediate voice conversation
· Sometimes a user can’t talk (noisy, privacy)
· Sometimes they can’t hear (noisy)
· Sometimes they need to send information to be viewed in the context of a voice conversation
· Sometime a user can’t read or type (driving)
· Sometimes the response to an asynchronous message requires a voice conversation, real-time IM exchange, or a change in the message medium.
One Example of Telephony Providers Responding To UC Change
Leading telephony system providers recognize that the flexibility of communication interfaces is becoming critical, and they are converging their new IP Telephony offerings with other text-based communications. One example of this is NEC.
According to Jay Krauser, General Manager of Sales Support and Engineering, NEC Corporation of America:
“The users we are developing products for today may use texting more than voice and email combined. They’ve used any number of social networking and online collaborative tools for many years. They’re tech-savvy and mobile, and whatever business user interfaces we put in their hands need to fit a highly evolved work style.”
As an example, Krauser referenced a hospital setting where the software-based communications infrastructure integrates with patient data using the HL7 standard to give workers in any role - operator, administrator, nurse or doctor - access to the clinical, financial or other administrative data quickly and on-the-go. Automating notifications to mobile devices to advise clinical staff of a change in patient status ultimately speeds patients through diagnosis and treatment to where they’d rather be, which is home.
NEC put its IP Telephony technology where its mouth is when the company announced last month that its software-based Unified Communications platform, Sphericall, is fully integrated with IBM’s Lotus Foundations platform. When installed, it is literally a part of IBM’s software package and shares resources with IBM’s text messaging applications.
This is a step forward in integrating all the key communication applications of UC together as a single, interoperable product set. NEC’s other major partner, Microsoft, is also a candidate for such close-knit interoperability through its Exchange server for email and unified messaging and its OCS Office Communications Server for Instant Messaging, presence management, and unified conferencing.
Who Will You Trust To Provide New UC-based IP Telephony Applications?
It should be pretty obvious that UC functionality that includes more than traditional person-to-person voice contacts will require new, heavy-duty capabilities from the other technology providers involved. Those new technology offerings are still evolving, so reputation and direction must be part of your evaluation. Because the various UC technologies involved are generally developed by different suppliers, there will be different combinations of UC software applications available as alternative solutions.
1. UC will depend heavily on text-based interfaces for both messaging and application information, so the two big players in the business email and IM industry, Microsoft and IBM, will have to be part of the team that can offer customers a complete UC solution. Their offerings will be most important for UC integrations for presence management, unified messaging, CEBP, etc.
2. Well-established, experienced, IP Telephony providers who can offer both a new software-based platform along with integration capabilities to work with a variety of existing PBX and IPBX systems, will be a safe bet for implementing a new IP Telephony solution.
3. Traditional contact center capabilities will have to be accommodated with what I have labeled as “Customer UC” functions, which provides increased contact and interaction flexibility for customers who will exploit multimodal smartphones.
4. While legacy IVR solutions were very limited in their role of self-service applications, providers, who have already exploited them innovatively in the context of Vertical Market applications, will most likely be able to use their experience more effectively within the expanded context of a multimodal mobile smartphone environment.
5. Future-proofing an IP Telephony investment will require that it be based upon open industry standards, support for mobile device independence, and integration with third-party business process applications. These will support communication innovation that the next generation of users of IP Telephony and UC will require.
6. With the move of IP Telephony into a software-based environment, it has opened the door to providers who can also offer the use of that software as a hosted service (SaaS) or, in the case of communication services (CaaS). That option is rapidly gaining traction in the UC marketplace and can provide an alternative mode of implementation with lower capex costs and greater opex flexibility.
Will Your Incumbent Telephony Provider Be Able to Deliver Your UC-based IP Telephony Applications?
In planning your move to the future of mobile, UC-based IP Telephony applications, it may be questionable whether a traditional telephony provider is really ready to tackle the fast-moving new demands of multimodal and transmodal Mobile UC self-service applications required by your customers. One new source of technology for telephony applications is based on using speech to simplify end user information input, but using speech recognition to convert it to text, which is more efficient for application processing, storage, retrieval and user interface management. For this reason, it will be appropriate to consider other reputable technology providers who are moving more quickly to deliver innovative UC solutions that will support voice with speech recognition as application inputs, but also exploit visual output for practical online user interface efficiencies.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Getting UC Payoff Faster With Hosted IP Telephony
Copyright © 2010 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
March 5, 2010
Getting UC Payoff Fast With Hosted IP Telephony For Both Internal Users and Customers
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
A recent enterprise market study confirmed that customer-related business processes have the most important priorities for UC capabilities. This means that any communications involving either customer-facing staff or customers directly (self-services) will benefit the enterprise the most from UC flexibility. It makes little difference how or where the communication services are provided to the different end users, but ultimately, cost will be an influence.
By now, everyone understands that traditional business telephone voice applications are slowly but surely becoming an integrated part of multi-modal “unified communications” (UC) for both enterprise users and customer interactions. This means shifting legacy TDM network connections to SIP-based VoIP networks, software-based call management (IP Telephony), and exploiting multimodal endpoint devices on the desktop (e.g., PC “softphones”) and mobile “smart-phones.”
Initiating and receiving phone calls through UC will not only exploit more efficient and contextual visual user interfaces, e.g., presence-based “click-to-call”, but will also enable business process automated applications to initiate real-time notifications to people and support self-service transactions in the recipient’s interface of choice. This flexibility will be particularly important as consumers and business users increasingly adopt personalized, mobile “smart-phones” for faster, flexible modes of contact accessibility. All of this software-based flexibility, however, means greater technology complexity, which is increasingly difficult and expensive to support with traditional in-house IT resources, especially when software products will be constantly changing and evolving.
The biggest challenge for enterprise organizations migrating to such a UC environment, will be to change their existing telephony systems and voice applications to integrate seamlessly and device-independently with other UC components such as email, unified messaging (UM), Instant Messaging, presence management, communications enabled business processes (CEBP), social networking, and mobile network services.
How To Get Going Fast With Minimal Cost? - Hosted Services!
As everyone will tell you, migrating the enterprise to UC is a “journey.” That means you have to selectively prioritize which business processes and which end users (staff, customers) should be implemented first with UC capabilities. Since we are talking about changing existing business processes through new communication facilities, it will be important to “pilot” such redesigned applications first, before going operationally across the enterprise.
Fortunately, because IP Telephony is now software-based and accessible over the Internet, it has joined other business process applications in becoming easily available as a hosted or managed service that can be used to replace or supplement legacy premise-based TDM telephone systems and call center technologies. IP Telephony service is labeled as “Communications as a Service” (CaaS) and is becoming a key starting point for hosted UC services.
The proven benefits of any hosted telephony service usually include:
· No capital expense, controllable operational expenses based on actual usage/need, operational management controls over usage
· Selective use of UC applications features, including IP Telephony, for either internal users, partners, or customers
· Centralizes management and support for multiple site locations. Does not require adding in-house IT expertise to maintain new applications. This will be especially useful where there are different communication technologies being used at different site locations.
· Enables new contact center applications to be developed and activated within only a few weeks or months, depending on the level of integration and customization required, compared to traditional, location-based implementations.
· Integrates with and supplements existing enterprise communication technologies (e.g., PBXs, Microsoft OCS, Email, IM, mobile and wireless services, etc.)
· Integration with on-site business process applications
· Exploits efficient SIP networking architecture overlay
· Provides centralized backup survivability for individual locations
· Supports all necessary user interfaces required by different end users
· Applications can be easily and dynamically implemented and changed as needed
· Flexible payment plans for on-demand usage
· Option to move hosted technology on-premise for either managed support service or for full internal support
Because of the obvious benefits of hosted and managed software applications, all large technology and service providers are starting to offer such services instead of traditional software and system sales. The question now becomes one of who should be your hosted service provider?
Who Can Best Support Your Hosted Applications?
Because the IP network has now become critical for multi-modal access to all centralized, “cloud-based” applications, it is easy to fall into the trap of expecting network providers to also support your business process applications as if they were simple phone connections. Network service providers who offer hosted or managed applications are really “resellers,” who themselves can’t directly provide the necessary application support that the original application developers can offer.
When it comes to application developers who might now be directly offering hosted application services, even there you have to look at the level of integration they provide for interoperability between the different applications and the different end users involved. In particular, UC for internal business users doesn’t really do much for customer needs, or what I have labeled as “Customer UC.” The latter will provide special UC facilities for customer-facing personnel, including agents (in-house, home), subject matter “experts,” mobile sales and field support staff, and customer contact operational management. This will also include all flavors of inbound and outbound contacts for customer self-service applications, automated notifications, and multi-modal access to live assistance (real-time and "as-soon-as-possible").
The developers of a hosted application are the best source for the hosted service because of the following considerations:
· The Developer already owns the solution and can more rapidly provide/add applications when needed
· The Developer owns the code and can fix bugs more rapidly
· The Developer can provide superior support since they know the products inside and out.
· A telecom service provider relies upon its relationship to the original Developer (Avaya, Nortel, etc.) for updates, bug fixes, troubleshooting, etc.
· A telecom service provider can usually only provide a subset of a product’s feature set, since it typically only wants to support the most common set of features that applies to the broadest possible audience
The challenge for enterprise organizations is to find a specialized IP Telephony and Contact Center technology developer that can also provide maximum flexibility in its hosted services offerings.
Interactive Intelligence Has “All-in-One” Integration Head-start on Hosted UC
Back in 1997, Interactive Intelligence introduced the first open, “all-in-one” communications software platform that integrated all telephony applications. They supplement or replace traditional PBXs with their value-add telephony applications for both business users and for customer interactions. More recently, they moved up the food chain to provide software tools for creating business process work flow applications that integrate tightly with their communication applications.
Interactive Intelligence now offers their open “all-in-one” software applications as a hosted service, which will enable enterprise organizations that are looking for a hosted solution to benefit from the tight integration between communication applications that has already been implemented. By virtue of its open architecture, and their basic SIP-based Interaction Center Platform, Interactive Intelligence is well prepared to quickly support any and all business communication application needs of their hosted service customers.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
March 5, 2010
Getting UC Payoff Fast With Hosted IP Telephony For Both Internal Users and Customers
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
A recent enterprise market study confirmed that customer-related business processes have the most important priorities for UC capabilities. This means that any communications involving either customer-facing staff or customers directly (self-services) will benefit the enterprise the most from UC flexibility. It makes little difference how or where the communication services are provided to the different end users, but ultimately, cost will be an influence.
By now, everyone understands that traditional business telephone voice applications are slowly but surely becoming an integrated part of multi-modal “unified communications” (UC) for both enterprise users and customer interactions. This means shifting legacy TDM network connections to SIP-based VoIP networks, software-based call management (IP Telephony), and exploiting multimodal endpoint devices on the desktop (e.g., PC “softphones”) and mobile “smart-phones.”
Initiating and receiving phone calls through UC will not only exploit more efficient and contextual visual user interfaces, e.g., presence-based “click-to-call”, but will also enable business process automated applications to initiate real-time notifications to people and support self-service transactions in the recipient’s interface of choice. This flexibility will be particularly important as consumers and business users increasingly adopt personalized, mobile “smart-phones” for faster, flexible modes of contact accessibility. All of this software-based flexibility, however, means greater technology complexity, which is increasingly difficult and expensive to support with traditional in-house IT resources, especially when software products will be constantly changing and evolving.
The biggest challenge for enterprise organizations migrating to such a UC environment, will be to change their existing telephony systems and voice applications to integrate seamlessly and device-independently with other UC components such as email, unified messaging (UM), Instant Messaging, presence management, communications enabled business processes (CEBP), social networking, and mobile network services.
How To Get Going Fast With Minimal Cost? - Hosted Services!
As everyone will tell you, migrating the enterprise to UC is a “journey.” That means you have to selectively prioritize which business processes and which end users (staff, customers) should be implemented first with UC capabilities. Since we are talking about changing existing business processes through new communication facilities, it will be important to “pilot” such redesigned applications first, before going operationally across the enterprise.
Fortunately, because IP Telephony is now software-based and accessible over the Internet, it has joined other business process applications in becoming easily available as a hosted or managed service that can be used to replace or supplement legacy premise-based TDM telephone systems and call center technologies. IP Telephony service is labeled as “Communications as a Service” (CaaS) and is becoming a key starting point for hosted UC services.
The proven benefits of any hosted telephony service usually include:
· No capital expense, controllable operational expenses based on actual usage/need, operational management controls over usage
· Selective use of UC applications features, including IP Telephony, for either internal users, partners, or customers
· Centralizes management and support for multiple site locations. Does not require adding in-house IT expertise to maintain new applications. This will be especially useful where there are different communication technologies being used at different site locations.
· Enables new contact center applications to be developed and activated within only a few weeks or months, depending on the level of integration and customization required, compared to traditional, location-based implementations.
· Integrates with and supplements existing enterprise communication technologies (e.g., PBXs, Microsoft OCS, Email, IM, mobile and wireless services, etc.)
· Integration with on-site business process applications
· Exploits efficient SIP networking architecture overlay
· Provides centralized backup survivability for individual locations
· Supports all necessary user interfaces required by different end users
· Applications can be easily and dynamically implemented and changed as needed
· Flexible payment plans for on-demand usage
· Option to move hosted technology on-premise for either managed support service or for full internal support
Because of the obvious benefits of hosted and managed software applications, all large technology and service providers are starting to offer such services instead of traditional software and system sales. The question now becomes one of who should be your hosted service provider?
Who Can Best Support Your Hosted Applications?
Because the IP network has now become critical for multi-modal access to all centralized, “cloud-based” applications, it is easy to fall into the trap of expecting network providers to also support your business process applications as if they were simple phone connections. Network service providers who offer hosted or managed applications are really “resellers,” who themselves can’t directly provide the necessary application support that the original application developers can offer.
When it comes to application developers who might now be directly offering hosted application services, even there you have to look at the level of integration they provide for interoperability between the different applications and the different end users involved. In particular, UC for internal business users doesn’t really do much for customer needs, or what I have labeled as “Customer UC.” The latter will provide special UC facilities for customer-facing personnel, including agents (in-house, home), subject matter “experts,” mobile sales and field support staff, and customer contact operational management. This will also include all flavors of inbound and outbound contacts for customer self-service applications, automated notifications, and multi-modal access to live assistance (real-time and "as-soon-as-possible").
The developers of a hosted application are the best source for the hosted service because of the following considerations:
· The Developer already owns the solution and can more rapidly provide/add applications when needed
· The Developer owns the code and can fix bugs more rapidly
· The Developer can provide superior support since they know the products inside and out.
· A telecom service provider relies upon its relationship to the original Developer (Avaya, Nortel, etc.) for updates, bug fixes, troubleshooting, etc.
· A telecom service provider can usually only provide a subset of a product’s feature set, since it typically only wants to support the most common set of features that applies to the broadest possible audience
The challenge for enterprise organizations is to find a specialized IP Telephony and Contact Center technology developer that can also provide maximum flexibility in its hosted services offerings.
Interactive Intelligence Has “All-in-One” Integration Head-start on Hosted UC
Back in 1997, Interactive Intelligence introduced the first open, “all-in-one” communications software platform that integrated all telephony applications. They supplement or replace traditional PBXs with their value-add telephony applications for both business users and for customer interactions. More recently, they moved up the food chain to provide software tools for creating business process work flow applications that integrate tightly with their communication applications.
Interactive Intelligence now offers their open “all-in-one” software applications as a hosted service, which will enable enterprise organizations that are looking for a hosted solution to benefit from the tight integration between communication applications that has already been implemented. By virtue of its open architecture, and their basic SIP-based Interaction Center Platform, Interactive Intelligence is well prepared to quickly support any and all business communication application needs of their hosted service customers.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Is Everything Mobile Going To Be A "Phone?"
Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.
Windows Phone 7
I am somewhat surprised that the name given by Microsoft to its new mobile operating system platform is a "phone.'” After all, the term "phone" comes from the Greek word for "voice." The word “telephone” means "far voice." Just because the mobile device/system will handle voice applications, in addition to visual data, doesn't make it just a "phone!"
But maybe because Apple took the lead in calling their multimedia device the "iPhone," everything that can also handle voice applications will have "phone" in its name.
Of course, voice is just a piece of the “unified communications" picture, which enables application speech interfaces as well as real-time contextual voice contacts with people. But various forms of real-time text messaging are already replacing traditional phone calls, especially by online self-service applications that need timely contact with a specific person.
So, it’s really not just about voice coming into play here, but other mobile user interfaces as well!
Windows Phone 7
I am somewhat surprised that the name given by Microsoft to its new mobile operating system platform is a "phone.'” After all, the term "phone" comes from the Greek word for "voice." The word “telephone” means "far voice." Just because the mobile device/system will handle voice applications, in addition to visual data, doesn't make it just a "phone!"
But maybe because Apple took the lead in calling their multimedia device the "iPhone," everything that can also handle voice applications will have "phone" in its name.
Of course, voice is just a piece of the “unified communications" picture, which enables application speech interfaces as well as real-time contextual voice contacts with people. But various forms of real-time text messaging are already replacing traditional phone calls, especially by online self-service applications that need timely contact with a specific person.
So, it’s really not just about voice coming into play here, but other mobile user interfaces as well!
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Mobile UC and Customer Interactions
Copyright © 2010 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
January 23, 2010
Customer UC + Smartphones + CEBP = UC-B and UC-U Enterprise Payoffs
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
The bottom line payoff for UC-based business communications has been widely promoted as optimizing business process performance through communications efficiency and flexibility or “UC-B.” While there are also direct benefits to individual end users (UC-U) in terms of their productivity, the reality is that the more you can automate a business process and the less you need to depend on people to be part of the business process, the more efficient that process can be. (In the real world, however, we really can’t automate everything all the time!)
With the rapid adoption of personalized mobile, multimodal, smartphones by both consumers and business users, the opportunity to exploit UC for both inbound and outbound (proactive notifications) real-time interactions between customers, enterprise action-takers, and automated business applications will be increasing significantly. What that means is that both automated self-service applications and access to live assistance can be initiated by either a business process or by a customer, and the real-time medium of communication can selectively be combinations of “click-to-call” voice conversations, “Push-to-talk” (voice message exchange), online application interactions, or text messaging (IM, SMS). (Social networking might now also be part of the interaction game.)
The “Apps Store” concept of wireless service providers can be extended to enterprise portals to facilitate individual consumer access to various mobile customer applications, while at the enterprise end, an automated business process can monitor the status of application metrics and proactively initiate a personalized customer contact with a choice of user interfaces based on accessibility (device, Presence status) or user preference.
I see CEBP getting the most mileage out of mobile online applications and proactive “process-to-person” multimodal notifications, (authorized, of course), both coupled with “click-for assistance” (choice of IM or voice connection). Such contacts will be more “intelligent” and efficient because they will be multimodal and contextually initiated, based on the information source used by the customer for contact initiation or the business application that exploits CEBP. It won’t be just their identity as a caller or the location they call from.
If we are looking at UC-B business process benefits as the major justification for implementing UC, we obviously must highlight customer contacts and interactions as a key target for UC flexibility because that is where revenue and profit come from (in addition to cost savings). Accordingly, as consumer adoption of personalized mobile smartphones increases, the old enterprise voice-based customer call center game has to change to multimodal live and self-service interactions as well.
Hello proactive “IVVR” applications! (Interactive Voice-Visual Response)
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
January 23, 2010
Customer UC + Smartphones + CEBP = UC-B and UC-U Enterprise Payoffs
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
The bottom line payoff for UC-based business communications has been widely promoted as optimizing business process performance through communications efficiency and flexibility or “UC-B.” While there are also direct benefits to individual end users (UC-U) in terms of their productivity, the reality is that the more you can automate a business process and the less you need to depend on people to be part of the business process, the more efficient that process can be. (In the real world, however, we really can’t automate everything all the time!)
With the rapid adoption of personalized mobile, multimodal, smartphones by both consumers and business users, the opportunity to exploit UC for both inbound and outbound (proactive notifications) real-time interactions between customers, enterprise action-takers, and automated business applications will be increasing significantly. What that means is that both automated self-service applications and access to live assistance can be initiated by either a business process or by a customer, and the real-time medium of communication can selectively be combinations of “click-to-call” voice conversations, “Push-to-talk” (voice message exchange), online application interactions, or text messaging (IM, SMS). (Social networking might now also be part of the interaction game.)
The “Apps Store” concept of wireless service providers can be extended to enterprise portals to facilitate individual consumer access to various mobile customer applications, while at the enterprise end, an automated business process can monitor the status of application metrics and proactively initiate a personalized customer contact with a choice of user interfaces based on accessibility (device, Presence status) or user preference.
I see CEBP getting the most mileage out of mobile online applications and proactive “process-to-person” multimodal notifications, (authorized, of course), both coupled with “click-for assistance” (choice of IM or voice connection). Such contacts will be more “intelligent” and efficient because they will be multimodal and contextually initiated, based on the information source used by the customer for contact initiation or the business application that exploits CEBP. It won’t be just their identity as a caller or the location they call from.
If we are looking at UC-B business process benefits as the major justification for implementing UC, we obviously must highlight customer contacts and interactions as a key target for UC flexibility because that is where revenue and profit come from (in addition to cost savings). Accordingly, as consumer adoption of personalized mobile smartphones increases, the old enterprise voice-based customer call center game has to change to multimodal live and self-service interactions as well.
Hello proactive “IVVR” applications! (Interactive Voice-Visual Response)
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Business Users Want Their Own Smartphones For Both Company and Personal Use
Copyright © 2010 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
January 10, 2010
Business Users Will Want Their Own Mobile “Smart-phones” For Consumer UC
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
With all the announcements about mobile “smartphones” at last week’s 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, I was glad to see the recent smartphone survey by Forrester Research aimed at mobile business end users (“information workers” or “iWorkers”), who are also “consumers.” They will be the key users of converged UC applications because of the multimodal flexibility demands of mobile users, who can’t always talk, hear, look or type to communicate. The survey results confirm our view that not only must enterprise UC support these popular mobile devices, but those mobile devices will be chosen by and paid for, if necessary, by the individual end users.
It also means that a single, multimodal smartphone device will have to support “dual persona” usage, i.e., treating the same individual differently as a consumer than as a business user or enterprise employee. The former enables personal contacts and services including entertainment, while the latter will apply appropriate priorities for business contacts and applications controllable by an enterprise.
With business applications and information access moving into Internet “cloud” servers, mobile endpoint devices can exploit browsers that can handle on-line applications regardless of differences in smartphone form factors. This will make it practical to use a single, multimodal mobile device for multiple contexts and application interfaces supported by UC.
Highlights of Forrester End User Survey on Business User Mobility
The Forrester survey covered responses from 2001 information workers who worked in an organization with 100 or more employees.
· 11% of U.S. workers currently use a “smartphone” at work
(14% of iWorkers in the U.S., Canada, and UK)
· 64% would like to use smartphones for work
· 33% of respondents use their own mobile phones for work
For comparison, (33% of U.S. workers have a laptop)
· Teleworkers, on average work two hours more per week than office workers
· 81% of iWorkers use smartphones from home
· 62% while traveling
· 64% at their office desks
· 29% spend more than 3 hours a day on their mobile device
The increasing demand for smartphone usage for both personal consumer usage, as well as business needs, is leading enterprise organizations to move away from “corporate-liable” cost responsibility for all mobile usage to a “shared user-liable” approach to costs which allows individual users to choose their own smartphones and services.
The “Fly in the Smartphone Ointment”
While the practical demand for increased device-independent mobility for business applications is rapidly increasing, there are, unfortunately, still software standardization barriers for smartphones. These will interfere with realizing the objective of “universal” mobile accessibility to both people contacts and mobile business apps through smartphones. These problems are highlighted in an article reporting from the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where new smartphones were one of the big highlights of the show.
With all the new smartphones being announced, the problem for universal interoperability of mobile applications apparently is the fact that they use different mobile operating systems that are incompatible. Even mobile OS software from the same developer comes in a variety of versions. This has caused mobile application developers to create different versions of their applications – a very expensive and restrictive way to productize software.
A potential solution to the problem is expected from a new, hardware-independent, software-based platform standard called HTML5, which is expected to start putting in an appearance this year. This is expected to support graphical applications through smartphone Web browsers.
Consumer use of Smartphones will prove a boon to customer interactions with enterprise organizations and services, because they will enable personalized, timely, proactive customer service notifications by automated business process applications (CEBP). This will be particularly useful in health care and financial services, where notification flexibility and timeliness can be critical, along with easy contextual access to live assistance (“click-to-call”) when necessary.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
January 10, 2010
Business Users Will Want Their Own Mobile “Smart-phones” For Consumer UC
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
With all the announcements about mobile “smartphones” at last week’s 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, I was glad to see the recent smartphone survey by Forrester Research aimed at mobile business end users (“information workers” or “iWorkers”), who are also “consumers.” They will be the key users of converged UC applications because of the multimodal flexibility demands of mobile users, who can’t always talk, hear, look or type to communicate. The survey results confirm our view that not only must enterprise UC support these popular mobile devices, but those mobile devices will be chosen by and paid for, if necessary, by the individual end users.
It also means that a single, multimodal smartphone device will have to support “dual persona” usage, i.e., treating the same individual differently as a consumer than as a business user or enterprise employee. The former enables personal contacts and services including entertainment, while the latter will apply appropriate priorities for business contacts and applications controllable by an enterprise.
With business applications and information access moving into Internet “cloud” servers, mobile endpoint devices can exploit browsers that can handle on-line applications regardless of differences in smartphone form factors. This will make it practical to use a single, multimodal mobile device for multiple contexts and application interfaces supported by UC.
Highlights of Forrester End User Survey on Business User Mobility
The Forrester survey covered responses from 2001 information workers who worked in an organization with 100 or more employees.
· 11% of U.S. workers currently use a “smartphone” at work
(14% of iWorkers in the U.S., Canada, and UK)
· 64% would like to use smartphones for work
· 33% of respondents use their own mobile phones for work
For comparison, (33% of U.S. workers have a laptop)
· Teleworkers, on average work two hours more per week than office workers
· 81% of iWorkers use smartphones from home
· 62% while traveling
· 64% at their office desks
· 29% spend more than 3 hours a day on their mobile device
The increasing demand for smartphone usage for both personal consumer usage, as well as business needs, is leading enterprise organizations to move away from “corporate-liable” cost responsibility for all mobile usage to a “shared user-liable” approach to costs which allows individual users to choose their own smartphones and services.
The “Fly in the Smartphone Ointment”
While the practical demand for increased device-independent mobility for business applications is rapidly increasing, there are, unfortunately, still software standardization barriers for smartphones. These will interfere with realizing the objective of “universal” mobile accessibility to both people contacts and mobile business apps through smartphones. These problems are highlighted in an article reporting from the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where new smartphones were one of the big highlights of the show.
With all the new smartphones being announced, the problem for universal interoperability of mobile applications apparently is the fact that they use different mobile operating systems that are incompatible. Even mobile OS software from the same developer comes in a variety of versions. This has caused mobile application developers to create different versions of their applications – a very expensive and restrictive way to productize software.
A potential solution to the problem is expected from a new, hardware-independent, software-based platform standard called HTML5, which is expected to start putting in an appearance this year. This is expected to support graphical applications through smartphone Web browsers.
Consumer use of Smartphones will prove a boon to customer interactions with enterprise organizations and services, because they will enable personalized, timely, proactive customer service notifications by automated business process applications (CEBP). This will be particularly useful in health care and financial services, where notification flexibility and timeliness can be critical, along with easy contextual access to live assistance (“click-to-call”) when necessary.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Are Enterprise Users Waiting For The CIO To Lead Them To UC?
Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.
November 25, 2009
How Can The CIO Help Enterprise Users Migrate To UC?
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
There has been a lot of talk, but still relatively little action, on the enterprise UC migration front. There are a number of practical reasons why this has been so, including:
· Confusion about what “UC” really is all about as a concept vs. specific technology requirements.
· Migrating to UC is an ongoing transition from proprietary, hardware-based communication applications to a “virtual” framework of interoperable, integrated, IP-based, software application servers and endpoint clients.
· Legacy communications still work and those investments are being maximized, particularly expensive telephone systems.
· UC-enabled telephony (“UC Telephony”) goes beyond IP Telephony because it integrates with all other UC communication applications and business process applications. It will require a simple, flexible, and inexpensive integration framework to support interoperability between existing and new forms of communication, e.g., social networking applications, at the user interface level with to be successful.
· Lack of demand from enterprise end users for new UC functionality is complicated by the fact that individual end users will all have different, personalized needs, including their choice of mobile communication devices and services.
· Individual UC application technologies are still evolving, along with appropriate new standards, e.g., SIP.
· Confusion about who in the enterprise organization should be involved and when for UC implementation planning.
· Since all forms of communication with people are considered elements of UC, they are all being labeled by the technology providers as “UC”, even if they are not properly integrated.
· The recessionary economic climate has slowed down all enterprise technology investments.
The “Who” of Enterprise UC Migration
UC application implementations in enterprise organizations will be influenced by different groups within the organization because such groups have different perspectives of need and value for using UC-integrated versions of traditional communication applications.
There are three main constituencies in an enterprise organization that should be directly involved in the planning for UC implementations:
· Business management – Primarily interested in improving business processes and operational performance through more efficient and effective means of people contact and information access through UC technologies.
· IT management - Primarily concerned with costs to implement and maintain enterprise technologies, as well as the ability to integrate them with existing and future applications and services.
· Individual end users - Focused on communication flexibility, ease of use, device independence, personalization, and saving time in doing their jobs whenever and wherever they happen to be.
The big question is, who should be driving the demand for UC solution implementations within an enterprise organization?
One would normally expect that the real users of the technology, those who benefit most directly, might be clamoring for the benefits of UC; e.g., business management, who could realize faster operational benefits from the elimination of “human contact latency” in business process performance (“UC-B”). Individual internal users might want the personal productivity benefits of UC, particularly when mobile, in order to do their jobs more easily and flexibly, regardless of their location (“UC-U”).
External end users, such as consumers/customers or business partners, will also want the UC benefits of faster and more flexible contacts, particularly when mobility is involved. However, because such users are outside of the organization, they will be dependent on how enterprise communication technologies will interoperate with public network services that outsiders will typically be using.
UC Demand and Justifications
IT management will traditionally support implementation of new technologies if there is, first, justifiable demand from the other two constituencies, including budgetary support. IT management will also be even more interested if the new technology can also significantly reduce current technology support costs that are IT’s responsibility.
However, because of the confusion surrounding what UC actually does and who will benefit most directly, there has been little serious demand (yet) from those first two constituencies. As a result, UC-oriented technology providers have been trying to sell IT management primarily on cost-saving benefits like Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which is usually of little interest to individual end users or even to revenue-sensitive Line of Business management. In the meantime, UC migration planning has not yet involved LOB management or individual end users very much, even though their different needs must help define UC requirements first!
The CIO As Enterprise UC Migration Leader
For several years the question has been raised as to who should be in charge of driving enterprise UC migration planning and how. The answers have ranged from the CEO down to Telecom management, the latter mainly because legacy telephony systems are being affected the most by new forms of IP communication and their integration under UC. However, now that IP Telephony (IP-PBXs and IP phones) are replacing TDM phone systems in both end-of-life and “greenfield” situations, those implementations should really be part of a broader “UC migration” plan for both business processes and individual end user communication needs.
Although Line of Business management and individual end users must help to identify their specific UC application requirements and their implementation priorities, it will still be up to IT to plan and manage the various steps required for migrating to UC in an evolutionary manner. For this reason, it will be in the best interests for enterprise IT management to start the UC migration ball rolling with two initial steps:
1. Establish a convenient, cost-efficient integration approach to UC migration to be prepared for any initial pilot UC applications and integrations required.
2. Promote awareness and understanding of what UC really means for those other constituencies and coordinate their UC requirements and priorities for initial application implementation planning.
Once migration to UC has successfully started, it will then become an ongoing, learning process for both users and IT support that will be a never-ending step 3.
Step 1. Establish An Integration Framework For UC Migration
Although UC encompasses all forms of communication interoperability, voice telephony usage will be the most impacted because the traditional telephony endpoint devices and network infrastructures are changing so dramatically. However, legacy telephone systems cannot be simply replaced throughout an enterprise organization, especially in multiple locations with different phone systems because of both cost and complexity of traditional telephony system implementations.
This is where a UC migration framework should be selected that will:
1. Support a technology approach for integrating and simplifying future migrations from existing siloed communication systems to a centralized UC environment that is flexible, cost-efficient, and “future-proof.”
2. Provide a UC migration platform that will cost-efficiently and selectively support evolutionary integrations of key UC applications including:
a. Device-independent “UC Telephony” for desktops and mobile usage
b. IP-based voice and video conferencing
c. Interoperability with unified messaging servers and public social networking services
d. Federated presence management integrations for enterprise IM, telephony, public social networking services, and business process applications
e. Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) integrations with enterprise business applications
f. Integration of all forms of customer contacts with an enterprise organization that are inbound or outbound, device-independent, and will include inbound/outbound self-service applications. This will exploit UC capabilities for those enterprise communication applications that I have labeled as “Customer UC”.
g. Providing consolidated UC activity data collection and reporting tools to cover all forms of communication activity with people, as either initiators or as recipients, both inside and outside of the organization. This will enable critical metrics to be developed to manage the ongoing effectiveness of UC solutions in business process performance.
There can be a number of choices for how UC migration platforms can be deployed, including premise-based, managed, hosted, or a hybrid approach. Whichever approach is selected, the availability of such a flexible “UC migration platform” will facilitate the next two UC implementation steps, including educating end user constituencies and identifying their UC requirements, to be carried out more effectively.
UC migration platforms that satisfy the need for both maximum, standards-based flexibility and low investment costs are relatively new technology offerings that simplify integrations of old and new enterprise communications technologies under a common UC framework. In particular, they can facilitate the creation of “UC Telephony” capabilities within any existing enterprise telephony environment, selectively and cost effectively. For an excellent presentation and discussion of this evolutionary UC migration strategy with a leading provider of this technology, view the UCStrategies.com webinar on Aastra’s “overlay” approach that exploits its “Clearspan” UC platform for flexible and low-cost migrations to UC.
According to Aastra’s cost analysis of migrating to UC by replacing an old PBX with a new IP-PBX, compared to simply adding an “overlay UC platform” that can control all necessary integrations with existing telephony infrastructures and other UC applications, the cost per user for “UC Telephony” is estimated to be one-third that of an IP-PBX replacement. That doesn’t include the savings and disruption avoidance gained by keeping existing infrastructure equipment (PBXs, desktop phones). This approach also facilitates selective, customized, and priority-based UC migrations based upon the real needs of the user constituencies as they evolve.
Step 2. Who Needs What? When? – Evolving User UC Requirements
Obviously, a critical step for moving an organization slowly, but surely, towards an operational UC environment is to fully understand the existing communication problems of high-value business processes, the communication requirements of different user groups, and even individual end user needs for “role-based” communication applications. Personalization and “role-based” application needs will be key to determining selective individual end user UC requirements.
As the high-value operational business communication problems (or “Hot Spots” as my UniComm colleagues call them) are identified, IT management can proceed to do its job of planning the implementation for specific UC applications/solutions. These can then be prioritized and associated with existing and new communication products and services that require UC integrations. (Filling in the UC “holes!") This will also enable IT management to evaluate various available vendor offerings from a broad UC perspective, rather than just on an individual application basis, for interoperability, functionality, usability, supportability, and costs.
This user-based information will then lead to identifying UC’s impact on IT’s infrastructure and integration responsibilities for wired and wireless networking requirements, integration with business application servers, user endpoint software client needs, mobile device independence, traffic and usage management, access security, etc.
Step 2 for a CIO or IT management is therefore NOT to simply select technology replacements for legacy telephony systems or other communication applications such as IM or CEBP applications, nor even to start worrying about the implementation or support costs involved in UC applications. Rather, that step must be to help the “user” constituencies in the organization understand the different user perspectives of UC and participate in identifying, justifying, and prioritizing specific UC solution implementations. While reducing costs is always a valid UC planning objective, that alone will not justify the kind of disruptive change that UC is bringing to both technology management, business operations, and end user communication procedures.
Step 3. UC Migration Learning
With a UC migration platform in place and user requirements being identified, a flexible, selective, and self-paced learning phase (pilots, trials) can begin for an organization to quickly realize important performance benefits for high-value business processes (UC-B). In addition, individual end user productivity benefits in doing their different jobs (UC-U) will also be gained.
In the latter case, there will also be an opportunity to identify specific end user “role” needs and usability requirements for different endpoint devices. Finally, it will also be a learning phase for IT to gain experience in supporting the various old and new communication applications of a UC environment. This is a critical point where IT management has to both learn its new responsibilities and help guide operational changes being introduced by UC solutions and mobility changes.
Based on the results of Step 2, migration planning for UC can be finalized for the business processes trialed, and extended to larger groups of users. While it is always nice to have individual end users create demand because of the viral nature of individual user benefits of UC, (UC-U), the CIO must take into consideration the business process performance benefits (UC-B), as well as costs (TCO), for supporting UC migrations cost effectively. IT management must insure that their UC platform can collect activity data across all forms of UC communications, as well as reporting tools to provide the metrics for evaluating and managing both UC-U as well as UC-B benefits.
Perhaps most importantly for enterprise IT organizations, internal IT resources must be evaluated in order to decide to what extent UC solutions can be managed and supported internally vs. using third-party services.
Summary
Enterprise IT will have its work cut out for it in terms of starting to migrate to a UC-based environment. The justification and priorities for making the moves must, however, come from the other enterprise constituencies. This is where the CIO can play a leading role in organizing and managing the migration planning activity, including being prepared to quickly respond to important user needs for UC solutions. Because there will be little internal prior experience with UC implementations, this may require the services of outside consultants to identify and quantify UC solution needs and their potential value both to the enterprise and to specific end users.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
November 25, 2009
How Can The CIO Help Enterprise Users Migrate To UC?
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
There has been a lot of talk, but still relatively little action, on the enterprise UC migration front. There are a number of practical reasons why this has been so, including:
· Confusion about what “UC” really is all about as a concept vs. specific technology requirements.
· Migrating to UC is an ongoing transition from proprietary, hardware-based communication applications to a “virtual” framework of interoperable, integrated, IP-based, software application servers and endpoint clients.
· Legacy communications still work and those investments are being maximized, particularly expensive telephone systems.
· UC-enabled telephony (“UC Telephony”) goes beyond IP Telephony because it integrates with all other UC communication applications and business process applications. It will require a simple, flexible, and inexpensive integration framework to support interoperability between existing and new forms of communication, e.g., social networking applications, at the user interface level with to be successful.
· Lack of demand from enterprise end users for new UC functionality is complicated by the fact that individual end users will all have different, personalized needs, including their choice of mobile communication devices and services.
· Individual UC application technologies are still evolving, along with appropriate new standards, e.g., SIP.
· Confusion about who in the enterprise organization should be involved and when for UC implementation planning.
· Since all forms of communication with people are considered elements of UC, they are all being labeled by the technology providers as “UC”, even if they are not properly integrated.
· The recessionary economic climate has slowed down all enterprise technology investments.
The “Who” of Enterprise UC Migration
UC application implementations in enterprise organizations will be influenced by different groups within the organization because such groups have different perspectives of need and value for using UC-integrated versions of traditional communication applications.
There are three main constituencies in an enterprise organization that should be directly involved in the planning for UC implementations:
· Business management – Primarily interested in improving business processes and operational performance through more efficient and effective means of people contact and information access through UC technologies.
· IT management - Primarily concerned with costs to implement and maintain enterprise technologies, as well as the ability to integrate them with existing and future applications and services.
· Individual end users - Focused on communication flexibility, ease of use, device independence, personalization, and saving time in doing their jobs whenever and wherever they happen to be.
The big question is, who should be driving the demand for UC solution implementations within an enterprise organization?
One would normally expect that the real users of the technology, those who benefit most directly, might be clamoring for the benefits of UC; e.g., business management, who could realize faster operational benefits from the elimination of “human contact latency” in business process performance (“UC-B”). Individual internal users might want the personal productivity benefits of UC, particularly when mobile, in order to do their jobs more easily and flexibly, regardless of their location (“UC-U”).
External end users, such as consumers/customers or business partners, will also want the UC benefits of faster and more flexible contacts, particularly when mobility is involved. However, because such users are outside of the organization, they will be dependent on how enterprise communication technologies will interoperate with public network services that outsiders will typically be using.
UC Demand and Justifications
IT management will traditionally support implementation of new technologies if there is, first, justifiable demand from the other two constituencies, including budgetary support. IT management will also be even more interested if the new technology can also significantly reduce current technology support costs that are IT’s responsibility.
However, because of the confusion surrounding what UC actually does and who will benefit most directly, there has been little serious demand (yet) from those first two constituencies. As a result, UC-oriented technology providers have been trying to sell IT management primarily on cost-saving benefits like Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which is usually of little interest to individual end users or even to revenue-sensitive Line of Business management. In the meantime, UC migration planning has not yet involved LOB management or individual end users very much, even though their different needs must help define UC requirements first!
The CIO As Enterprise UC Migration Leader
For several years the question has been raised as to who should be in charge of driving enterprise UC migration planning and how. The answers have ranged from the CEO down to Telecom management, the latter mainly because legacy telephony systems are being affected the most by new forms of IP communication and their integration under UC. However, now that IP Telephony (IP-PBXs and IP phones) are replacing TDM phone systems in both end-of-life and “greenfield” situations, those implementations should really be part of a broader “UC migration” plan for both business processes and individual end user communication needs.
Although Line of Business management and individual end users must help to identify their specific UC application requirements and their implementation priorities, it will still be up to IT to plan and manage the various steps required for migrating to UC in an evolutionary manner. For this reason, it will be in the best interests for enterprise IT management to start the UC migration ball rolling with two initial steps:
1. Establish a convenient, cost-efficient integration approach to UC migration to be prepared for any initial pilot UC applications and integrations required.
2. Promote awareness and understanding of what UC really means for those other constituencies and coordinate their UC requirements and priorities for initial application implementation planning.
Once migration to UC has successfully started, it will then become an ongoing, learning process for both users and IT support that will be a never-ending step 3.
Step 1. Establish An Integration Framework For UC Migration
Although UC encompasses all forms of communication interoperability, voice telephony usage will be the most impacted because the traditional telephony endpoint devices and network infrastructures are changing so dramatically. However, legacy telephone systems cannot be simply replaced throughout an enterprise organization, especially in multiple locations with different phone systems because of both cost and complexity of traditional telephony system implementations.
This is where a UC migration framework should be selected that will:
1. Support a technology approach for integrating and simplifying future migrations from existing siloed communication systems to a centralized UC environment that is flexible, cost-efficient, and “future-proof.”
2. Provide a UC migration platform that will cost-efficiently and selectively support evolutionary integrations of key UC applications including:
a. Device-independent “UC Telephony” for desktops and mobile usage
b. IP-based voice and video conferencing
c. Interoperability with unified messaging servers and public social networking services
d. Federated presence management integrations for enterprise IM, telephony, public social networking services, and business process applications
e. Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) integrations with enterprise business applications
f. Integration of all forms of customer contacts with an enterprise organization that are inbound or outbound, device-independent, and will include inbound/outbound self-service applications. This will exploit UC capabilities for those enterprise communication applications that I have labeled as “Customer UC”.
g. Providing consolidated UC activity data collection and reporting tools to cover all forms of communication activity with people, as either initiators or as recipients, both inside and outside of the organization. This will enable critical metrics to be developed to manage the ongoing effectiveness of UC solutions in business process performance.
There can be a number of choices for how UC migration platforms can be deployed, including premise-based, managed, hosted, or a hybrid approach. Whichever approach is selected, the availability of such a flexible “UC migration platform” will facilitate the next two UC implementation steps, including educating end user constituencies and identifying their UC requirements, to be carried out more effectively.
UC migration platforms that satisfy the need for both maximum, standards-based flexibility and low investment costs are relatively new technology offerings that simplify integrations of old and new enterprise communications technologies under a common UC framework. In particular, they can facilitate the creation of “UC Telephony” capabilities within any existing enterprise telephony environment, selectively and cost effectively. For an excellent presentation and discussion of this evolutionary UC migration strategy with a leading provider of this technology, view the UCStrategies.com webinar on Aastra’s “overlay” approach that exploits its “Clearspan” UC platform for flexible and low-cost migrations to UC.
According to Aastra’s cost analysis of migrating to UC by replacing an old PBX with a new IP-PBX, compared to simply adding an “overlay UC platform” that can control all necessary integrations with existing telephony infrastructures and other UC applications, the cost per user for “UC Telephony” is estimated to be one-third that of an IP-PBX replacement. That doesn’t include the savings and disruption avoidance gained by keeping existing infrastructure equipment (PBXs, desktop phones). This approach also facilitates selective, customized, and priority-based UC migrations based upon the real needs of the user constituencies as they evolve.
Step 2. Who Needs What? When? – Evolving User UC Requirements
Obviously, a critical step for moving an organization slowly, but surely, towards an operational UC environment is to fully understand the existing communication problems of high-value business processes, the communication requirements of different user groups, and even individual end user needs for “role-based” communication applications. Personalization and “role-based” application needs will be key to determining selective individual end user UC requirements.
As the high-value operational business communication problems (or “Hot Spots” as my UniComm colleagues call them) are identified, IT management can proceed to do its job of planning the implementation for specific UC applications/solutions. These can then be prioritized and associated with existing and new communication products and services that require UC integrations. (Filling in the UC “holes!") This will also enable IT management to evaluate various available vendor offerings from a broad UC perspective, rather than just on an individual application basis, for interoperability, functionality, usability, supportability, and costs.
This user-based information will then lead to identifying UC’s impact on IT’s infrastructure and integration responsibilities for wired and wireless networking requirements, integration with business application servers, user endpoint software client needs, mobile device independence, traffic and usage management, access security, etc.
Step 2 for a CIO or IT management is therefore NOT to simply select technology replacements for legacy telephony systems or other communication applications such as IM or CEBP applications, nor even to start worrying about the implementation or support costs involved in UC applications. Rather, that step must be to help the “user” constituencies in the organization understand the different user perspectives of UC and participate in identifying, justifying, and prioritizing specific UC solution implementations. While reducing costs is always a valid UC planning objective, that alone will not justify the kind of disruptive change that UC is bringing to both technology management, business operations, and end user communication procedures.
Step 3. UC Migration Learning
With a UC migration platform in place and user requirements being identified, a flexible, selective, and self-paced learning phase (pilots, trials) can begin for an organization to quickly realize important performance benefits for high-value business processes (UC-B). In addition, individual end user productivity benefits in doing their different jobs (UC-U) will also be gained.
In the latter case, there will also be an opportunity to identify specific end user “role” needs and usability requirements for different endpoint devices. Finally, it will also be a learning phase for IT to gain experience in supporting the various old and new communication applications of a UC environment. This is a critical point where IT management has to both learn its new responsibilities and help guide operational changes being introduced by UC solutions and mobility changes.
Based on the results of Step 2, migration planning for UC can be finalized for the business processes trialed, and extended to larger groups of users. While it is always nice to have individual end users create demand because of the viral nature of individual user benefits of UC, (UC-U), the CIO must take into consideration the business process performance benefits (UC-B), as well as costs (TCO), for supporting UC migrations cost effectively. IT management must insure that their UC platform can collect activity data across all forms of UC communications, as well as reporting tools to provide the metrics for evaluating and managing both UC-U as well as UC-B benefits.
Perhaps most importantly for enterprise IT organizations, internal IT resources must be evaluated in order to decide to what extent UC solutions can be managed and supported internally vs. using third-party services.
Summary
Enterprise IT will have its work cut out for it in terms of starting to migrate to a UC-based environment. The justification and priorities for making the moves must, however, come from the other enterprise constituencies. This is where the CIO can play a leading role in organizing and managing the migration planning activity, including being prepared to quickly respond to important user needs for UC solutions. Because there will be little internal prior experience with UC implementations, this may require the services of outside consultants to identify and quantify UC solution needs and their potential value both to the enterprise and to specific end users.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
Converging Real-time Communication and Publication
Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.
November 28, 2009
UC Strategies Uses Sonexis For Converging UC Conferencing and Publication
By Art Rosenberg
One of the big UC applications that both reduces business costs and speeds up collaborative work is real-time conferencing. The latter benefit is particularly useful when independent experts in different locations outside of an organization have to discuss issues in a timely manner. With the way UC Strategies.com is organized, not only does simplified voice conferencing facilitate coordination of creative thinking between the independent UC experts, but it also closes the loop between internal discussions and the selective publication of such thinking in the form of immediate podcasts.
The challenge that UC Strategies experts face is not uncommon in most businesses today. Not everyone who needs to be involved in discussing issues or sharing information is necessarily in the same physical location at the same time any more. What makes the challenge for UC Strategies as an objective industry thought-leader even more interesting is that the topics discussed are very dynamic and debatable and are very interesting to its audience.
Accordingly, what UC Strategies does with voice/web conferencing, is to practice what it preaches by starting a conferencing connection between its distributed team. In many cases, the participants are talking from mobile phones. The conference call then is then wrapped up by recording a final summary of individual comments by the participants for publication as a podcast on the UC Strategies web site.
So, not only do the independent UC Strategies experts meet regularly as a team, they can also quickly publish their output as perspectives on the latest developments in the evolving UC technologies industry.
Using Sonexis Conference Manager
As a frequent user of conferencing, UC Strategies has exploited the technology offering of Sonexis, a long-time leading provider of in-house and managed audio and optional web conferencing. Their Conference Manager is a flexible, simple to install and use system that reduces the high costs of an external service or purchasing high-end equipment. As a key UC application that can reduce travel costs as well as speed up collaborative interactions, “instant” conferencing activity has increased its operational role in business communications. This is particularly important as business users, both inside and outside of an organization become more accessible through mobile devices.
Sonexis Conference Manager is “investment protected” because they integrate with any and all communication vendors (Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, Nortel, Microsoft, IBM, NEC, Aastra, ShoreTel, 3Com, etc…), scales to 400 Web seats and audio ports, and can connect to any environment (PSTN or VOIP). They also have a built-in “insurance policy” that provides free access to a hosted system if needed in the event of downtime or for disaster recovery.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
November 28, 2009
UC Strategies Uses Sonexis For Converging UC Conferencing and Publication
By Art Rosenberg
One of the big UC applications that both reduces business costs and speeds up collaborative work is real-time conferencing. The latter benefit is particularly useful when independent experts in different locations outside of an organization have to discuss issues in a timely manner. With the way UC Strategies.com is organized, not only does simplified voice conferencing facilitate coordination of creative thinking between the independent UC experts, but it also closes the loop between internal discussions and the selective publication of such thinking in the form of immediate podcasts.
The challenge that UC Strategies experts face is not uncommon in most businesses today. Not everyone who needs to be involved in discussing issues or sharing information is necessarily in the same physical location at the same time any more. What makes the challenge for UC Strategies as an objective industry thought-leader even more interesting is that the topics discussed are very dynamic and debatable and are very interesting to its audience.
Accordingly, what UC Strategies does with voice/web conferencing, is to practice what it preaches by starting a conferencing connection between its distributed team. In many cases, the participants are talking from mobile phones. The conference call then is then wrapped up by recording a final summary of individual comments by the participants for publication as a podcast on the UC Strategies web site.
So, not only do the independent UC Strategies experts meet regularly as a team, they can also quickly publish their output as perspectives on the latest developments in the evolving UC technologies industry.
Using Sonexis Conference Manager
As a frequent user of conferencing, UC Strategies has exploited the technology offering of Sonexis, a long-time leading provider of in-house and managed audio and optional web conferencing. Their Conference Manager is a flexible, simple to install and use system that reduces the high costs of an external service or purchasing high-end equipment. As a key UC application that can reduce travel costs as well as speed up collaborative interactions, “instant” conferencing activity has increased its operational role in business communications. This is particularly important as business users, both inside and outside of an organization become more accessible through mobile devices.
Sonexis Conference Manager is “investment protected” because they integrate with any and all communication vendors (Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, Nortel, Microsoft, IBM, NEC, Aastra, ShoreTel, 3Com, etc…), scales to 400 Web seats and audio ports, and can connect to any environment (PSTN or VOIP). They also have a built-in “insurance policy” that provides free access to a hosted system if needed in the event of downtime or for disaster recovery.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Avaya's Aura Exploits CEBP For Notification Solutions
Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.
November 3, 2009
Avaya Runs With CEBP For Aura “UC Telephony” Solutions
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
“Collaboration” means working together, exchanging information, and communicating in a timely manner with people and processes in various ways. It usually is a term that applies to people involved in a common task or problem and often need to discuss important issues in real time.
However, "customers" were rarely treated the same as enterprise personnel in the collaborative space because they are independent of the enterprise communications and information infrastructure and can’t be easily contacted for timely collaborative interactions .
With the interoperability of the Internet, personalized multi-modal endpoint devices, business communication applications, business process applications, presence information, and mobile accessibility, "Customer UC" flexibility is enabling business contacts with customers to be treated in a more "collaborative" way. What “UC” as a concept does is to make the choice of interaction more flexible for all the people directly involved with a business process.
Process-to-Person Contacts For Work Flow Inside And Outside The Organization
UC is not just about person-to-person contacts, but also about pro-active process-to-person "notifications" that enable the recipient to dynamically use any mode of notification receipt (text, speech), as well as choose the modality of response. The latter can include interactions with automated self-service business process applications (on-line, IVR) and any mode of communication access to live assistance when necessary.
Outbound contacts with customers by automated business process applications is coming to life under the label of "Communications Enabled Business Processes" or CEBP, and will be particularly effective with the growing population of mobile users that carry "smart-phones" for flexible accessibility and increased availability and responsiveness.
CEBP, coupled with UC, is thus enabling customers to become part of the "collaborative" business landscape by providing a cost-effective means for a business process application to contact a customer whenever and wherever they may be through UC "notification and response" services. Notification alone is not enough to close the communication loop in a timely and efficient manner. Remember the pager?
Avaya Puts Aura To Work To Support Timely Business Process Flow
Avaya has just announced its first customizable automated outbound solutions for its Aura enterprise communications system that provides what I call "UC Telephony" (IP Telephony) integrations across multi-vendor, multi-location, and multi-modal business processes. One solution is called Avaya Notification Solution (ANS) designed to orchestrate and streamline the voice contacts between people involved in coordinating any real-time business process activity, but especially in responding to urgent or emergency situations.
The second solution is called Avaya Proactive Outreach for Financial Services for the mortgage market, which automatically contacts customers by phone to determine eligibility. This is an example of a proactive outbound IVR application that can also trigger delivery of text messages that contain a URL link for further self-service actions. In addition, the Outreach solution provides timely messaging notifications of ongoing mortgage processing status, as well as any need for real-time interactions, if required.
Such CEBP-based business process solutions are unlimited and, like smart-phone " apps," will proliferate swiftly with Aura system customers. Clearly, multimodal, mobile accessibility will be key to the effectiveness of many of these solutions, so we should see more mention of the role of Mobile UC in the future.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
November 3, 2009
Avaya Runs With CEBP For Aura “UC Telephony” Solutions
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
“Collaboration” means working together, exchanging information, and communicating in a timely manner with people and processes in various ways. It usually is a term that applies to people involved in a common task or problem and often need to discuss important issues in real time.
However, "customers" were rarely treated the same as enterprise personnel in the collaborative space because they are independent of the enterprise communications and information infrastructure and can’t be easily contacted for timely collaborative interactions .
With the interoperability of the Internet, personalized multi-modal endpoint devices, business communication applications, business process applications, presence information, and mobile accessibility, "Customer UC" flexibility is enabling business contacts with customers to be treated in a more "collaborative" way. What “UC” as a concept does is to make the choice of interaction more flexible for all the people directly involved with a business process.
Process-to-Person Contacts For Work Flow Inside And Outside The Organization
UC is not just about person-to-person contacts, but also about pro-active process-to-person "notifications" that enable the recipient to dynamically use any mode of notification receipt (text, speech), as well as choose the modality of response. The latter can include interactions with automated self-service business process applications (on-line, IVR) and any mode of communication access to live assistance when necessary.
Outbound contacts with customers by automated business process applications is coming to life under the label of "Communications Enabled Business Processes" or CEBP, and will be particularly effective with the growing population of mobile users that carry "smart-phones" for flexible accessibility and increased availability and responsiveness.
CEBP, coupled with UC, is thus enabling customers to become part of the "collaborative" business landscape by providing a cost-effective means for a business process application to contact a customer whenever and wherever they may be through UC "notification and response" services. Notification alone is not enough to close the communication loop in a timely and efficient manner. Remember the pager?
Avaya Puts Aura To Work To Support Timely Business Process Flow
Avaya has just announced its first customizable automated outbound solutions for its Aura enterprise communications system that provides what I call "UC Telephony" (IP Telephony) integrations across multi-vendor, multi-location, and multi-modal business processes. One solution is called Avaya Notification Solution (ANS) designed to orchestrate and streamline the voice contacts between people involved in coordinating any real-time business process activity, but especially in responding to urgent or emergency situations.
The second solution is called Avaya Proactive Outreach for Financial Services for the mortgage market, which automatically contacts customers by phone to determine eligibility. This is an example of a proactive outbound IVR application that can also trigger delivery of text messages that contain a URL link for further self-service actions. In addition, the Outreach solution provides timely messaging notifications of ongoing mortgage processing status, as well as any need for real-time interactions, if required.
Such CEBP-based business process solutions are unlimited and, like smart-phone " apps," will proliferate swiftly with Aura system customers. Clearly, multimodal, mobile accessibility will be key to the effectiveness of many of these solutions, so we should see more mention of the role of Mobile UC in the future.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Copyright © 2009 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
October 23, 2009
“Customer UC” For Improving Collections ROI
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
As knowledgeable technology experts now agree, unified communications (UC) is a concept for integrating the use of various forms of communication technologies to make more flexible and efficient contact with people; such contacts can be initiated either by other people, or, even more importantly for business processes, by automating process workflows.
The “ROI” of UC technologies is expected to come from both reduced costs and more efficient and productive business processes that involve timely contact with people. The latter objective will also include reducing labor costs by exploiting automated notifications and self-service applications. More importantly, any customer-facing business process activity that can impact revenue generation will be of particular interest to business management, making contact center applications high-priority targets for UC implementation planning.
We are starting to see some contact center applications being integrated with UC capabilities to help provide the ROI that enterprises require. For example, Aspect, which has its roots in the contact center market, announced its unified communications solution, “Streamlined Collections.” By applying its long experience with traditional, telephony-based outbound customer contact and self-service applications to the increased need to make debt collection both more productive and cost efficient, Aspect is targeting a common high-value business process that suffers from the limitations of traditional, person-to-person telephone contacts.
The nature of outbound contacts for debt collection lends itself ideally to the flexible capabilities of UC, as well as the opportunity to exploit automated self-services applications, efficiently coupled with selective, on-demand live assistance when needed. This customer-facing outbound UC application fits in very well with other “Customer UC” applications, which I define as all forms of business communication services that directly involve interactions with “customers,” whether as contact initiators or recipients/respondents.
Moving Debt Collection From The Past To The Future
Debt collection letters have always been slow, with no guarantee of delivery or a convenient means of quick response. Collection phone call attempts are even more expensive, especially if you don’t know when and where to make direct contact with a particular person, and/ or debtors are avoiding such contact. The limitation of a traditional phone call to handle a data exchange has also been a major shortcoming for efficiently negotiating a collections interaction with a customer.
However, the consumer communications world has been dramatically changing in terms of personalized communications through individual email mailboxes, personalized mobile “smart-phones,” instant messaging (IM) contacts, Short Message Services (SMS) for mobile devices, social networking contacts, etc. It is really time to exploit the new web-based contact environment, not just the old telephone network, since the limitations of the Telephone User Interface (TUI) also restrict the flexibility of automated self-service applications, requiring greater use of live assistance than online Web applications. So, UC, coupled with mobile, multi-modal “smart-phones,” can expand the benefits of outbound self-service applications and reduce the need for live assistance to provide additional information.
A typical collections scenario would involve a customer contacting a customer service department for an unrelated reason and a business process application detecting the fact that a payment is overdue and automatically generate a personalized (text) “notification” message to the debtor (via email, SMS). A mobile recipient with UC capabilities will have the option to hear the message as well read it. Then, depending on the recipient’s particular situation, various response options can be offered, ranging from simple confirmation of receipt to a choice of payment methods. If there are questions or problems that require additional assistance, the response can escalate to an exchange of emails, a real-time “chat,” or a live call connection to an available and qualified collections agent.
Aspect’s Streamlined Collections integration with UC capabilities exploits “Communications Enabled Business Processes" or “CEBP”, where an automated business process can initiate an outbound communication contact to an individual person, based on personalized criteria. Customer debt collection is an ideal application for CEBP, enabling the choice of outbound contact, self-service application, and access to live assistance to be automatically optimized selectively on an individual customer basis.
“First Contact Resolution” Metrics For Outbound Customer Contact
Personalization of outbound contacts for customer collections will be very critical, because it will require differentiating the modality requirements of contact – proactive notifications coupled with self-service or live assistance options, as well as privacy concerns for the individual customer. Aspect has categorized its collection activities across different “phases” of the process, i.e.:
· “Early stage” 30- day
· “Mid-stage” 60-90-day
· “Late stage 90-day +
Each phase can have its own “message” to deliver, along with different choices for delivery and distinct self-service application options and live assistance requirements. Leveraging consumer’s increased use of ‘smart-phones” will enable faster contact accessibility, as well as customer response flexibility for both online or voice response self-service options. This will also minimize the need for live agent involvement unless requested by the customer. The self-service approach also facilitates identifying the level of live assistance required, which may or may not be immediately available and can be deferred.
Just as IVR applications have traditionally been used to screen incoming calls and determine intelligent routing to qualified call center agents, outbound contacts that connect recipients to either an online or an IVR self-service application can perform the same role for customer access to live assistance via a presence-based call connection or chat session.
Benefits for Everyone
Although important, it is simply not enough to claim that UC technologies will reduce enterprise operational costs in various ways. Unless it pays off in making a specific business process more efficient and productive for all users involved, the overall business process results will not be optimized. In the case of the Aspect Streamlined Collections contact center application. UC-based technologies exploit mobile consumer communications, email, and self-service technologies to maximize the following benefits:
For the enterprise:
· Efficient customization of interactions for different customer circumstances
· Faster revenue generation
· Minimized operational costs, especially need for staffing support
· Lower infrastructure technology costs
· Maximizing customer retention, customer experience satisfaction
For the customer:
· Greater contextual personalization of collection contacts
· Maintaining customer privacy for such interactions
· Opportunity to avoid or minimize financial penalties
· More response flexibility and information access, especially for mobile customers
· Greater flexibility for access to live assistance on demand
UC-based business process applications can be selectively implemented to improve a particular business process that will involve a specific group of end users, both inside and outside of an organization. They can integrate existing communication technologies with new capabilities to produce the benefits of cost savings, but more importantly, business process efficiencies and productivity. Aspect’s Streamlined Collections Solution is a practical example of the benefits of Customer UC in the rapidly changing world of consumer communications.
The consumer transition to universal online Internet access, UC, and multimodal “smartphones” won’t take place overnight, so there will be a requirement for enterprise organizations to continue to support traditional customer telephone contacts in addition to new UC contacts, with live assistance. For this reason, the Streamlined Collections unified communication applications for the contact center from Aspect integrates its outbound contact planning and workforce management functions to optimize “agent” and “expert” resources across all forms of customer interactions.
In addition, Aspect has its collections business process optimization solution packaged as “Optimized Collections,” which focuses on enhancing calling strategies and helps apply the right resources at the right times to improve collector productivity.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
October 23, 2009
“Customer UC” For Improving Collections ROI
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
As knowledgeable technology experts now agree, unified communications (UC) is a concept for integrating the use of various forms of communication technologies to make more flexible and efficient contact with people; such contacts can be initiated either by other people, or, even more importantly for business processes, by automating process workflows.
The “ROI” of UC technologies is expected to come from both reduced costs and more efficient and productive business processes that involve timely contact with people. The latter objective will also include reducing labor costs by exploiting automated notifications and self-service applications. More importantly, any customer-facing business process activity that can impact revenue generation will be of particular interest to business management, making contact center applications high-priority targets for UC implementation planning.
We are starting to see some contact center applications being integrated with UC capabilities to help provide the ROI that enterprises require. For example, Aspect, which has its roots in the contact center market, announced its unified communications solution, “Streamlined Collections.” By applying its long experience with traditional, telephony-based outbound customer contact and self-service applications to the increased need to make debt collection both more productive and cost efficient, Aspect is targeting a common high-value business process that suffers from the limitations of traditional, person-to-person telephone contacts.
The nature of outbound contacts for debt collection lends itself ideally to the flexible capabilities of UC, as well as the opportunity to exploit automated self-services applications, efficiently coupled with selective, on-demand live assistance when needed. This customer-facing outbound UC application fits in very well with other “Customer UC” applications, which I define as all forms of business communication services that directly involve interactions with “customers,” whether as contact initiators or recipients/respondents.
Moving Debt Collection From The Past To The Future
Debt collection letters have always been slow, with no guarantee of delivery or a convenient means of quick response. Collection phone call attempts are even more expensive, especially if you don’t know when and where to make direct contact with a particular person, and/ or debtors are avoiding such contact. The limitation of a traditional phone call to handle a data exchange has also been a major shortcoming for efficiently negotiating a collections interaction with a customer.
However, the consumer communications world has been dramatically changing in terms of personalized communications through individual email mailboxes, personalized mobile “smart-phones,” instant messaging (IM) contacts, Short Message Services (SMS) for mobile devices, social networking contacts, etc. It is really time to exploit the new web-based contact environment, not just the old telephone network, since the limitations of the Telephone User Interface (TUI) also restrict the flexibility of automated self-service applications, requiring greater use of live assistance than online Web applications. So, UC, coupled with mobile, multi-modal “smart-phones,” can expand the benefits of outbound self-service applications and reduce the need for live assistance to provide additional information.
A typical collections scenario would involve a customer contacting a customer service department for an unrelated reason and a business process application detecting the fact that a payment is overdue and automatically generate a personalized (text) “notification” message to the debtor (via email, SMS). A mobile recipient with UC capabilities will have the option to hear the message as well read it. Then, depending on the recipient’s particular situation, various response options can be offered, ranging from simple confirmation of receipt to a choice of payment methods. If there are questions or problems that require additional assistance, the response can escalate to an exchange of emails, a real-time “chat,” or a live call connection to an available and qualified collections agent.
Aspect’s Streamlined Collections integration with UC capabilities exploits “Communications Enabled Business Processes" or “CEBP”, where an automated business process can initiate an outbound communication contact to an individual person, based on personalized criteria. Customer debt collection is an ideal application for CEBP, enabling the choice of outbound contact, self-service application, and access to live assistance to be automatically optimized selectively on an individual customer basis.
“First Contact Resolution” Metrics For Outbound Customer Contact
Personalization of outbound contacts for customer collections will be very critical, because it will require differentiating the modality requirements of contact – proactive notifications coupled with self-service or live assistance options, as well as privacy concerns for the individual customer. Aspect has categorized its collection activities across different “phases” of the process, i.e.:
· “Early stage” 30- day
· “Mid-stage” 60-90-day
· “Late stage 90-day +
Each phase can have its own “message” to deliver, along with different choices for delivery and distinct self-service application options and live assistance requirements. Leveraging consumer’s increased use of ‘smart-phones” will enable faster contact accessibility, as well as customer response flexibility for both online or voice response self-service options. This will also minimize the need for live agent involvement unless requested by the customer. The self-service approach also facilitates identifying the level of live assistance required, which may or may not be immediately available and can be deferred.
Just as IVR applications have traditionally been used to screen incoming calls and determine intelligent routing to qualified call center agents, outbound contacts that connect recipients to either an online or an IVR self-service application can perform the same role for customer access to live assistance via a presence-based call connection or chat session.
Benefits for Everyone
Although important, it is simply not enough to claim that UC technologies will reduce enterprise operational costs in various ways. Unless it pays off in making a specific business process more efficient and productive for all users involved, the overall business process results will not be optimized. In the case of the Aspect Streamlined Collections contact center application. UC-based technologies exploit mobile consumer communications, email, and self-service technologies to maximize the following benefits:
For the enterprise:
· Efficient customization of interactions for different customer circumstances
· Faster revenue generation
· Minimized operational costs, especially need for staffing support
· Lower infrastructure technology costs
· Maximizing customer retention, customer experience satisfaction
For the customer:
· Greater contextual personalization of collection contacts
· Maintaining customer privacy for such interactions
· Opportunity to avoid or minimize financial penalties
· More response flexibility and information access, especially for mobile customers
· Greater flexibility for access to live assistance on demand
UC-based business process applications can be selectively implemented to improve a particular business process that will involve a specific group of end users, both inside and outside of an organization. They can integrate existing communication technologies with new capabilities to produce the benefits of cost savings, but more importantly, business process efficiencies and productivity. Aspect’s Streamlined Collections Solution is a practical example of the benefits of Customer UC in the rapidly changing world of consumer communications.
The consumer transition to universal online Internet access, UC, and multimodal “smartphones” won’t take place overnight, so there will be a requirement for enterprise organizations to continue to support traditional customer telephone contacts in addition to new UC contacts, with live assistance. For this reason, the Streamlined Collections unified communication applications for the contact center from Aspect integrates its outbound contact planning and workforce management functions to optimize “agent” and “expert” resources across all forms of customer interactions.
In addition, Aspect has its collections business process optimization solution packaged as “Optimized Collections,” which focuses on enhancing calling strategies and helps apply the right resources at the right times to improve collector productivity.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Getting Enterprise Telephony Ready For UC
Copyright © 2009 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
October 19, 2009
New, Combined Gateway Simplifies Migration of Enterprise Telephony To OCS UC
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
While business managers in enterprise organizations may just be starting to research their operational business needs to identify and prioritize their UC requirements to improve business processes, IT management must prepare to migrate existing enterprise telephone systems into the coming UC infrastructure environment.
For the many organizations that are deploying the latest version of Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS 2007 R2) for their UC infrastructure, NET’s newest VX series gateway with Enhanced UC Features, will provide a very practical, cost-savings approach to integrating enterprise telephony with the PSTN, SIP trunking, different PBX systems, and various UC applications provided through OCS. This migration can be done selectively to support specific individual end users (e.g., mobile users) or for selected business groups as needed, rather than on an across the boards basis.
As has been stressed many times, UC is not a single communication system, but a concept of open, communication applications that are interoperable across different user interfaces. UC communication applications must also be able to integrate with a variety of enterprise business process applications to enable them to initiate contacts and to interact with people both inside (internal staff) and outside (business partners, customers) of an enterprise organization. This also means that communication access for UC applications must support network and device independence, if necessary through gateways, in order to allow for all forms of contact between people and any business process applications they interact with.
The flexibility for Microsoft’s OCS to support a variety of SIP service providers or ITSP’s is also expanded by NET’s demarcation gateway approach. As a certified Microsoft partner for OCS gateway, NET gateways increase the number of supported, approved SIP carriers from three to eleven, and also directly support a wide list of WAN interfaces.
While it will take time to plan and implement all the business process applications that can be communications enabled (CEBP), IT management doesn’t have to wait, but can safely get a head start by moving forward with integrating existing telephony capabilities with Microsoft’s OCS server and UC applications.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
October 19, 2009
New, Combined Gateway Simplifies Migration of Enterprise Telephony To OCS UC
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
While business managers in enterprise organizations may just be starting to research their operational business needs to identify and prioritize their UC requirements to improve business processes, IT management must prepare to migrate existing enterprise telephone systems into the coming UC infrastructure environment.
For the many organizations that are deploying the latest version of Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS 2007 R2) for their UC infrastructure, NET’s newest VX series gateway with Enhanced UC Features, will provide a very practical, cost-savings approach to integrating enterprise telephony with the PSTN, SIP trunking, different PBX systems, and various UC applications provided through OCS. This migration can be done selectively to support specific individual end users (e.g., mobile users) or for selected business groups as needed, rather than on an across the boards basis.
As has been stressed many times, UC is not a single communication system, but a concept of open, communication applications that are interoperable across different user interfaces. UC communication applications must also be able to integrate with a variety of enterprise business process applications to enable them to initiate contacts and to interact with people both inside (internal staff) and outside (business partners, customers) of an enterprise organization. This also means that communication access for UC applications must support network and device independence, if necessary through gateways, in order to allow for all forms of contact between people and any business process applications they interact with.
The flexibility for Microsoft’s OCS to support a variety of SIP service providers or ITSP’s is also expanded by NET’s demarcation gateway approach. As a certified Microsoft partner for OCS gateway, NET gateways increase the number of supported, approved SIP carriers from three to eleven, and also directly support a wide list of WAN interfaces.
While it will take time to plan and implement all the business process applications that can be communications enabled (CEBP), IT management doesn’t have to wait, but can safely get a head start by moving forward with integrating existing telephony capabilities with Microsoft’s OCS server and UC applications.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Customer UC Issue #5 - Implementing Customer UC Applications
Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.
October 3, 2009
“Customer UC” – Panelists Discuss Issue #5 – Trialing and Implementing New UC Applications
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
More Panelist Comments on “Customer UC” Issues
I put all business communication contacts that directly involve customer facing activities into “Customer UC,” because they must ultimately all be accounted for in managing customer relationships. This topic was discussed by a panel of innovative contact center technology developers at a kickoff session, ”UC and the Contact Center,” at TMC’s last Internet Telephony conference in L.A. (9/1-3). My panelists were representatives from Altitude Software, CosmoCom, and Fonality.
In previous posts on what was happening with UC in the Contact Center space, I summarized comments by the panelists on the first four issues we discussed that face business organizations looking to exploit the benefits of UC for customer contact activities.
Here are their comments on another key issue discussed:
Issue #5. How should an organization implement new “Customer UC” applications for their customers?
As business information becomes increasingly accessible online over the public Internet, the need for an organization to provide personnel for such access is greatly reduced. Not only does this capability for direct customer online access to information reduce operational labor costs, but it expands customer service levels to 24x7 self-services and opens the door to other kinds of transactional services that would traditionally be limited to “office hours” and premise-based access. Clearly, cost-effective expanded customer service capabilities can accelerate revenue growth and profitability.
Voice-based self-service (IVR) applications, while productive, have always been limited to simple applications because anything complex would quickly require live assistance. On-line web-based applications have been better because visual screen interfaces are much more practical for information output, long menus, graphic output, links to web sites, etc., but once live assistance is required, it becomes limited to Instant Messaging facilities or email, with no simple way to switch to a real-time voice connection. However, with the rapid consumer adoption of personalized, multi-modal, mobile devices (“smart-phones”), UC can now help bridge the gap between customers, online or voice self-service applications, and various sources of live assistance. Going a step further, business process applications can now also become more pro-active in contacting customers to flexibly deliver information and services on a customized, individual end-user basis.
The challenge for implementing any new contact center communication applications will be a learning process to design and test the new user interfaces and integrations with real customers and contact center staff, before finalizing such offerings. Given the fact that UC is still evolving as a set of old and new communication applications that need to integrate and interact with each other and with business process applications, most business organizations don’t have all the technologies nor the expertise in place to develop and test the effectiveness of a UC solution to a business process problem. We have a “chicken and egg” situation - we don’t want invest too heavily in new technologies until we can demonstrate that it will work with customers and will produce the benefits for expected.
Most consultants and industry pundits therefore push the practical idea of “pilots” and “trials,” but that only raises the questions of “how?”
Panelist Comments
· Every organization will have its own business process application candidates for UC trialing. Based upon type of business, customer base and geographical locations, current use of self-service applications, and strategic operational problems that need to be addressed
· The business process application that is of high priority because of time-criticality and impact on revenues, but with relative ease of testing implementation, should be selected for trialing first
· The key operational problems associated with that application must be identified first
· The UC feature set required for that application solution and it’s operational problems must be determined
· The users involved, including, “agents,” “experts” and types of customers, must all be identified for trialing purposes
· Any existing online or IVR self-service applications must be evaluated for changes that must be made for new options for customers and impact on customer-facing staff (“agents,” “experts,” business partners)
· Performance metrics, for evaluating the pilot, need to be established, including metrics not previously used for traditional call center operations
· “Try before buy!” – Before investing in the purchase of new technologies, it would be advantageous to utilize hosted services to test the tools for designing, developing and managing the UC communication applications and for integrating them with existing process business applications
· A “phased” approach may be used for a given business process application, where not all the desired UC applications are implemented or integrated at once. For example, the first target might be online customers and a specific set of business process applications that can maximize the benefits of UC flexibility at the desktop. Alternatively, mobile customers might be the first targets because of their increased accessibility and need for both timely delivery with multi-modal flexibility
· After trialing the application solution for its effectiveness with the users involved, a next step will be to test the approach for scalability with increased volumes.
· Prepare both your “pilot” customers and “agents” for the expected changes they will experience from legacy technologies in both self-service options and in accessing live assistance. Based on the actual user results, the user preparation for the full rollout can be finalized.
Bottom line, every organization should be prepared to learn how to benefit from UC in the contact center environment, even though the technology is still evolving and experience is lacking. Trialing and piloting self-service applications with hosted and “cloud”-based software services are rapidly becoming a cost-effective, practical alternative to quickly finding out what you don’t yet really know about your customized, UC-based, self-service application needs.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
October 3, 2009
“Customer UC” – Panelists Discuss Issue #5 – Trialing and Implementing New UC Applications
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
More Panelist Comments on “Customer UC” Issues
I put all business communication contacts that directly involve customer facing activities into “Customer UC,” because they must ultimately all be accounted for in managing customer relationships. This topic was discussed by a panel of innovative contact center technology developers at a kickoff session, ”UC and the Contact Center,” at TMC’s last Internet Telephony conference in L.A. (9/1-3). My panelists were representatives from Altitude Software, CosmoCom, and Fonality.
In previous posts on what was happening with UC in the Contact Center space, I summarized comments by the panelists on the first four issues we discussed that face business organizations looking to exploit the benefits of UC for customer contact activities.
Here are their comments on another key issue discussed:
Issue #5. How should an organization implement new “Customer UC” applications for their customers?
As business information becomes increasingly accessible online over the public Internet, the need for an organization to provide personnel for such access is greatly reduced. Not only does this capability for direct customer online access to information reduce operational labor costs, but it expands customer service levels to 24x7 self-services and opens the door to other kinds of transactional services that would traditionally be limited to “office hours” and premise-based access. Clearly, cost-effective expanded customer service capabilities can accelerate revenue growth and profitability.
Voice-based self-service (IVR) applications, while productive, have always been limited to simple applications because anything complex would quickly require live assistance. On-line web-based applications have been better because visual screen interfaces are much more practical for information output, long menus, graphic output, links to web sites, etc., but once live assistance is required, it becomes limited to Instant Messaging facilities or email, with no simple way to switch to a real-time voice connection. However, with the rapid consumer adoption of personalized, multi-modal, mobile devices (“smart-phones”), UC can now help bridge the gap between customers, online or voice self-service applications, and various sources of live assistance. Going a step further, business process applications can now also become more pro-active in contacting customers to flexibly deliver information and services on a customized, individual end-user basis.
The challenge for implementing any new contact center communication applications will be a learning process to design and test the new user interfaces and integrations with real customers and contact center staff, before finalizing such offerings. Given the fact that UC is still evolving as a set of old and new communication applications that need to integrate and interact with each other and with business process applications, most business organizations don’t have all the technologies nor the expertise in place to develop and test the effectiveness of a UC solution to a business process problem. We have a “chicken and egg” situation - we don’t want invest too heavily in new technologies until we can demonstrate that it will work with customers and will produce the benefits for expected.
Most consultants and industry pundits therefore push the practical idea of “pilots” and “trials,” but that only raises the questions of “how?”
Panelist Comments
· Every organization will have its own business process application candidates for UC trialing. Based upon type of business, customer base and geographical locations, current use of self-service applications, and strategic operational problems that need to be addressed
· The business process application that is of high priority because of time-criticality and impact on revenues, but with relative ease of testing implementation, should be selected for trialing first
· The key operational problems associated with that application must be identified first
· The UC feature set required for that application solution and it’s operational problems must be determined
· The users involved, including, “agents,” “experts” and types of customers, must all be identified for trialing purposes
· Any existing online or IVR self-service applications must be evaluated for changes that must be made for new options for customers and impact on customer-facing staff (“agents,” “experts,” business partners)
· Performance metrics, for evaluating the pilot, need to be established, including metrics not previously used for traditional call center operations
· “Try before buy!” – Before investing in the purchase of new technologies, it would be advantageous to utilize hosted services to test the tools for designing, developing and managing the UC communication applications and for integrating them with existing process business applications
· A “phased” approach may be used for a given business process application, where not all the desired UC applications are implemented or integrated at once. For example, the first target might be online customers and a specific set of business process applications that can maximize the benefits of UC flexibility at the desktop. Alternatively, mobile customers might be the first targets because of their increased accessibility and need for both timely delivery with multi-modal flexibility
· After trialing the application solution for its effectiveness with the users involved, a next step will be to test the approach for scalability with increased volumes.
· Prepare both your “pilot” customers and “agents” for the expected changes they will experience from legacy technologies in both self-service options and in accessing live assistance. Based on the actual user results, the user preparation for the full rollout can be finalized.
Bottom line, every organization should be prepared to learn how to benefit from UC in the contact center environment, even though the technology is still evolving and experience is lacking. Trialing and piloting self-service applications with hosted and “cloud”-based software services are rapidly becoming a cost-effective, practical alternative to quickly finding out what you don’t yet really know about your customized, UC-based, self-service application needs.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
UC and Contact Center Panel Issue #4 - Where Does CEBP Fit In?
Copyright © 2009 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
September 26, 2009
“Customer UC” – Panelists Discuss Impact of CEBP on Business Applications
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
More Panelist Comments on “Customer UC”
In previous posts on what was happening with UC in the Contact Center space at TMC’s Internet Telephony show in L.A., I summarized comments by my panelists on the first three issues we discussed that face business organizations looking to exploit UC for customer contact activities.
I have labeled all customer-facing UC communication activities as “Customer UC,” which was then discussed by a panel of innovative contact center technology developers at a kickoff session, ”UC and the Contact Center,” at TMC’s last Internet Telephony conference in L.A. (9/1-3). My panelists were representatives from leading innovative contact center technology developers Altitude Software, CosmoCom, and Fonality, Here are their comments on another key issue discussed:
Issue #4. How will business process applications be affected by “CEBP” in a Customer UC environment?
With UC, different forms of business communication contact may be activated, depending upon who (or what) is initiating the contact with a person, which may be person-to-person or process-to-person. The type of contact will also depend upon the current real-time accessibility and availability of the contact recipient. As more elements of a business process become automated, e.g., monitoring sensitive status conditions, the role of real-time process-to-person “notifications” will increase, including what is commonly referred to as “Communications Enabled Business Communications” (CEBP).
CEBP commonly stands for “Communications Enabled Business Process,” which means that an automated) business process application can initiate a communications contact to a specific person, instead of it being done manually by another person. Needless to say, this kind of capability is particularly useful for contacting mobile recipients and for what some people call “outbound IVR” to exploit self-service transactions initiated by a business process application. Another term for such a capability is a “Communications enabled application” or CEA, which can apply to non-business applications as well, e.g., entertainment, social contacts, games, etc.
Like everything new that is falling under the umbrella of UC, the definitions for “CEBP” can be confusing. Microsoft’s OCS enables it’s online users to “click-to-call” contextually from information within any online software application. And, of course, there is competition for the term itself from the likes of “all-in-one” enterprise communications provider, Interactive Intelligence, with its communications-based workflow platform it describes as providing “CBPA” (Communications-Based Process Automation). The difference claimed there is that CBPA consolidates work flow activity on a communications-based platform, making contacts with people at any point in the process flow readily accessible, while CEBP doesn’t go beyond enabling individual applications within a work flow process to contact people.
The business application contact target could be any end user, including people within a business organization or external users such as business partners and consumer/customers. The contact initiator can also be any type of end user who may be using a CEBP application, or it could be initiated pro-actively and directly by a CEBP application itself to send personalized information or a notification to a specific person.
Process-to-person forms of contact initiation will require the business application involved to interoperate with various communication applications (telephony, messaging, presence management, routing information, etc.) just as a person would, providing specific contact information (name, “addressing”, etc.). However, an automated application that can make contact with a customer’s phone (mobile or desktop), will obviously not be expected to carry on a voice conversation that people do.
Panelist Comments
· The technology for enabling business process applications to exploit UC capabilities at the recipient end, particularly customers using mobile “smart-phones, is complex and still evolving.
· Today, CEBP is still very much the exception and not the rule, when you consider the fact that 75% of businesses in the US are under 20 employees.
· CEBP needs to complement existing business process applications enabling different forms of contact and interaction between the contact initiator (application process, person) and the recipient (person).
· In a contact center environment, CEBP must support the basic objectives to align a customer need with available types of company support resources -i.e., self-service, live assistance or a combination of both. This can be done on the traditional contact center “on-demand” response basis, or pro-actively by automated business process applications that monitor and respond to dynamic status information.
· UC flexibility improves contact accessibility and thus flexibility when person-to-person contacts are required. Increased accessibility through both mobility and UC flexibility will make CEBP applications more useful and productive.
· Unified Messaging will be a key UC application that enables a business process application to efficiently deliver a time-sensitive notification to an accessible (mobile) customer for information delivery. Coupled with “click-to-interact” with an online or IVR self-service application, or “click-to-talk/chat” for live assistance, the customer can immediately execute time-sensitive transactions that require attention.
· If CEBP is deployed correctly, it will be perceived positively by customers and will also reduce traditional on-demand contact needs.
Example: Proactive flight status notifications that advise a passenger of gate changes and departure time changes can proactively provide timely updates to a mobile customer. Customer will rely on such timely and up-to-date notifications to avoid, minimize and correct their travel problems.
· The impact of such timely access to personalized information will be greater customer satisfaction and loyalty and reduced labor costs for handling unnecessary on-demand contacts.
· CEBP is, by its nature, a highly customized business application development and almost always requires an integration and/or professional services design and development effort. However, off-the-shelf CEBP applications that apply to horizontal industries can be useful in minimizing the costs and effort in developing customized versions.
· The growing adoption of mobile “smart-phones” by consumers and business users will be a major driver for implementing CEBP for both customers and customer-facing staff.
· Such use of mobile devices will also enable CEBP to tie in comfortably with personalized, self-service options on a proactive, rather than just on an “on demand” basis. This will minimize the need for staffing customer assistance and associated costs, in order to maximize customer satisfaction.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
September 26, 2009
“Customer UC” – Panelists Discuss Impact of CEBP on Business Applications
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
More Panelist Comments on “Customer UC”
In previous posts on what was happening with UC in the Contact Center space at TMC’s Internet Telephony show in L.A., I summarized comments by my panelists on the first three issues we discussed that face business organizations looking to exploit UC for customer contact activities.
I have labeled all customer-facing UC communication activities as “Customer UC,” which was then discussed by a panel of innovative contact center technology developers at a kickoff session, ”UC and the Contact Center,” at TMC’s last Internet Telephony conference in L.A. (9/1-3). My panelists were representatives from leading innovative contact center technology developers Altitude Software, CosmoCom, and Fonality, Here are their comments on another key issue discussed:
Issue #4. How will business process applications be affected by “CEBP” in a Customer UC environment?
With UC, different forms of business communication contact may be activated, depending upon who (or what) is initiating the contact with a person, which may be person-to-person or process-to-person. The type of contact will also depend upon the current real-time accessibility and availability of the contact recipient. As more elements of a business process become automated, e.g., monitoring sensitive status conditions, the role of real-time process-to-person “notifications” will increase, including what is commonly referred to as “Communications Enabled Business Communications” (CEBP).
CEBP commonly stands for “Communications Enabled Business Process,” which means that an automated) business process application can initiate a communications contact to a specific person, instead of it being done manually by another person. Needless to say, this kind of capability is particularly useful for contacting mobile recipients and for what some people call “outbound IVR” to exploit self-service transactions initiated by a business process application. Another term for such a capability is a “Communications enabled application” or CEA, which can apply to non-business applications as well, e.g., entertainment, social contacts, games, etc.
Like everything new that is falling under the umbrella of UC, the definitions for “CEBP” can be confusing. Microsoft’s OCS enables it’s online users to “click-to-call” contextually from information within any online software application. And, of course, there is competition for the term itself from the likes of “all-in-one” enterprise communications provider, Interactive Intelligence, with its communications-based workflow platform it describes as providing “CBPA” (Communications-Based Process Automation). The difference claimed there is that CBPA consolidates work flow activity on a communications-based platform, making contacts with people at any point in the process flow readily accessible, while CEBP doesn’t go beyond enabling individual applications within a work flow process to contact people.
The business application contact target could be any end user, including people within a business organization or external users such as business partners and consumer/customers. The contact initiator can also be any type of end user who may be using a CEBP application, or it could be initiated pro-actively and directly by a CEBP application itself to send personalized information or a notification to a specific person.
Process-to-person forms of contact initiation will require the business application involved to interoperate with various communication applications (telephony, messaging, presence management, routing information, etc.) just as a person would, providing specific contact information (name, “addressing”, etc.). However, an automated application that can make contact with a customer’s phone (mobile or desktop), will obviously not be expected to carry on a voice conversation that people do.
Panelist Comments
· The technology for enabling business process applications to exploit UC capabilities at the recipient end, particularly customers using mobile “smart-phones, is complex and still evolving.
· Today, CEBP is still very much the exception and not the rule, when you consider the fact that 75% of businesses in the US are under 20 employees.
· CEBP needs to complement existing business process applications enabling different forms of contact and interaction between the contact initiator (application process, person) and the recipient (person).
· In a contact center environment, CEBP must support the basic objectives to align a customer need with available types of company support resources -i.e., self-service, live assistance or a combination of both. This can be done on the traditional contact center “on-demand” response basis, or pro-actively by automated business process applications that monitor and respond to dynamic status information.
· UC flexibility improves contact accessibility and thus flexibility when person-to-person contacts are required. Increased accessibility through both mobility and UC flexibility will make CEBP applications more useful and productive.
· Unified Messaging will be a key UC application that enables a business process application to efficiently deliver a time-sensitive notification to an accessible (mobile) customer for information delivery. Coupled with “click-to-interact” with an online or IVR self-service application, or “click-to-talk/chat” for live assistance, the customer can immediately execute time-sensitive transactions that require attention.
· If CEBP is deployed correctly, it will be perceived positively by customers and will also reduce traditional on-demand contact needs.
Example: Proactive flight status notifications that advise a passenger of gate changes and departure time changes can proactively provide timely updates to a mobile customer. Customer will rely on such timely and up-to-date notifications to avoid, minimize and correct their travel problems.
· The impact of such timely access to personalized information will be greater customer satisfaction and loyalty and reduced labor costs for handling unnecessary on-demand contacts.
· CEBP is, by its nature, a highly customized business application development and almost always requires an integration and/or professional services design and development effort. However, off-the-shelf CEBP applications that apply to horizontal industries can be useful in minimizing the costs and effort in developing customized versions.
· The growing adoption of mobile “smart-phones” by consumers and business users will be a major driver for implementing CEBP for both customers and customer-facing staff.
· Such use of mobile devices will also enable CEBP to tie in comfortably with personalized, self-service options on a proactive, rather than just on an “on demand” basis. This will minimize the need for staffing customer assistance and associated costs, in order to maximize customer satisfaction.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
UC Escalations in Customer Contacts
Copyright © 2009 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
September 23, 2009
Drilling Down Into Contact Center “Escalations” With UC
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
UC is starting to get increasingly focused on customer contacts because that is where both business costs can be reduced and revenues improved. A recent post on the subject at www.UCStrategies.com by Michael Barbagallo drills down into how subject matter experts (SMEs) should be efficiently brought into contact center operations and whether their involvement should be tracked and reported.
Here is my comment to that perspective.
Michael,
I am glad to see you drilling down into call center procedures, as they will apply to customer contact operations and “agent”-“expert” escalations.
While I agree with your views on including "experts" in workflow management reporting for business process performance tracking, we have to include the role of the customer in “escalating to assistance” as well. Accordingly, UC will be disruptive for customers too, since they will be increasingly "escalating" to live assistance from self-service applications (online, IVR), using multi-modal devices (PCs, smartphones). That also means it can be their choice to contextually "click-to-call," "click-to-chat," or, if there is no real rush, "click-to-message" (text, voice) for live assistance from their multi-modal endpoint devices.
Note: “Contextually” means that information about the self-service application they were using will be passed on to the person providing assistance (“screen pop”).
That also means new, UC-based "contact centers" must move away from the metric of just First “Call” Resolution to First “Contact” Resolution and apply it to both "customer" and "agent" escalation procedures. In many cases, the need for assistance and escalation requires further informational research or approval authorization, so there is no point in keeping a caller connected to wait for such resolution. Furthermore, with consumers becoming increasingly accessible and available because of personal Mobile UC, keeping them on a voice connection or transferring them unnecessarily becomes questionable from an “experience” perspective. With mobility and UC, we can always get back to them easily and quickly!
Which brings us to the next point of what I call "Customer UC," pro-active process-to-person contacts using CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes). With UC, we don't need to always have people deliver real-time information to people. Automated business process applications can now do that using Mobile UC tools for media flexibility and faster notification/delivery, coupled with "click-for-assistance" if necessary. That will take labor costs, as well as the "human latency," out of many business processes.
Needless to say, Mobile UC won't happen overnight and won't always be available to all customers, so the old call center "agent”/”expert” game will continue being played but on a “virtual” basis. However, on the enterprise side, “agents” and “experts” will not only NOT be collocated geographically, but will be selected for "escalation" based upon their "availability” and contextual qualifications, not by "agent" choice. This will apply to all involved customer-facing staff, who may belong to different business organizations.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
September 23, 2009
Drilling Down Into Contact Center “Escalations” With UC
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
UC is starting to get increasingly focused on customer contacts because that is where both business costs can be reduced and revenues improved. A recent post on the subject at www.UCStrategies.com by Michael Barbagallo drills down into how subject matter experts (SMEs) should be efficiently brought into contact center operations and whether their involvement should be tracked and reported.
Here is my comment to that perspective.
Michael,
I am glad to see you drilling down into call center procedures, as they will apply to customer contact operations and “agent”-“expert” escalations.
While I agree with your views on including "experts" in workflow management reporting for business process performance tracking, we have to include the role of the customer in “escalating to assistance” as well. Accordingly, UC will be disruptive for customers too, since they will be increasingly "escalating" to live assistance from self-service applications (online, IVR), using multi-modal devices (PCs, smartphones). That also means it can be their choice to contextually "click-to-call," "click-to-chat," or, if there is no real rush, "click-to-message" (text, voice) for live assistance from their multi-modal endpoint devices.
Note: “Contextually” means that information about the self-service application they were using will be passed on to the person providing assistance (“screen pop”).
That also means new, UC-based "contact centers" must move away from the metric of just First “Call” Resolution to First “Contact” Resolution and apply it to both "customer" and "agent" escalation procedures. In many cases, the need for assistance and escalation requires further informational research or approval authorization, so there is no point in keeping a caller connected to wait for such resolution. Furthermore, with consumers becoming increasingly accessible and available because of personal Mobile UC, keeping them on a voice connection or transferring them unnecessarily becomes questionable from an “experience” perspective. With mobility and UC, we can always get back to them easily and quickly!
Which brings us to the next point of what I call "Customer UC," pro-active process-to-person contacts using CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes). With UC, we don't need to always have people deliver real-time information to people. Automated business process applications can now do that using Mobile UC tools for media flexibility and faster notification/delivery, coupled with "click-for-assistance" if necessary. That will take labor costs, as well as the "human latency," out of many business processes.
Needless to say, Mobile UC won't happen overnight and won't always be available to all customers, so the old call center "agent”/”expert” game will continue being played but on a “virtual” basis. However, on the enterprise side, “agents” and “experts” will not only NOT be collocated geographically, but will be selected for "escalation" based upon their "availability” and contextual qualifications, not by "agent" choice. This will apply to all involved customer-facing staff, who may belong to different business organizations.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Issue #3 UC and Contact Centers
Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.
September 18, 2009
“Customer UC” – Panelists Discuss UC and the Contact Center - Issue # 3
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
More Panelist Comments on Implementing “Customer UC”
In my previous post on what was happening with UC in the Contact Center space at TMC’s Internet Telephony show in L.A., I summarized comments by my panelists on the first two issues we discussed that face business organizations looking to exploit UC for customer contact activities.
From a business results perspective, UC ROI performance must include metrics like customer satisfaction (soft) and revenue generation (hard), not just cost savings and Total Cost of Ownership (hard). Customer contact activities are therefore increasingly being evaluated as high-value applications for overall UC implementation planning.
I have labeled all customer-facing UC communication activities as “Customer UC.” These kinds of challenges were discussed by a panel of innovative contact center technology developers on the subject of ”UC and the Contact Center” at TMC’s Internet Telephony conference in L.A. at the beginning of this month (9/1-3).
My panelists were representatives from leading innovative contact center technology developers Altitude Software, CosmoCom, and Fonality, Here are their comments on another key issue discussed:
Issue #3. What are the key considerations for presence in a Customer UC environment?
· “Agent” availability, once they have been logged on to their desktops and set their status to being ready to take a call assignment (inbound or outbound), has always been a part of ACD technologies in traditional telephone call centers. Being “available” for a phone call means that they are not on another phone call, but can be doing other tasks that are interruptible or can be multi-tasked.
· Agent assignment to non-voice tasks can be made to a “busy” agent, especially, when such tasks are not “real-time” and can be done “as soon as possible,” e.g., outbound calls (“call blending”), messaging responses, etc. Even several customer real-time IM assignments can be multi-tasked by a single agent.
· Real-time access to non-“agents,” i.e., (”Subject Matter Experts” or SMEs) is becoming a key concern for customer contact operations and is dependent on (1) their accessibility and (2) their availability. For the most part, SMEs are not directly accessible to customer callers, but could be assigned to handle appropriate customer messages. However, “first line agents” who need assistance from an SME, must themselves be guided by presence and availability to whichever live assistance resource is available at the moment, like an “ACD for SMEs.”
· Wireless mobility and the use of multi-modal endpoint devices (notebooks, “smart-phones”), will increase accessibility to SMEs, and thus SME availability.
· However, SMEs are very dynamically “available” and “accessible,” and only they know whether they can provide real-time assistance to an “agent,” based on the SME’s current situation and other task priorities. A panel recommendation was NOT to make specific “agent” assignments to SMEs or to let an “agent” select the SME of their choice, but to broadcast a “priority alert” message (Dispatch) to all qualified and accessible SMEs and let the “first responder” SME be connected by IM with the requesting “agent” in queue.
· SMEs can also respond to tasks that are not real-time, e.g., responding to an email or SMS message request sent in directly by a customer, field sales/support personnel, or as a result of an automated business process application that is monitoring a customer-related situation (CEBP). Again, making automatic assignments to individual SMEs may not work as well as broadcasting the request to qualified and available “first responders.”
· In real world worst-case situations, where no real-time live assistance is available to resolve a customer problem, customers need to be able to leave information about their needs (trouble tickets, messaging, online or IVR application input, etc.) and given written (text) confirmation of the request, with a time projection for follow up. In many cases, there is no possibility or even need for an immediate fix of a problem; it’s just the customer reporting and acknowledgment that is “real-time.”
· Performance management issues still remain for tracking “agent” vs. “SME” availability. While “agents” have to “punch in” for call handling accountability for their time on the job, SMEs don’t have the same requirements. On the other hand, from a customer perspective, all contact activities involved with a given customer should be tracked, regardless of format and source.
· “Customer presence” is another facet for the contact center in terms of outbound contacts. This is becoming particularly important as consumers become more accessible and therefore more “available” for real-time notifications and connections with mobile smart-phones. This will make “First Call Resolution” and voice conversations less critical than “First Contact Resolution” and message notification and delivery, coupled with “click-to-call” capabilities.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
September 18, 2009
“Customer UC” – Panelists Discuss UC and the Contact Center - Issue # 3
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
More Panelist Comments on Implementing “Customer UC”
In my previous post on what was happening with UC in the Contact Center space at TMC’s Internet Telephony show in L.A., I summarized comments by my panelists on the first two issues we discussed that face business organizations looking to exploit UC for customer contact activities.
From a business results perspective, UC ROI performance must include metrics like customer satisfaction (soft) and revenue generation (hard), not just cost savings and Total Cost of Ownership (hard). Customer contact activities are therefore increasingly being evaluated as high-value applications for overall UC implementation planning.
I have labeled all customer-facing UC communication activities as “Customer UC.” These kinds of challenges were discussed by a panel of innovative contact center technology developers on the subject of ”UC and the Contact Center” at TMC’s Internet Telephony conference in L.A. at the beginning of this month (9/1-3).
My panelists were representatives from leading innovative contact center technology developers Altitude Software, CosmoCom, and Fonality, Here are their comments on another key issue discussed:
Issue #3. What are the key considerations for presence in a Customer UC environment?
· “Agent” availability, once they have been logged on to their desktops and set their status to being ready to take a call assignment (inbound or outbound), has always been a part of ACD technologies in traditional telephone call centers. Being “available” for a phone call means that they are not on another phone call, but can be doing other tasks that are interruptible or can be multi-tasked.
· Agent assignment to non-voice tasks can be made to a “busy” agent, especially, when such tasks are not “real-time” and can be done “as soon as possible,” e.g., outbound calls (“call blending”), messaging responses, etc. Even several customer real-time IM assignments can be multi-tasked by a single agent.
· Real-time access to non-“agents,” i.e., (”Subject Matter Experts” or SMEs) is becoming a key concern for customer contact operations and is dependent on (1) their accessibility and (2) their availability. For the most part, SMEs are not directly accessible to customer callers, but could be assigned to handle appropriate customer messages. However, “first line agents” who need assistance from an SME, must themselves be guided by presence and availability to whichever live assistance resource is available at the moment, like an “ACD for SMEs.”
· Wireless mobility and the use of multi-modal endpoint devices (notebooks, “smart-phones”), will increase accessibility to SMEs, and thus SME availability.
· However, SMEs are very dynamically “available” and “accessible,” and only they know whether they can provide real-time assistance to an “agent,” based on the SME’s current situation and other task priorities. A panel recommendation was NOT to make specific “agent” assignments to SMEs or to let an “agent” select the SME of their choice, but to broadcast a “priority alert” message (Dispatch) to all qualified and accessible SMEs and let the “first responder” SME be connected by IM with the requesting “agent” in queue.
· SMEs can also respond to tasks that are not real-time, e.g., responding to an email or SMS message request sent in directly by a customer, field sales/support personnel, or as a result of an automated business process application that is monitoring a customer-related situation (CEBP). Again, making automatic assignments to individual SMEs may not work as well as broadcasting the request to qualified and available “first responders.”
· In real world worst-case situations, where no real-time live assistance is available to resolve a customer problem, customers need to be able to leave information about their needs (trouble tickets, messaging, online or IVR application input, etc.) and given written (text) confirmation of the request, with a time projection for follow up. In many cases, there is no possibility or even need for an immediate fix of a problem; it’s just the customer reporting and acknowledgment that is “real-time.”
· Performance management issues still remain for tracking “agent” vs. “SME” availability. While “agents” have to “punch in” for call handling accountability for their time on the job, SMEs don’t have the same requirements. On the other hand, from a customer perspective, all contact activities involved with a given customer should be tracked, regardless of format and source.
· “Customer presence” is another facet for the contact center in terms of outbound contacts. This is becoming particularly important as consumers become more accessible and therefore more “available” for real-time notifications and connections with mobile smart-phones. This will make “First Call Resolution” and voice conversations less critical than “First Contact Resolution” and message notification and delivery, coupled with “click-to-call” capabilities.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
UC and Customer Contacts
Copyright © 2009 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
September 14, 2009
“Customer UC” –
Voice Assistance Is Only A Part of The “Contextual Contact Center”
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
As I mentioned in my last article, new unified communications technologies (UC) have started to impact customer contact operations to the point that the traditional “call center” now has to be called a customer “contact “center. In addition, the holy grail of call center performance efficiency, “First Call Resolution” (FCR), must now be called “First Contact Resolution.”
From a business results perspective, UC ROI performance must include metrics like customer satisfaction (soft) and revenue generation (hard), not just cost savings and Total Cost of Ownership (hard). Customer contact activities are therefore increasingly being evaluated as key to overall UC implementation planning.
I have labeled such customer-facing UC communication activities as “Customer UC.” This is where the flexibility of UC technologies are applied to traditional customer contacts (inbound and outbound), “Customer UC” must support users both inside and outside of the organization who are not necessarily at a desktop, on premise, or using the same communication technologies, but are involved directly or indirectly with “customers.” These kinds of challenges were discussed by a panel of innovative contact center technology developers on the subject of ”UC and the Contact Center” at TMC’s Internet Telephony conference in L.A. at the beginning of this month (9/1-3).
The Disruptive Impact of UC and Mobility On Traditional Telephone Call Centers
The traditional call center is no longer really a physically located “center,” but has to be “virtual” in terms of where the technology is located and where the “agents” and “experts” are located. (Call center “customers” have always been “virtual!”) Nor is the next generation “contextual contact center” dedicated to handling just conversational voice calls or automated, self-service applications, based on legacy telephones and Interactive Voice Response technologies.
Because of the exploding consumer shift to personalized, multi-modal, mobile “smart-phones,” coupled with evolving SIP networking infrastructure that can support all forms of person-to-person, person-to-process, and process-to-person interactions, organizations of all sizes will need the power of UC to support the dynamic demands of their users and customers. “Customer UC” must be endpoint device and location independent to provide faster, more efficient access to both information and people to end users involved in their business activities, whether they are internal staff “agents,” and “experts” or external customers and business partners.
What’s Happening With “Customer UC” Today?
Feedback from the contact center market today confirms some of the points made above. In various panel discussions at the IT Expo show, the following interesting observations were noted:
- Business organizations are buying more “UC technology” for contact center applications, although not actually using the technology yet. Desktop video (for conferencing) is in second place as a UC application purchases. This indicates the direction and priorities that UC implementation planning is taking.
- Biggest UC implementation mistakes that enterprise IT staffs seem to be making are:
Making a vendor selection first
No preparations, doing requirements “homework”
Trying to implement UC like existing communications (e.g., treating Microsoft OCS like Exchange)
- The cost of planning for UC is about the same for a large and a smaller business organization, while the cost of implementation will obviously be higher for the larger group. Any size organization will have the similar customer care problems and therefore “Customer UC” will pay off for them all.
- “Hosted” and “cloud computing” solutions are increasingly attractive to any size organization, as IP telephony and wireless mobility become software rather than hardware based.
- UC operational needs are based on individual job responsibilities (“roles”). For the SMB organization, the needs analysis and requirements effort can typically be 50% of the total UC implementation cost. For the large organization, UC implementation can be phased in by individual groups, application by application.
However, the SMB market doesn’t have big legacy technology investments to protect nor IT staffs to train and manage, will “low-hanging fruit” for service providers.
- “Communication Enabled Business Processing” (CEBP) is a big target for UC integration with business applications and mobile customer contact exploitation, but is still evolving. It needs standards for open interoperability to make its role in the “Contextual Contact Center” really take off.
- New IP telephony technology can’t be sold separately without UC integration considerations, making UC marketing a partnering team effort. UC also can’t be sold just on a telephony cost savings basis to IT management alone, thus requiring business management and business process analyses first.
My Panel’s First Two Question
My panelists were representatives from contact center technology developers Altitude Software, CosmoCom, and Fonality,
1. What Are The Key Drivers For UC In The Contact Center Market?
- Increase flexibility for customer access to mobile and remote personnel who are best qualified and “available” to satisfy specific customer needs
- Increase flexibility of choice for mobile and desktop customers to get information and contextual access to live assistance in real-time (“click-to-call/chat”) or via timely messaging
- Improve operational business process performance by increasing use of self-service applications (online, voice, mobile, proactive services), which minimize both labor needs and human delays.
- Increase customer satisfaction and retention through improved customer experiences, which helps generate revenues and profits. This includes proactive “notifications” to mobile users about time-sensitive, requested information.
- Increase business application flexibility by shifting to communications-enabled software, rather than hardware, that can be customized for any-size business and for individual end users.
- Reduce operational costs and TCO by centralizing and virtualizing operational management and technology support for competitive business operational needs
Note: Although there are UC benefits for everyone involved in customer interactions, there will be different organizational and business priorities for each of the above considerations that must be analyzed and evaluated prior to planning UC implementations.
2.What traditional call center processes will be probably be changed first by UC? Which won’t?
Will:
- Importance of contact handling time vs. effectiveness of modality of contact vs. increasing shift to self-service and pro-active notifications.
- Consolidating “Agent” desktops to facilitate multi-modal customer interactions for various business applications
- Supporting new multi-modal communication needs for remote, online “agents” and “experts”
- Supporting mobile and online multi-modal customers
- Customizing “unified desktops” to make both “agent’ and “expert” interactions more efficient across different business application processes
- Developing new metrics and reports to track all new forms of customer contacts and interactions
Won’t
- Consolidated reporting of all customer interaction metrics from both the customer perspective and live assistance support involved will be evolving after all specific Customer UC capabilities have been successfully tested and implemented
- Automated proactive notifications by business applications will also come later as more customers become mobile and more practical experience is gained with new mobile devices and specific types of applications. At that point, individual applications will have to be integrated to enable “CEBP” functionality and operational management
- Agent empowerment to dynamically switch interaction modalities, e.g., text messaging, voice calls, online collaboration, video conferencing, etc.
- Changing “First Call resolution” to “First Contact Resolution” in terms of responding to a mobile caller by acknowledging the call notification but deferring it in various ways from an immediate real-time voice response
- Won’t change management responsibilities for line of business and customer contact activities.
Comments to other UC-Contact Center issues will be posted later.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
September 14, 2009
“Customer UC” –
Voice Assistance Is Only A Part of The “Contextual Contact Center”
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
As I mentioned in my last article, new unified communications technologies (UC) have started to impact customer contact operations to the point that the traditional “call center” now has to be called a customer “contact “center. In addition, the holy grail of call center performance efficiency, “First Call Resolution” (FCR), must now be called “First Contact Resolution.”
From a business results perspective, UC ROI performance must include metrics like customer satisfaction (soft) and revenue generation (hard), not just cost savings and Total Cost of Ownership (hard). Customer contact activities are therefore increasingly being evaluated as key to overall UC implementation planning.
I have labeled such customer-facing UC communication activities as “Customer UC.” This is where the flexibility of UC technologies are applied to traditional customer contacts (inbound and outbound), “Customer UC” must support users both inside and outside of the organization who are not necessarily at a desktop, on premise, or using the same communication technologies, but are involved directly or indirectly with “customers.” These kinds of challenges were discussed by a panel of innovative contact center technology developers on the subject of ”UC and the Contact Center” at TMC’s Internet Telephony conference in L.A. at the beginning of this month (9/1-3).
The Disruptive Impact of UC and Mobility On Traditional Telephone Call Centers
The traditional call center is no longer really a physically located “center,” but has to be “virtual” in terms of where the technology is located and where the “agents” and “experts” are located. (Call center “customers” have always been “virtual!”) Nor is the next generation “contextual contact center” dedicated to handling just conversational voice calls or automated, self-service applications, based on legacy telephones and Interactive Voice Response technologies.
Because of the exploding consumer shift to personalized, multi-modal, mobile “smart-phones,” coupled with evolving SIP networking infrastructure that can support all forms of person-to-person, person-to-process, and process-to-person interactions, organizations of all sizes will need the power of UC to support the dynamic demands of their users and customers. “Customer UC” must be endpoint device and location independent to provide faster, more efficient access to both information and people to end users involved in their business activities, whether they are internal staff “agents,” and “experts” or external customers and business partners.
What’s Happening With “Customer UC” Today?
Feedback from the contact center market today confirms some of the points made above. In various panel discussions at the IT Expo show, the following interesting observations were noted:
- Business organizations are buying more “UC technology” for contact center applications, although not actually using the technology yet. Desktop video (for conferencing) is in second place as a UC application purchases. This indicates the direction and priorities that UC implementation planning is taking.
- Biggest UC implementation mistakes that enterprise IT staffs seem to be making are:
Making a vendor selection first
No preparations, doing requirements “homework”
Trying to implement UC like existing communications (e.g., treating Microsoft OCS like Exchange)
- The cost of planning for UC is about the same for a large and a smaller business organization, while the cost of implementation will obviously be higher for the larger group. Any size organization will have the similar customer care problems and therefore “Customer UC” will pay off for them all.
- “Hosted” and “cloud computing” solutions are increasingly attractive to any size organization, as IP telephony and wireless mobility become software rather than hardware based.
- UC operational needs are based on individual job responsibilities (“roles”). For the SMB organization, the needs analysis and requirements effort can typically be 50% of the total UC implementation cost. For the large organization, UC implementation can be phased in by individual groups, application by application.
However, the SMB market doesn’t have big legacy technology investments to protect nor IT staffs to train and manage, will “low-hanging fruit” for service providers.
- “Communication Enabled Business Processing” (CEBP) is a big target for UC integration with business applications and mobile customer contact exploitation, but is still evolving. It needs standards for open interoperability to make its role in the “Contextual Contact Center” really take off.
- New IP telephony technology can’t be sold separately without UC integration considerations, making UC marketing a partnering team effort. UC also can’t be sold just on a telephony cost savings basis to IT management alone, thus requiring business management and business process analyses first.
My Panel’s First Two Question
My panelists were representatives from contact center technology developers Altitude Software, CosmoCom, and Fonality,
1. What Are The Key Drivers For UC In The Contact Center Market?
- Increase flexibility for customer access to mobile and remote personnel who are best qualified and “available” to satisfy specific customer needs
- Increase flexibility of choice for mobile and desktop customers to get information and contextual access to live assistance in real-time (“click-to-call/chat”) or via timely messaging
- Improve operational business process performance by increasing use of self-service applications (online, voice, mobile, proactive services), which minimize both labor needs and human delays.
- Increase customer satisfaction and retention through improved customer experiences, which helps generate revenues and profits. This includes proactive “notifications” to mobile users about time-sensitive, requested information.
- Increase business application flexibility by shifting to communications-enabled software, rather than hardware, that can be customized for any-size business and for individual end users.
- Reduce operational costs and TCO by centralizing and virtualizing operational management and technology support for competitive business operational needs
Note: Although there are UC benefits for everyone involved in customer interactions, there will be different organizational and business priorities for each of the above considerations that must be analyzed and evaluated prior to planning UC implementations.
2.What traditional call center processes will be probably be changed first by UC? Which won’t?
Will:
- Importance of contact handling time vs. effectiveness of modality of contact vs. increasing shift to self-service and pro-active notifications.
- Consolidating “Agent” desktops to facilitate multi-modal customer interactions for various business applications
- Supporting new multi-modal communication needs for remote, online “agents” and “experts”
- Supporting mobile and online multi-modal customers
- Customizing “unified desktops” to make both “agent’ and “expert” interactions more efficient across different business application processes
- Developing new metrics and reports to track all new forms of customer contacts and interactions
Won’t
- Consolidated reporting of all customer interaction metrics from both the customer perspective and live assistance support involved will be evolving after all specific Customer UC capabilities have been successfully tested and implemented
- Automated proactive notifications by business applications will also come later as more customers become mobile and more practical experience is gained with new mobile devices and specific types of applications. At that point, individual applications will have to be integrated to enable “CEBP” functionality and operational management
- Agent empowerment to dynamically switch interaction modalities, e.g., text messaging, voice calls, online collaboration, video conferencing, etc.
- Changing “First Call resolution” to “First Contact Resolution” in terms of responding to a mobile caller by acknowledging the call notification but deferring it in various ways from an immediate real-time voice response
- Won’t change management responsibilities for line of business and customer contact activities.
Comments to other UC-Contact Center issues will be posted later.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
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