Copyright © 2012 The
Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide
By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC
Strategies Expert
Rapid
user adoption of mobile smartphones and tablets and their impact on Internet
access is changing business communications and interactions. For a “big picture”
overview how such change is affecting IT for both organizations and consumers,
see the latest report
by Mary Meeker of Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers.
The
statistics reaffirm the growth of mobility and personalization that is driving
change in how organizations interact with customers/consumers, as well as with
their employees. They also reflect the
role of flexible unified communications for both internal users as well as for
multi-modal interactions with consumers/customers.
Improving Customer Services With Mobile, Multi-modal Self-Service Applications
Although
contact center technologies from the leading industry providers are slowly
shifting to public, private, and hybrid “cloud” offerings, there are also
innovative players who are moving faster to exploit mobility and cloud-based
applications in practical ways that I have long been waiting for. In
particular, they are supporting consumer adoption of smartphones and tablets to
increase the role of online applications for customer self-services over legacy
IVR applications, while UC-enabled “click-for-assistance” provides access to
live support on demand. Two technology providers that caught my attention
recently are Voxeo, with their approach to “Unified Self-Service” and
the second incarnation of Radish Systems, with their ChoiceView
Visual IVR service for smartphone users.
Of
particular interest, is not only how legacy IVR applications are becoming
multi-media, but also how such self-service applications are supporting both
inbound and outbound “mobile apps” and hosted by leading communications service
providers. As consumers shift to mobile, multi-modal interactions with all
types of organizations, legacy contact centers will increasingly become
cloud-based and UC-enabled for self-services.
Mobile Users Need More Notification
Control As Contact Recipients
Business
communications is a two-way-street, but not just between individual people any
more. People contact organizations and organizations contact people using
various modes of contact (AKA “channels”), contextually exploiting online
business applications and CEBP. We see increasing recognition of the need for
legacy business contact centers to support such flexible, multi-modal
interactions because of what I call mobile “Consumer BYOD.” However, the same concerns for flexibility
and control applying to all individual mobile users, who now must handle a
variety of business and personal inbound and outbound contacts, except, guess
what? They don’t have personal “agents” to handle all important
(time-sensitive) inbound contacts (calls, ALL forms of messages) when they are
too busy doing something else.
So,
the more ways that people can be directly contacted by other people or by
business process applications (CEBP), especially in real-time (voice, SMS, IM,
video calls), the greater the need to automatically screen and manage incoming
contacts. Otherwise, people will be spending most of their valuable time going
through emails, all kinds of notifications and alerts, SMS messages,
phone/video call attempts, social networking postings, etc. For this reason, it
is time to focus on the individual end user’s need for what I would describe as
“unified notification” management that can deal contextually with the dynamics of mobile
contacts by recipients and their individual time priorities.
To prove my point here is an
interesting commentary
from a blogger on the subject of managing his incoming mobile messaging and
notifications.The “cloud” is already
being exploited to provide hosted inbound contact center services to
organizations, so can it also be used to provide personal contact management
services to individual consumers?
So Who Will Provide “Unified Mobile Notification”
Services To Consumers?
The
answer lies with the service provider(s) that the mobile user will use in a
BYOD environment. Since BYOD implies
the procurement of mobile devices from a service provider that also provides
network connectivity, the wireless carriers are obvious candidates for such
responsibilities. Perhaps this is one reason that Voxeo has spun off a new
company that will provide self-service applications capabilities to service
providers.
However,
with a “dual persona” approach to sharing a mobile device between work
responsibilities and all other personal interactions, it would appear logical
to have incoming contacts controlled by the individual user for both personas,
i.e., screening the contact initiator, the type of contact, the form of
notification, and the options to respond to respond at this particular time.
Some
of these features have long existed under the umbrella of personal call
management services (telephone answering) and voice mail systems available to
business end users, e.g., AVST, but with
multi-modal mobility, must be expanded.
When
it comes to such notifications and alerts, there is an issue of personal time
availability, as well as the mode in which the alert will be executed because
of situational circumstances. Take your pick:
- Vibration
- Audible sounds
- Visual displays
- Other?
- Do not disturb at all
Clearly,
the individual end user will have to dynamically select what will be suitable
in any given mobile situation, especially when driving
a car and restricted to an eyes-free, hands-free user interface. The
challenge to make such dynamic control simple, intuitive, and as automatic as
possible. Let’s not pass the buck to the contact initiators to check presence
information before making contact – that doesn’t solve the recipient’s problem.
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