UC, Hyperconnectivity, Caller Text Messaging

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

September 25, 2007

Why UC Needs “Hyperconnectivity”

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Let’s face it! UC is not simple. It is more complicated than just voice telephony or any one particular form of messaging, because it is really a “mix and match’ of multimodal communication capabilities that individual end users will selectively exploit depending upon their personal needs. For person-to-person contacts, this means that both contact initiators and contact recipients will have choices in how they want to (or have to) communicate at any given moment in time.

UC, and it’s unified messaging components, is also forcing the convergence of wired and wireless network communications, because timely communications requires personalized, location-independent, mobile accessibility. This convergence is having a disruptive impact upon how business organizations support their end user UM/UC communication needs with a combination of internal technology and external services. It is also creating a lack of terminology to properly describe new communication infrastructure problems and their solutions. So, I was happy to see Nortel come up earlier this year with a good descriptor for the network problems that UC (and mobility) will be generating. They called it “hyperconnectivity,” which they define as the “state in which the number of devices, nodes, and applications connected to the network far exceeds the number of people using the network.”

This emphasis on providing adequate network capacity for the flexibility that UC will offer end users is probably one of the reasons that Microsoft has strategically partnered with Nortel, because network hardware management is not Microsoft’s cup of tea. They are more interested in the operating systems, business applications and user interfaces that will feed network traffic, and will leave network technology management to the likes of Nortel, Cisco, and other network infrastructure providers.

The “Chicken and the Egg” – What About “UC Traffic?”

While it is indeed necessary to plan for adequate network resources to handle the different types of converged communication traffic that will be flowing between people and application processes (let alone directly between applications), I have to agree with the concerns voiced by UC consultant Nancy Jamison in her latest comment on UCStrategies.com about ”What I Didn’t Hear Much of At VoiceCon.” Apparently there was a lot of emphasis on the future of UC applications and features, ROIs, and interoperability, etc., but little discussion of the impact of “UC traffic” upon network resources and how that will be handled.

To make matters even more complex, because the flexibility of UM/UC will really pay most importantly for mobile users, network resources will have to support all forms of wired and wireless connectivity between different kinds of user endpoints. However, because individual mobile end user communication needs will be dynamically affected by personal activities, their choice of contact modalities (i.e., real-time vs. asynchronous messaging, voice vs. visual text), may fluctuate wildly. This will affect end user behavior as both contact initiators and as contact recipients and change the kind of network traffic they will generate.

This is the problem domain that Nortel is addressing with it’s focus on “hyperconnectivity,” but, no matter what you want to call it, it means that IP networks will have to be device independent, very flexible as to what kinds of communication traffic they will handle, and as to how much capacity and priority they can provide to the various forms of voice and video communication contacts.

The flexibility of UC to enable users to easily choose any method of contact initiation vs. what contact recipients will choose to, can change network usage in two ways. Escalating the response to an asynchronous email or voice message by a “click-to-call” action will increase network demand, while downgrading a voice call attempt to an IM exchange or a voice/text message will reduce network demand. Similarly, converting a voice message to text will make message retrieval and storage more efficient, both from a user productivity and system resources perspective. Listening to a text message via text-to-speech will be convenient for eyes-free mobile situations, while preserving the efficiency of the original text message.

So, how much network capacity will be required to support all of the above? How can the enterprise plan for unknown future network traffic without first learning which users will be doing what with UC capabilities?

UC Applications – Increasing “Speed of Contact” vs. “Ease of Use”

Although the success of UC will be very dependent upon simplifying the user interface for managing multimodal communications, “ease of use” alone will not be enough for efficiently completing business contacts. For example, everyone looking at UC is excited about using a simple visual interface, i.e., “click-to-call,” to initiate a phone call, that is not enough to insure contact. It has always been pretty easy to initiate a telephone call (if you knew the number), but that didn’t mean the call attempt would be successful; in fact, the old statistics that around 70% of business call attempts “fail” might get much worse because it will be easier to initiate call attempts to people who are just not available. With mobile phones, call screening is also contributing to that increase of failed real-time contacts because users who are mobile don’t want to be interrupted by low priority contacts.

As UC industry attention increasingly focuses on satisfying the end user with easy-to-use application interfaces and simple procedures, the importance of “real-time” contacts has not diminished. This is especially true for contact initiators who now have plenty of non-real-time messaging options and will (hopefully) use real-time contacts more selectively when really necessary.

Presence management, along with the single contact approach of UC (“one number”), will be effective mechanisms to facilitate more efficient real-time contacts. This will be true for “person-to-person” contacts (phone calls, “push-to-talk,” or IM), or “instant” group conferencing by voice, video, or IM. This technology approach doesn’t necessarily make the calling procedure easier, but it will speed up successful call connections, vs. failed attempts, particularly for person-to-person call attempts. That, in turn, will increase what I will call the “speed of use” of IP telephony.

Increasing “Speed of Use” for Caller Messages

Legacy voice mail systems emulated telephone answering machines at the recipient’s end of the phone line, because there was no other way to quickly know the availability of the recipient without actually making a call. In addition, there was no good way to send a location-independent message before electronic messaging. (Remember the handwritten pink telephone message slips?)

One of the severe limitations of legacy voice mail systems, however, was that outside callers did not have the same privileges for initiating a voice message to a subscriber’s voice mailbox as another subscriber on the same voicemail/phone system. For one thing, outside callers could not directly access a voice mailbox without first attempting to make a phone call attempt through a voicemail auto-attendant or to a DID number. One would think that with new multimodal “smartphones,” universal email addressing, IP telephony, UC, and presence management, it’s time for a change!

Now that everyone is (1) already using electronic messaging, (2) will increasingly be using multimodal desktop or mobile “smart phones,” and (3) will soon be able to check a recipient’s (call) availability status with federated presence management, there is an opportunity to increase the “speed of use” for caller messaging too. Why should the “smart caller” continue to be at the mercy of a recipient’s “dumb” voice mailbox? Why can’t contact initiators quickly and easily create and send any kind of message as soon as they find out that the recipient is unavailable for a voice conversation?

Because short voice messages are easier and faster for callers to create, especially when they are mobile, voice will remain a convenient form of contact forever. This also applies to the ability to send voice messages as attachments to an email message, rather than typing text. However, retrieving and managing voice messages is still not so efficient for the recipients, and using mature speech recognition technology to convert voice to more manageable text messaging is becoming a new, more efficient “call answering” service for busy users.

Technology developers like CallWave, SpinVox, TalkText, and SimulScribe are driving consumer market interest in voice-to-text messaging through service offerings that provide greater personal productivity efficiency to contact recipients. However, as I pointed out in a previous article, it won’t be long before enterprise organizations will also want to exploit such services to minimize the drain on internal voice messaging resources.

What Do You Think?

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

White Paper on UC ROIs and Transition Strategies

I authored a recent white paper describing UC ROIs and practical approaches to enterprise transition planning that highlight Microsoft’s UC product positioning for simplifying the challenge of evolving to UC. Rather than start with replacing existing wired desktop phone systems, the UC evolution can start with adding IM/presence management, unified messaging, mobile devices, and IP softphones. You can download a copy of the white paper by going to the UC Strategies web site at:

http://www.ucstrategies.com/Migration_to_Unified_Communications.aspx

UC Rubber Meets Enterprise Roads

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

September 14, 2007

Where the UC “Rubber” Meets the Enterprise “Road”

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

This is a follow up to my last article about low “demand” for UC. Although TDM telephone systems are very gradually being replaced by IP-PBXs and desktop IP phones, along with IP-based voice mail and “unified messaging” products, when it comes to full-blown unified communications (UC), market movement is still relatively slow. However, the telecommunications industry is going through a disruptive cycle of change, where it’s not just a matter of adopting new communication technologies, but also replacing some of the ways the traditional telephone is used.

We are still going through a “hype” cycle, where UC concepts are being promoted for all kinds of business and personal communication benefits, but, as real products and services are announced, business organizations have to get serious about how UC can affect the way they operate. This will require first understanding what UC technology will actually do for various end users and for those business processes that involve those end users. That means “UC applications,” and I don’t mean “VoIP!”

UC Applications

Using Blair Pleasant’s VoiceCon Fall presentation in San Francisco on the market structure of UC as a frame of reference for what functionality end users will see, the key UC application areas were identified as:

· Voice/Telephony (“VoIP”)

· Collaboration (conferencing, information sharing)

· Instant Messaging (IM)/Presence

· Unified Messaging (UM)

· Business Process/Applications (Communication enabled applications)

All of the above can support the flexibility of multimodal communications between end users within the same business organization, with individuals in other organizations, or with customers/constituents. However, there will be differences in how the various business market segments (and their customers) will transition to UC in the next few years.

The Barriers to UC Migration For Everyone

First and foremost, all business market segments are very confused about what UC is, what the benefits are, and how they should implement it. Clearly, the confusion is centered mostly around the telephony part of UC, since that is what is changing dramatically. This confusion is affecting both end users, who don’t understand what the changes will do to them as callers and call recipients, and business management, who don’t understand the benefits to their business processes.

IT staffs are another obstacle to UC migration for several reasons. They may not know what UC application capability to implement first, how to do it, or how to support it. They may also see such new technology as a threat to their job security, especially if UC comes in the form of hosted or managed services. Couple that with low demand from both business management and end users and there is obviously going to be resistance to changes to the status quo.

The Small Business - The “S Market”

I took advantage of my participation in TMC’s Internet Telephony Expo in L.A. this month to discuss some of the barriers facing business migration to UC. In particular, I was concerned with the “Small” business market, since that is a big market segment, as shown in the chart below provided by one of my panelists in discussing IP telephony as a hosted service.

Theoretically, small businesses should be easiest to migrate to UC for several reasons:

· They don’t have big investments in legacy TDM phone systems to protect

· They don’t have big IT staffs and are therefore good candidates for faster implementation through hosted and managed services

· They already probably use hosted email services

· They probably are extensive users of cellular services to be always accessible to customers and business contacts

· UC capabilities will enable the small business to enjoy the same competitive technology benefits of IP communications as larger organizations

· Decision-making can be much simpler and usually made by business owners management

While it would appear that the “S” market should be moving forward quickly into UC, the fact is that they are not moving that fast. There seem to be a number of barriers that are getting in the way.

For the small business market, which is dependent on value-added resellers (VARs) to give them advice and support in implementing telephone systems as CPE, the convergence of telephony with all forms of IP communications (email, IM, mobility) from multiple technology providers under UC, is challenging because of new expertise they don’t have yet. Furthermore, because software-based UC applications are moving towards hosted subscription services, the VAR’s haven’t adapted their thinking about generating income from equipment sales and maintenance to software maintenance and subscription sales.

Larger Business Organizations Have More UC Homework To Do

For the bigger companies (Medium, Large enterprises), things are a little more complicated because they have more locations, more customized business process applications, greater investments in legacy telephone systems, and larger IT staffs who will not be experienced with IP telephony technology, nor with application convergence and mobility issues of UC. All this will require greater justifications for change, as well as practical priorities for a selective transition to UC application technologies.

One major planning obstacle will be the operational Line of Business management, who should be able to identify the important business process problems that can be alleviated by UC capabilities, the relative ROI value and priority of such solutions, and which key end users really need UC capabilities (e.g., mobile, customer-facing users). They should also be able to identify pertinent, high-value business process applications that can integrate with UC capabilities (Communications Enabled Business Processes) to achieve faster workflow performance. But who is educating their thinking about requirements, UC capabilities, and benefits for their business operations? The CIOs? Vendors?

“Alignment” of IT With Business Management in Large or Growing Companies

A recent study by Bain & Company found that companies grew faster and lowered costs by making their IT staff more “effective,” rather than through simple “alignment” with business management. Their definition of “alignment” has been primarily to simply give individual business units raw IT resources to throw at their different problems. But if neither business management nor IT knows what their end users need in terms of communication flexibility and work flow efficiency, this will be like the “blind leading the blind!”

In one of my panel discussions on the role of “SIP In The Call Center,” which is a pretty technical view of IP telephony and UC for customer contact applications, my panelists from both Nortel and Genesys agreed that getting business process management involved in defining operational application needs was a key prerequisite before asking IT to plan any SIP-based contact center implementation. So, my definition of “alignment” for UC implementations includes the following steps:

1. Educating both business management and IT about the operational work flow benefits that UC can provide.
2. Having IT understand what work flow and communication problems both business management and end users currently have, their relative priorities for business activities, and which specific end users will be involved (both within and outside of the organization).
3. Having IT research pertinent new technologies to supplement or replace current technology that meet business and end user requirements, including hosted and managed service offerings
4. Pilot and test UC applications that are high priority to determine how effective they will be and what the transition impact will be for those users that will be affected.
5. With the results of the above, IT can then justify practical implementation recommendations because they have been exposed to practical experience pertinent to their own operational environments.

Needless to say, since UC technology is still evolving and “best practices” can’t replace the steps mentioned above for any business environment, it will be practical to enlist the services of independent and objective consultancies, which can supplement internal resources with their UC implementation experience and awareness of available UC solution alternatives. One newly formed consultancy that has both long-time telephony and messaging experience and now specializes in UC planning and implementation is UniComm Consulting. (http://www.unicommconsulting.com/).

What Do You Think?

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

White Paper on UC ROIs and Migration Strategies

I authored a new white paper describing UC ROIs and practical approaches to enterprise migration planning that highlight Microsoft’s UC product positioning for simplifying the challenge of moving to UC. Rather than start with replacing existing wired desktop phone systems, the migration can start with adding IP softphones, mobile devices, and unified messaging. You can download a copy by going to the UC Strategies web site at:

http://www.ucstrategies.com/Migration_to_Unified_Communications.aspx

Attention CIOs: Watch this great recent Webcast from Avaya and Microsoft on the practical “Why’s” and “How’s” of migrating to UC!

Go to: http://cxolyris.cxomedia.com/t/833300/379459/8118/0/

This discussion with the two leading enterprise communications technology providers in the text messaging and telephony worlds highlights the practicalities of migrating to UC and also underscores the need for identifying individual business user requirements for UC.

Microsoft's Enterprise UC Migration Strategy

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

August 6, 2007

Microsoft Leading Technology Scramble
For UC Market Positioning

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

On July 26th, Microsoft made a big deal of its Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of its Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS) and Office Communicator 2007 client as its precursor to pushing into the unified communications market this fall. What is most interesting about Microsoft’s marketing strategy is that is not pushing to replace TDM PBX systems first, but suggests that “VoIP As You Are!” and Unified Messaging (UM) are a practical and less disruptive way to migrate to UC.

With the convergence of all business communications around IP, there is bound to be hot competition from the various technology provider “silos” as to who will supply what pieces of UC. However, everyone is finally acknowledging that the real business ROIs of UC will not simply come from technology cost savings, but from individual user productivity (including enterprise personnel, business partners, and especially customers) and, more importantly, business process efficiencies that are dependent upon people contact. The real drivers of UC migration will therefore have to come from end user demand and line of business management priorities, not just IT implementations.

I authored a new white paper describing UC ROIs and practical approaches to enterprise migration planning that highlight Microsoft’s UC product positioning for simplifying the challenge of moving to UC. Rather than start with replacing existing wired desktop phone systems, the migration can start with adding IP softphones, mobile devices, and unified messaging. You can download a copy by going to the UC Strategies web site at:

http://www.ucstrategies.com/Migration_to_Unified_Communications.aspx

Comments On The White Paper

An analyst for BetaNews has commented on the white paper and you can see his remarks at:

http://www.betanews.com/article/Office_Communications_Server_Heads_to_RTM/1185480763

I got his attention on the subject of “UC Migration: Where Do You Start?” by leading off with the statement “It all depends!”

Clearly, every business organization has to establish its implementation strategies and priorities based on the following:

• Business process values
• End user contact needs based upon business process priorities and personal work environments
• Existing technologies that must interoperate with new UC elements
• Internal IT support resources and expertise

• Budgets

Obviously these will vary from organization to organization and between different vertical market segments. So, there is no “one size fits all” for UC and it will be complicated to match new technology capabilities to existing business operations.

What Do You Think?

I will be clarifying more details from this white paper in future articles, so feel free to send me your questions and comments. You can contact me at:

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

The iPhone and All Your Customers

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

June 29, 2007

What Will Have To Happen To Customer Service When Your Customers Get Their iPhones?

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Today’s the big day for Apple’s new iPhone and all the pundits are speculating about its impact on the market for a variety of reasons.

Back in January of this year, after Steve Jobs first introduced the coming iPhone product to the world, I welcomed the arrival of a device that would make UC real for end users. Although converging IPod music entertainment with multimodal communications has been a major attraction for the consumer market, I see the innovative multimodal device interface design as step forward in the migration in the migration to mobile unified communications. However, I also highlighted some of the initial iPhone deficiencies for business users in the enterprise market reported by industry pundits. Now that the iPhone is about to be delivered to the drooling consumer market, it is time to look at what it will do to enterprise communications from a customer contact application perspective.

I have discussed “Consumer UC” in the past as something that will require traditional telephone call centers to get ready for the “multimodal customer,” and the iPhone release is the tip of the multimodal contact center iceberg. This event should be a wakeup call for every organization to get serious about migrating their customer contact operations towards the future. That migration will range from supporting IP and wireless network connectivity to training multimodal agents to dynamically support “transmodal” customer interactions. That’s a major overhaul of legacy call center operations and will pose serious questions for both IT management and contact center operations planning.

Raising the customer contact bar - What if a lot of consumers have an iPhone or similar “smartphone”?

A practical way to look at what’s coming down the pike for contact centers is to simply assume that a lot of consumers will soon get an iPhone or a competitive “smartphone” equivalent. Although one of the big drivers for consumer interest in the iPhone is because it has integrated IPod entertainment capabilities into a mobile phone device, it is also of interest because it also offers the convenience of multimodal, unified communications capabilities, including unified messaging and web information access. So, what will that mean for enterprise contact centers and satisfying the customer experience?

Here are some logical perspectives:

1. Because the iPhone is a multimodal device that will be carried by individual customers, it will be “always on” and personalized.
2. It will be used for “person-to-person” contacts, information delivery, and multimodal self-services.
3. Because of richer, multimodal self-services, the iPhone/smartphone will be able to exploit the benefits of self-services to a greater degree than traditional telephones or cell phones.
4. Because environments constantly change, the mobile user will initiate customer contacts with different modalities, depending on a combination of:
• The communication need,
• The initiator’s preferences, and
• The environmental circumstances.
5. Increased information richness of self-service applications, enabled by multimodal mobile device interfaces, will help reduce the demand for live assistance.
6. We can assume that presence will be involved for managing contact access for all real-time contacts.
7. Use of email and IM will be more efficient because they can exploit links to information and documents by URL links, rather than enclosing attachments.
8. Email from customers or customer service will also be able to exploit speech input rather than typing, e.g., JOTT, another way making voice messaging more efficient and manageable for customer contacts.
9. Voice messaging will exploit speech recognition to convert voice messages to more efficiently managed email, although the iPhone Visual Voicemail stresses only the control interface of voice messages.
10. Mobility will be a new driver, in addition to global customers, for customer contacts to be initiated 24x7, driving further change to the old peak-hour traffic models of traditional call center activity.
11. Mobile customer accessibility through multimodal “smartphones” will also impact traditional call center queuing for live assistance in several ways, including:
• Call back rather waiting in queue
• IM and text messaging options
• Dynamic escalation between communications modalities (“transmodal communications”), e.g.: escalate from email, voice mail, SMS, IM to voice conversation (“click-to-talk”)
12. IM and presence management will facilitate collaborative interactions between enterprise personnel in supporting customer assistance in real-time. (First Contact Resolution – FCR)

There are other ripple effects upon enterprise customer contact/support requirements that will stem from the consumer adoption of the iPhone and other successful “smartphones.” So, Apple and AT&T’s “coming out” party will herald the advent of multimodal customer contact and all the consequences of satisfying new customer contact experiences. Most importantly, it will push enterprise organizations to really start rethinking their old call center operations from a UC perspective and start planning their migrations to multimodal customer contact.

The good news! Hosted and managed services will ease the transition to multimodal customer care

Although the industry watchers originally started off with concerns only about enterprise movement to VoIP and Internet Telephony, it is becoming increasingly clear that the real driver of UC migration will be the customer-facing support of business process applications that will require the flexibility of mobile and multimodal communications. That will apply not only to where the revenue “ROI” comes from, the customers, but also to the customer-facing support staff wherever they are located. That’s where the capabilities of the multimodal iPhone, coupled with both customer contact response flexibility and proactive information delivery will drive business communications into the UC future.

Inasmuch as the multimodal customer contact technology is still evolving and internal enterprise IT resources have little or no experience with converged communications, business organizations are not really ready to take full responsibility with internal staffing for new UC technologies. So, why should they?

This is where the new, software-based complexities of multimodal contact center technologies, coupled with the power of flexible distribution of computing resources and support staffing, will be pushing the enterprise market towards the practical benefits of rapid time-to-market from hosted, multi-sourced technology migration services. In particular, with the new offerings of hosted, multi-sourcing service providers that can quickly migrate existing contact center technologies to the multimodal customer environment, the enterprise pain of first developing a comprehensive RFP for all customer contact applications before fully understanding what will really work for different customer contact needs, can be significantly reduced in time, effort, and costs. It’s not just “try before buy,” but rather “learn before migrating,” because only experience can determine the choice of implementations required.

What Do You Think?

Send your comments to me at artr@ix.netcom.com.

Attention CIOs: Watch this great recent Webcast from Avaya and Microsoft on the practical “Why’s” and “How’s” of migrating to UC!

Go to: http://cxolyris.cxomedia.com/t/833300/379459/8118/0/

This discussion with the two dominant enterprise communications technology providers in the text messaging and telephony worlds highlights the practicalities of migrating to UC and also underscores the UCStrategies.com industry-wide initiative for identifying individual business user requirements.

A New Service For Enterprise UC Planning

The Unified-View, together with the industry experts at UCStrategies.com, is developing a standard end-user online survey service that will be made freely available to enterprise organizations to help gather UC/mobility profiling information about current end user business communications activities. This information will help enterprise management to:

1. Gather information about which individual end users or work groups need UC capabilities the most
2. Identify the related business process that will determine UC migration priorities
3. Help align the value of improved UC capabilities with the ROIs of business processes.
4. Help identify and quantify the mobile and UC activities associated with specific individual users and their business contacts that should also be provided with UC capabilities
5. Enable the organization to plan specific migration training needs for individual end users or end user groups, in accordance with a practical migration implementation schedule.
6. Enable the enterprise to compare before and after changes in business communication efficiencies and business process benefits by basically using the same survey for “migrated” users as a “before and after” comparison.
7. The service will also allow enterprise organizations to “benchmark” individual users or different groups within the organization for evaluation purposes. In addition, it is planned to allow such information to be benchmarked in Unified-View market research reports across enterprise organizations, to identify differences in end user needs between different vertical market segments, and identify “best practices” for UC management.

Stay tuned to the UCStrategies.com web site for initial availability of the UC Profiling service. We are in discussions with all the major UC technology providers to support this initiative to help both their customers and sales channels plan their UC migrations properly and effectively.

News From UC Strategies

To better understand the different perspectives and issues involved with implementing UC technologies, go to the UCStrategies.com web site for the latest, most practical insights on migrating the enterprise to UC.

UC Industry Update including Highlights from VoiceCon Spring

You can also review the presentations given by the UCStrategies.com experts at TMC’s IT Expo.

UC-based Kiosks

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

June 8, 2007

UC Going After the On-premise Customer – Will The Wired IP “Smartphone” Become the New, Multimodal Applications Kiosk?

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

UC capabilities originally targeted business communications on a person-to-person basis, where the contact initiator knows the specific contact recipient and just needs the flexibility of different communication modalities for maximizing individual and group productivity. However, it is no big secret that the real business “ROI” of converging information/communication technologies will be coming from three primary sources:

1. Speeding up revenue generation from customers
2. Reducing operational labor costs to get 1
3. Reducing technology costs (TCO) to support maximum customer access

All of the above are geared to contribute to the bottom line of any business activity with customers, and the Web has become the fastest growing form of customer access to business activities because it is “always-on,” multimodal, and “virtual.”

Generating Revenue Faster At The “Point-of-Sale”

Getting revenue from customers faster means that customers are getting their needs satisfied more quickly, including getting live assistance with the purchase of goods and services. This can happen wherever the customer happens to be initiating their transactions, including:

· From a wired phone

· Online at a business web site

· Mobile, using a personalized wireless device (laptop, smartphone)

· Visiting a “brick and mortar” branch office or retail location

Although e-Commerce has significantly displaced some traditional brick-and-mortar business activity, there are many kinds of businesses that still require customer visits to retail locations or branch offices. This is where self-service business process applications can be highly customized and simplified for on-premise devices to quickly service simple customer needs without the costs and delays of on-premise live assistance. A familiar example is the ATM machine located at banks and other remote locations for simple banking transactions (deposits and withdrawals).

However, as we all know too well, every self-service application may require live assistance and for premise-based business activities, such assistance must be immediate and based upon the device that is supplied on-premise. This is where the benefits of premise-based business process applications can benefit from IP communications capabilities, shifting from an on-line interaction to a real-time voice conversation with live assistance. Although this may sound like a traditional IVR call center situation where a caller presses ”0” to talk to an agent, this is much more focused on specialized, live “point-of-sale” transaction applications that are key to revenue generation. The question is, how will UC help that happen?

Putting the Premise-based Customer Contact UC Opportunity in Perspective – “Contextual Contact Initiation”

Most telephone customer contacts originate off-premise, where there has been little application control over the consumer’s communication device. Even with premise-based phones, the chasm between telephony and business applications limited voice application interfaces to the complexities of standard telephone device TUI.

We have always had premised-based telephones available for use by both visitors/customers to contact live assistance, usually via an operator, e.g., an airport, a hotel, department store, etc. We have also always had different kinds of application-based, online information and transaction kiosks in public locations, often with a separate wired telephone alongside to initiate an independent voice conversation with live assistance. In both cases, the telephone contact was totally controlled by the customer/visitor who would then have to explain what kind of information or assistance they would need.

Online premise-based PC applications are more flexible and efficient because of their dedicated and customized rich, transaction-oriented interfaces, e.g., ATM machines. However, when live assistance is required, the traditional voice connection must still be activated over a separate telephone line. With VoIP and IP telephony, the combination of rich, online information and data transactions with live, contextual voice contacts can make premise-based self-service applications much more efficient and productive, yet easily supported by live assistance “on demand.”

Some Examples

The lodging industry always has visiting customers, better known as “guests.” Guests always have both information needs and assistance needs while on the premises. The former was traditionally taken care of by a combination of hotel information reference books and the use of the in-room television set to access information from the hotel computer systems. For live assistance, however, the traditional room telephone was available as a separate means of contact unrelated to the information delivered over the TV set.

Although originally announced back in 2001, Avaya created a new, applications oriented “Concierge” phone for the opening of the new Wynn hotel in Las Vegas. It was an IP phone with a screen that was able to do display all kinds of hotel and local area information like the in-room TV, but also had the option to initiate context-based outbound phone calls related to the displayed information. The desktop “smartphone” form factor simplified the application user interface and avoided the complexities of a general-purpose PC. For business travelers who need to do “work,” however, this was not the device for that purpose.

Cisco is also moving in this direction, having formed a “customer business transformation” consulting team that is doing the business process analysis for their customers to come up with UC solutions that exploit the benefits of multimodal IP phones. Listen to the examples cited in Blair Pleasant’s recent interview with Cisco’s Manjula Talreja that enable UC-enabled communication devices to support self-service business process applications in point-of sale environments.

Consumers are being given new capabilities to search for nearby locations of products and services that need to be seen, transacted, tried on, or discussed face-to-face. But, once on premise at these locations, the opportunity to get information and execute transactions on a self-service basis needs to be simplified by customizing the user interfaces around the specific business application process involved. General-purpose computer interfaces are not what is needed for “point-of-sale” activities.

Summary

While UC is very heavily oriented towards the flexibility of multimodal devices for a variety of person-to-person contacts, it is also going to be useful to the “point-of-sale” customer environment, where the customer is only a visiting contact initiator, who will use a premise-based device designed specifically for simplified self-service functions, and, if necessary, to immediately access live assistance within the context the customer’s activity. (“Contextual contact initiation”)

While such premise-based activity may be limited in volume compared to growing web-based e-commerce and mobile usage, it is certainly a critically sensitive factor for revenue generation for businesses that are visited by the customers.

What Do You Think?

Send your comments to me at artr@ix.netcom.com.

Attention CIOs: Watch this great recent Webcast from Avaya and Microsoft on the practical “Why’s” and “How’s” of migrating to UC!

Go to: http://cxolyris.cxomedia.com/t/833300/379459/8118/0/

This discussion with the two dominant enterprise communications technology providers in the text messaging and telephony worlds highlights the practicalities of migrating to UC and also underscores the UCStrategies.com industry-wide initiative for identifying individual business user requirements.

A New Service For Enterprise UC Planning

The Unified-View, together with the industry experts at UCStrategies.com, is developing a standard end-user online survey service that will be made freely available to enterprise organizations to help gather UC/mobility profiling information about current end user business communications activities. This information will help enterprise management to:

1. Gather information about which individual end users or work groups need UC capabilities the most
2. Identify the related business process that will determine UC migration priorities
3. Help align the value of improved UC capabilities with the ROIs of business processes.
4. Help identify and quantify the mobile and UC activities associated with specific individual users and their business contacts that should also be provided with UC capabilities
5. Enable the organization to plan specific migration training needs for individual end users or end user groups, in accordance with a practical migration implementation schedule.
6. Enable the enterprise to compare before and after changes in business communication efficiencies and business process benefits by basically using the same survey for “migrated” users as a “before and after” comparison.
7. The service will also allow enterprise organizations to “benchmark” individual users or different groups within the organization for evaluation purposes. In addition, it is planned to allow such information to be benchmarked in Unified-View market research reports across enterprise organizations, to identify differences in end user needs between different vertical market segments, and identify “best practices” for UC management.

Stay tuned to the UCStrategies.com web site for initial availability of the UC Profiling service. We are in discussions with all the major UC technology providers to support this initiative to help both their customers and sales channels plan their UC migrations properly and effectively.

News From UC Strategies

To better understand the different perspectives and issues involved with implementing UC technologies, go to the UCStrategies.com web site for the latest, most practical insights on migrating the enterprise to UC.

UC Industry Update including Highlights from VoiceCon Spring

You can also review the presentations given by the UCStrategies.com experts at TMC’s IT Expo.

Where Is Intervoice Going With It's New Multimodal Self-service Interface Technology?

Copyright Ó 2007 The Unified-View. All Rights Reserved Worldwide

May 21, 2007

Executive Interview:

Intervoice’s UC Breakthrough For Multimodal Self-service Applications

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Intervoice is an experienced name in the IVR and contact center industries, not only as a provider of traditional voice response technologies, but also as a full-service designer and developer of customized voice and speech self-service applications for over five-thousand satisfied customers. So, when they suddenly announced their new, “multimodal” approach to self-service applications for mobile “smartphones,” I applauded the first industry move towards supporting the interface needs of unified communications where the need was greatest, the mobile consumer.

Of course, I had a lot of questions about exactly where Intervoice was going with their technology and welcomed the opportunity to sit down with Ken Goldberg, Intervoice’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Development & Strategy, to discuss them at length. I consider the information important for anyone interested in where telephone-based voice applications will be going in the coming world of UC and mobile devices.

To put things into a technology and application perspective, Intervoice claims to be first to market with a software applications platform, a Multimodal Portal, that exploits a new W3C language standard, State Chart XML (SCXML). This enables voice interfaces to easily integrate concurrently with existing IP-based visual application interfaces to provide the user with a flexible choice of voice, visual, or combined “multimodal” interfaces to self-service applications through any user communication device.

Such flexibility will be particularly useful for mobile users who have screen-enabled smartphones, but who may be dynamically constrained by their environment as to what medium to use for input and/or output (voice or text). Whether in a noisy or “silence required” environment, or where an “eyes-free, hands-free” interface is needed (driving), dynamic application interface flexibility will help consumers give or get information whenever they need to. Multimodal interface technology can also be used for any business process applications used internally by enterprise personnel or by external business partners.

1. AR: What major business problems is Intervoice addressing with its multimodal
interface technology?

KG: Our customers are still interested in the same major issues – how to lower the cost of servicing customers yet increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. For more than 20 years, Intervoice has been developing voice self-service applications for telephone callers wanting information. We saw dramatic cost reductions as companies introduced touch-tone self-service. But it was speech that started to increase caller satisfaction. The use of speech interfaces in telephone self-service transactions was a big improvement in expanding the use of such applications.

However, there are limitations in the use of a speech interface to exchange information. Noisy environments or where language translation is not highly effective, all negatively impact the customer experience for self-service telephone applications. These inherent limitations on voice create a need for adding the efficiencies of a visual user interface and for giving the user greater flexibility and choice of how they want to interact with a business process application.

There are also inefficiencies in using voice alone for informational output, especially for mobile users. With consumers becoming more mobile and multi-channel, we can now add the optional power of screen outputs from any information source to a mobile device. This significantly enhances the customer experience through increased flexibility, efficiency, and effectiveness of any self-service business application.

2. AR: What have been the greatest barriers and issues for implementing multimodal application user interfaces and why are they now becoming practical?

KG: There have been three significant barriers: the interface technology of the mobile devices themselves, the bandwidth of the available wireless networks, and the availability of software for voice/data information access and delivery.

· At a minimum, multimodal mobile devices must allow application output to be received via SMS text messaging, so the caller can act on that information and make choices during a self-service phone call. A significant majority of today’s phones have this capability.

However, with the proliferation of new, screen and text entry ”smartphones” like RIM, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, etc., users have the device technology for “real-time” multimodal applications in their hands right now. A real-time multimodal interface enables simultaneous voice and data for users to visually interact with information on a mobile device while they’re also interacting via speech and audio. According to Forrester’s 2006 research, more than 10% of U.S. mobile phone users aged 18 and 50 are already carrying smartphones, and for users aged 18-26, the penetration is 14%.

· Wireless broadband is becoming more available to handle simultaneous voice and data – with 3G networks expanding around the world and Wi-Fi and WiMax technology filling in local coverage, many more customers will soon have access to high-speed simultaneous voice and data service.

· On the software side, simultaneous voice and data transactions require the ability to run two interface versions of an application process simultaneously – one over the voice channel and one over the data (text) channel. Thanks to a new standard that’s now emerging – State Chart XML or SCXML – we have the framework needed to make simultaneous voice and visual interfaces a reality.

With the progress being made in bringing down all three barriers, we moved aggressively to adapt our technology and offer our enterprise customers new ways to differentiate their self-service applications. Not only can they further reduce costs, but they can also improve their consumer interactions, satisfaction, and brand loyalty. Enterprises can now extend their branding strategies to personal mobile devices with new services and visual advertising campaigns for brand promotion.

3. AR: Where does Intervoice see its role for supporting multimodal business applications?

KG: Intervoice has long been very successful in providing a software applications platform for designing, developing and managing voice self-service applications, as well as the expertise to help customers across all industries to implement and maintain these solutions. We are now expanding the scope of our platform to include the new multimodal capabilities and we are expanding our design and development capabilities to add the efficiencies of a visual interface. The latter includes both screen outputs as well as data (text) input to more efficiently deal with information entry and output needs of a mobile multimodal user.

· We’ve introduced and demonstrated real products for multimodal devices and services that can help our enterprise customers create and launch these new multimodal self-service applications.

· We’ve leveraged three of our recent multimodal technology patents, as well as the new SCXML standard for managing state, to deliver a next-generation Voice Portal platform that has the capability to handle rich multimodal application development. Industry analysts have acknowledged our product development as the first-to-market for voice in a multimodal application environment.

· In addition to software, Intervoice also has the in-depth implementation expertise within our 175+ person Global Consulting Services organization to do application “discovery” within our customer’s business process, identify the areas that will produce the highest ROI, and assist our customers in designing, developing and delivering new multimodal applications. Just as IVR applications required our interface design and implementation expertise, we are now training our services staff on multimodal interfaces to be ready when our enterprise customers are.

4. AR: What feedback have you gotten from enterprise customers so far?

KG: Very positive – customers are very excited and recognize the value right away. At our user conference and in individual meetings, when we show the technology in a real live demo, with a real multimodal application, customers really get it.

They immediately understand how our multimodal solution solves the age-old experiential problems of voice-only IVR applications. As an IVR application provider in many vertical segments, we have the applications knowledge base to easily move the enterprise market from traditional voice self-services to the coming world of mobile devices and multimodal interfaces.

Enterprise organizations also see our multimodal self-service approach minimizing one of the big issues that you have written about in the past. That is, reducing the need for mobile users, who are often in a noisy environment, to talk to a live agent, where there is no recognition that the caller is mobile and shouldn’t be treated like a landline caller. The last thing a busy mobile user needs is to be put into an on-hold queue that will cost them talk-time on their mobile service.

Although the technology is very new, enterprise customers are already engaging us to help them create some truly innovative multimodal applications.

5. AR: Who or what will Intervoice be competing against and what uniquely positions Intervoice to be a leader in this new market?

KG: There have been a couple of announcements by other vendors that are mobile offerings, but they are still single-streamed. Either they focus on using speech input to just add information to a form on the device or they show how an IVR voice output can also be displayed visually on the device using flash or video. No one else has launched and demonstrated a capability to develop true multimodal applications. Applications developed using the Intervoice Voice Portal uniquely allow consumers to use a combination of speech and visual interfaces simultaneously.

With our implementation of SCXML, Intervoice is the first company to have a comprehensive development environment that can manage “state,” so that within a single call, users can selectively interact in real-time with an application using a combination of speech and visual interfaces. Our approach also preserves traditional voice interactions, enabling a graceful transition from legacy voice response applications to added multimodal capabilities.

6. AR: How will your technology work in a hosted service environment?

KG: Our multimodal voice portal and the applications that run on it will work very well as hosted solutions, given that these are really just extensions of the types of voice portal applications that we host today for our customers. With server-side IP communications infrastructure, our multimodal software applications platform and customer applications can be located anywhere and managed by either the customer or our hosted solutions organization.

We believe an increasing percentage of customers will opt for a hosted solution rather than CPE-based. Due to our expertise in voice application hosting, customers already turn to Intervoice to outsource their self-service solutions because it is typically not a core competency and requires continual application changes. They also turn to Intervoice to ensure they always have the latest software technology updates and to leverage our state-of-the-art Network Operating Center (NOC) with regular 24X7 monitoring of their applications and systems. Customers tell us that we usually manage both speech or multimodal applications and the voice application platforms better and more cost efficiently than they could do themselves.

7. AR: How will the use of multimodal technology transform business and consumer-facing applications over the next five years?

KG: Multimodal applications will do to mobile devices what the Internet has done for the consumer PC. With multimodal interface capabilities, we are on the cusp of something that big for mobile devices. Multimodal interface flexibility enables mobile devices to become a personalized, “virtual” kiosk for end users to take care of a wide array of business transactions, quickly and easily, using a combination of speech and visual interfaces to meet varying day-to-day situations.

Already, Internet automation has become a way of life -- paying bills, shopping on-line; getting a boarding pass from a kiosk at the airport; making a doctor’s appointment, etc. Over the next five years, multimodal mobile interfaces will also become ubiquitous. Companies will exploit business process applications that proactively “push” relevant, time-sensitive information to customer devices in real-time.

This, in turn, will lead to self-service business applications offering visual or voice choices to help customers make time-sensitive decisions faster and with greater accuracy, regardless of the environment. And these companies will be successful because their employees, customers, subscribers, business partners, and other end users will all be accustomed to using multimodal interfaces to conduct everyday business activities by themselves. Just like the Internet, there will be a time when we won’t know how we lived without mobile, multimodal capabilities.

Comment: The Challenge For Customer Support Staffs

The availability of dynamic multimodal user interfaces will have a significant impact on automating enterprise business process applications for all its end users. The days when IVR self-services were primarily focused on customer needs because they only had telephone access to enterprise information are over. Now customers, internal staff, and business partners can all be efficiently exploiting Web-based business applications that can support both visual and speech interfaces from both multimodal devices, particularly for mobile access.

However, as we have long ago learned with IVR applications, self-services will always require access to live assistance, especially for sensitive customer contacts. The implications of multimodal application interfaces will have a ripple effect on traditional customer-facing support staff, because they too must be able to deal with customers who are both mobile and using visual rather than voice application interfaces. Preparing customer support staff (call centers) for this paradigm shift can’t really begin until more real-world experience is gained in how multimodal users with handheld mobile devices will require live assistance, with traditional voice conversation or visually with IM.

What Do You Think?

Send your comments to me at artr@ix.netcom.com.

What’s New With UC From UC Strategies

To get an idea of the different perspectives and issues related to UC technologies for the enterprise, go to the UC Strategies web site for better insights on migrating to UC.

UC Industry Update including Highlights from VoiceCon Spring

You can also review the presentations given by the UC Strategies experts at TMC’s IT Expo early this year.

Attention CIOs: Watch this great new Webcast from Avaya and Microsoft on the practical “Why’s” and “How’s” of migrating to UC!

Go to: http://cxolyris.cxomedia.com/t/833300/379459/8118/0/

This discussion with the two dominant enterprise communications technology providers in the text messaging and telephony worlds highlights the practicalities of migrating to UC and also underscores the UCStrategies.com industry-wide initiative for identifying individual business user requirements

Stay tuned to the UCStrategies.com web site for initial availability of the UC Profiling service. We are in discussions with all the major UC technology providers to support this initiative to help both their customers and sales channels plan their UC migrations properly and effectively.

New Research Shows Enterprise IT Wants UC, but Are Not Prepared

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

May 18, 2007

New Research On Enterprise UC Migration Confirms - Not A Question of “IF” or “WHEN,” But “HOW!”

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Although the enterprise market is getting more serious about converging their telephone systems into UC, it is no surprise that enterprise IT organizations still have a lot of homework to do. A new market research study of enterprise unified communications by Nemertes Research shows that while a large percentage of IT executives (79%) may already be using or planning to implement some UC capabilities that integrate and converge IP telephony and IM applications with email and voice messaging, IT management is still very divided organizationally between the text messaging and voice telephony groups in 60% of the organizations interviewed.

According to Nemertes analyst, Irwin Lazar, the migration to comprehensive enterprise UC is not only being slowed down by the lack of IT consolidation of user administration and support management across all forms of communication, but also because “federated” presence capability and device-independent mobile services are not yet very available. This is reflected in the finding that, “Most enterprises are not yet planning to integrate their mobile users with their presence and telephony services.”

What Should Enterprise Management Do About the UC Migration Problem?

It should be obvious by now that migrating to UC is not just about changing the technology infrastructure nor just about reducing TCO, both of which are in the domain of IT responsibility. It is also not about changing business communications technology all at once, but selectively choosing high-value business processes, as well as key end users associated with those business processes, as migration starting points with real ROI to the enterprise.

Step One: Which Business Processes Need UC?

So, how do you identify initial high-value business requirements for UC migration planning purposes? There really are two answers. One source of answers is from Line 0f Business (LOB) managers, who should know which business processes are most critical to the enterprise bottom line and also suffer the most from inefficient people communications, better known as “human latency.” They can probably also identify specific job responsibilities of key personnel who are particularly affected by current communication contact inefficiencies.

In larger organizations, the CIO is probably the right person to coordinate the identification of business process priorities with current technology upgrade or replacement planning to interoperate with UC technologies. In smaller organizations, consulting expertise will be the way this task can be accomplished most efficiently.

Step Two: Which End Users Need UC?

Because the convergence of communication interfaces through multimodal devices, along with changes in communication procedures and etiquette, will impact end users, they must be properly prepared to use new UC capabilities effectively. End users will only do so when they understand how they will personally benefit from the change, i.e., it will be easier, and faster to communicate with others in performing their individual jobs responsibilities. “One size does not necessarily fit all!”

As enterprise business communications are becoming more diverse and “virtual,” where people are increasingly mobile, away from an office location, or away from a desktop, communication requirements are becoming more personalized, i.e., dependent on a combination of individual job responsibilities, changing communication relationships and needs, different user work environments, and personal contact preferences. That means that the requirements for new, converged capabilities of UC have to be more tailored to individual user needs as both contact initiators and contact recipients, not as a set of standard, siloed desktop devices.

For this reason, we see that practical UC migration requirements planning will need to include individual end user information about how they communicate today, including what major communication problems they experience with different types of business contacts (internal, customers, supply-side partners, etc.). This will not only enable UC planners to identify and plan for different forms of UC activity for the future, but also will highlight specific UC benefits and changes in user communication procedures that will require retraining.

UC Migration Planning

Because UC migration will usually be a slow and evolutionary process, it will be appropriate for enterprise management to start with specific groups of users that have the greatest need for UC capabilities. Typically these will be people who are heavy mobile communication users and whose job profiles include:

§ Key decision makers

§ Key action takers

§ Customer-facing experts who must be available to support real-time customer issues

UC capabilities, coupled with mobile capabilities, will have a major influence on how people communicate and will impact traditional telephone and messaging traffic that must be supported with network resources. For this reason, it will be helpful to both enterprise business management and IT technology management to survey their end users about their current business contact activities in order to identify where UC and mobility will make a difference in both business processes and individual end user needs.

It is the Unified-View’s opinion that UC productivity ROI to the enterprise will be maximized when all the people involved in a common workflow task can exploit the flexibility of real-time UC capabilities. This will apply to people within the organization and to people outside of the organization (customers, supply-side partners, etc.) This is because if there is a delay in making contact with any particular individual end user participating in a group task, this will cause the task to suffer what has been referred to as “human latency.” (The Unified-View calls it “human contact latency” because it is not because people are slow, but because they are often inaccessible for communication.)

A New Service For Enterprise UC Planning

The Unified-View, together with the industry experts at UCStrategies.com, is developing a standard end-user online survey service that will be made freely available to enterprise organizations to help gather UC/mobility profiling information about current end user business communications activities. This information will help enterprise management to:

1. Gather information about which individual end users or work groups need UC capabilities the most
2. Identify the related business process that will determine UC migration priorities
3. Help align the value of improved UC capabilities with the ROIs of business processes.
4. Help identify and quantify the mobile and UC activities associated with specific individual users and their business contacts that should also be provided with UC capabilities
5. Enable the organization to plan specific migration training needs for individual end users or end user groups, in accordance with a practical migration implementation schedule.
6. Enable the enterprise to compare before and after changes in business communication efficiencies and business process benefits by basically using the same survey for “migrated” users as a “before and after” comparison.
7. The service will also allow enterprise organizations to “benchmark” individual users or different groups within the organization for evaluation purposes. In addition, it is planned to allow such information to be benchmarked in Unified-View market research reports across enterprise organizations, to identify differences in end user needs between different vertical market segments, and identify “best practices” for UC management.

Stay tuned to the UCStrategies.com web site for initial availability of the UC Profiling service. We are in discussions with all the major UC technology providers to support this initiative to help both their customers and sales channels plan their UC migrations properly and effectively.

Attention CIOs: Watch this great new Webcast from Avaya and Microsoft on the practical “Why’s” and “How’s” of migrating to UC!

Go to: http://cxolyris.cxomedia.com/t/833300/379459/8118/0/

This discussion with the two dominant enterprise communications technology providers in the text messaging and telephony worlds highlights the practicalities of migrating to UC and also underscores the UCStrategies.com industry-wide initiative for identifying individual business user requirements.

What Do You Think?

Send your comments to me at artr@ix.netcom.com.

News From UC Strategies

To better understand the different perspectives and issues involved with implementing UC technologies, go to the UCStrategies.com web site for the latest, most practical insights on migrating the enterprise to UC.

UC Industry Update including Highlights from VoiceCon Spring

You can also review the presentations given by the UCStrategies.com experts at TMC’s IT Expo.