Forums - Recent Threads

And now the forecast for Contact Centres: cloudy with outbreaks of cost savings!

paulm.scott — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 09:53:16 GMT

The drawback of using ‘cloud’ to describe a technology is the endless puns, cringing analogies and interminable references to weather. On the plus side, it does make it easy to understand the principles: it’s everywhere, up in the air, and always there. It might also explain the surprisingly rapid adoption of Cloud technology in contact centres which is expected to quadruple in the next 5 years.

Contact centre management have never been early adopters of technology. Indeed, if The Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report is to be believed, contact centres are normally at the back of the queue when it comes to technology innovation: 73% don’t have full integration of their channels and 40% sit outside the enterprise technology architecture, according to the Report. However, adoption of applications from Cloud platforms paints a very different picture.

Sixty five per cent of the Report participants already using hosted or cloud based technology, say its made it easier for them to get access to new functionality and for 64.8% its improved flexibility.

Commercially Cloud seems to make sense for contact centres too: 77.6% agreed that it’s helped reduce cost-to-serve, which is a principle success measure for many contact centres today.

One myth quickly dispelled about Cloud solutions is the belief it takes over completely from traditional on-premise solutions. This is very rarely the case. Indeed in the dozen or so implementations one large SI has completed for its clients none are operating a fully cloud-based solution, either for compliance and security reasons, or simply to ensure they don’t lose valued components of their technology infrastructure which is working.

All the indicators are for a bright future for contact centres, with sustained periods of high performance, albeit under a cloud!

UC for Chinese market

andyrmit — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 12:25:07 GMT

With China building up the IP infrastructure so rapidly, Enterprises and SPs are looking to adopt UC.

I have currently a few UC opportunities on hand and looking for UC vendors willing to invest in Chinese market.

Please email me to further discuss.

U.C and the Manufacturing Industry

tiffanyfp — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 16:26:59 GMT

A lot of people have cast doubt of the EU's (or Western) manufacturing feature. The numbers are looking bleak, whilst competitors are speeding ahead, getting products in the market faster and cheaper. Bizarrely, although there are employment (or lack of) issues, IT spending remains at an all time high.

Do we think there's still room in these industries for UC? What do you think?

https://www.ggr.net/ggr-blog/entry/87-business-3-reasons-unified-communications-could-benefit-the-manufacturing-industry.html?utm_source=forum&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=forumblog

I’ve read Russell’s article and was hoping he could explain the advantages the E-SBC bring to an enterprise with regards to Security?

alan.patterson — Tue, 31 May 2011 14:34:00 GMT

This forum is about this article by Russell Bennett: SIP Trunking: How the NET UX2000 Helps Balance Risk and Reward, https://ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-expert-views/sip-trunking-how-the-net-ux2000-helps-balance-risk-and-reward.aspx

Another Article About UC Being Dead

UCStrategies — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:54:53 GMT

Interesting article

https://blog.tmcnet.com/on-rads-radar/2010/11/the-buzz-on-uc-is-over.html

Put very simply, are there advantages for the customer to open interfaces over proprietary architecture in UC?

pavila — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:56:20 GMT

I was involved in the beginning of the convergence/UC movement when it was "CTI" - when the "big deal" was that in communication we were moving from the very proprietary environment that was characteristic of the telecom world to more open architecture, which was characteristic of the data world. It seemed to me, at the time, that this could be a huge benefit for the end-user customer. No longer would they be at the mercy of a single switch vendor. As convergence and then unified communications moved forward, the customer would have the option of choosing business solutions that were developed from best of breed products rather than "you take what we have to offer". Yet, what we're seeing today is a tendency for some VoIP and UC vendors to revert back to proprietary architecture as a means of forcing customers to "buy what we have to offer or forget it". There are "reasons" put forth of course for why proprietary is better... tighter integration, quality control, etc.... but so far, I'm not convinced that proprietary is better for the customer - only for the vendor.

What Kind of Organization Will Benefit From Using A Centralized Mediation Server Rather Than Just VoIP Gateways in Implementing UC?

artr — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 19:23:58 GMT

Everyone recognizes that flexible multimodal communications supported by UC will still require efficient consolidation and management of network access. Given that the market is still migrating from legacy TDM telephony networks and the PSTN, what solutions are available for bridging the network gaps at the enterprise or service provider levels?

Can End-users Make or Break the Success of a UC Implementation?

pavila — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:00:44 GMT

I just finished working with Plantronics on a white paper about the importance of end-user acceptance. Of course, it included a discussion on end-points overall - particularly relating to ease of use. And it set me to wondering about the challenge this presents to IT departments that are now generally responsible for UC decisions and implementations. Not to mention those traditional VARs who have evolved to UC "solutions integrators"....

New technology is great as long as it is used by those it is supposed to help. But people are generally resistive to change - even in the workplace. So how important are end-points in the world of UC? Do too many vendors give lip service to "ease of use" but deliver "I can't figure this out and I've read the manual 4 times"?

The Channel is Doomed

shel.brooks — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:26:47 GMT

We use Asterisk - I downloaded it. I buy brand new various SIP phones from multiple DOTCOM types on the net. I have not called a dealer in years. We used to call a dealer every time we needed to take a tele-sh*t. Not anymore.

A friend at another company just threw out their phone system for a hosted plan. I'm not crazy about hosting, but it made sense for them - they have about 12 locations with less than 4 people. One of their Internet service providers offered them hosting and just stole the account from multiple telecom dealers.

I don't see how a telecom dealer willl stay in business. Their model is hardware and the industry is moving to software and service. I guess there are plenty of antiques out there that need service and plenty of newer systems that are destined to become antiques, but I don't see how the telecom dealer will survive this change in the business.

Presence

shel.brooks — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:16:56 GMT

Every discussion of UC involves presence. Presence is free. I have multiple presence accounts - Skype, AIM, Yahoo, Google, and our own ICQ server internally. What's the big deal - companies like Avaya, Cisco, Mitel all think they invented presence. Is there any benefit I am missing to a totally proprietary implementation of presence when it is available both as a free service or free server/client software?

Avaya Aura

tom.levy — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:05:36 GMT

I understand how Avaya Aura manages existing phones systems as a sort of super phone system for SIP - but what I don't understand is if you can use just Aura alone as a phone system. Does aura directly support SIP endpoints or Avaya proprietary phones? I asked a few people and can't get a knowledgeable answer?

Subscription Based Licensing

dean.higgins — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 05:07:48 GMT

What companies are offering subscription based licensing regarding their IP solutions? If I understand it correctly, I can purchase an IP PBX core system and instead of buying user/phone/extension licenses - I can "rent" them through subscription based licensing. It sounds interesting - though a bit confusing. Would it not make more sense to rent the entire system via hosted voice solutions?

How important a role do you see mobility playing in the overall move to UC?

mfinneran — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:07:57 GMT

While every speech and article on UC makes reference to the importance of mobility, the take rate of the current UC mobility capabilities appears to be minimal. What's missing in those offerings that could put mobility in the center of users' UC planning?

Virtualization - I don't get it

dean.higgins — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 20:53:04 GMT

There seems to so much hype about virtualization. I can buy a basic server for about $3000 - complete installed - one time cost. My VMware servers are technically less expensive but require more ongoing care and feeding. Assuming both are equal in support of real time applications, which is a real leap as well - why bother putting UC servers on a virtual machine. Makes no sense to me.

Avaya Aura

alan.patterson — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 20:41:17 GMT

Did Avaya announce anything new regarding Aura at VoiceCon?

Does Location Matter?

dave — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 18:33:59 GMT

Historically, the telecom dealer was local to the customer. Does it matter any more? Are we seeing dealers increasingly supporting more and more non local customers?

The world is flat and VoIP reduces distance issues and now with centralization of telecom systems it seems a single dealer can support a national network of locations (branch offices).

Thoughts?

Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

nsj — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:10:44 GMT

On the UCStrategies.com site a few of us have posted articles or opinions on how UC came from the contact center because so many UC functions, such as reporting, presence, etc. have been used for decades in contact centers. This concept is getting even more interesting as vendors are beginning to combine more of the tools of the contact center in with UC tools. Analytics-driven workforce optimization (WFO) has been optimizing people, processes, and communication in the contact center for years. So now we are starting to see an emerging category within UC called “UC analytics” that tie together tried-and-true contact center WFO tools such as quality monitoring and workforce management with advanced speech, data, and desktop analytics, to help organizations uncover trends and issues that may hamper business performance. This holds true not only in the contact center, but across the enterprise. Using UC analytics, organizations are better equipped to capture, analyze, and act on information about workforce performance, customer interactions, and overall business processes in the contact center, back-office operations, and even branch and remote offices.

UC-B applications

admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 14:25:40 GMT

Ross Talbot --I don’t understand what business process automation is. Do I already have this in my company?

Tim Passios--You may. You’ll want to understand your own internal processes for getting work done to understand Business Process Automation. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in or what company you work for, we all have processes that we must go through for the work that needs to get done. The key is to find those processes that can be automated with technology. Would you like an example of a common process?

Ross Talbot--Yes!

Tim Passios--Ok! Let’s say a fax gets sent into a hospital with relevant patient information on it, it requires a human to review it and manually route it to the right location (pharmacy, doctor, emergency, etc.). There are several ways this process could be automated. Let’s look at one way it could be automated with technology. We could receive that fax and have it scanned automatically for relevant information (patient ID, doctor name, prescription information, etc.) that would then be routed to the right email inbox as an attachment. This eliminates human error and latency, automates the process, and improves efficiency and effectiveness. Get the idea?

Ross Talbot--No. What do you mean by "scanned automatically?"

Tim Passios--The old way of receiving a fax meant a piece of paper came out of a fax machine. However, it’s just as easy to receive a fax electronically and then deliver it somewhere for viewing or processing. One of those places could be a place where the fax is examined using optical character recognition and/or forms recognition software. These tools can “read” a form and extract names, addresses, patient ID, prescription name, and other information and pass that information along in the process.

Samantha Kane--I'm not really clear on the relation between business process automation and unified communications. Can someone describe the relationship?

Pam Avila--I think a lot of people wonder about that. Let’s take a look at the definition of UC and see if that helps - unified communications is defined as communications integrated to optimize business processes. By this definition, business process automation becomes the nirvana of unified communications - it's where companies can really realize a hard ROI.

Art Rosenberg--Samantha,I would keep things simple by describing the role of UC as being able to make timely contact with a person (or persons) in a variety of ways, depending upon the circumstances of the contact initiator as well as that of the recipient/respondent.

Unlike the tradtional telephone call, it's not just for "person-to-person" contacts, but also "process-to-person" outbound contacts. The latter is where an automated business process requires the participation of a person (specific individual or anyone who is available). In such cases, the business process application will act as the contact initiator and have the flexibility to initiate the contact independently of the recipient's circumstances, devices, or preferences. All the process has to do is initiate the delivery of the information or Web links and make sure that the recipient is notified and can access that information in a timely manner. I call this a new type of "I/O" that can addresss individual people device independently through UC.

Samantha Kane--Why would my business be interested in Communications-Based Process Automation (CBPA)?

Art Rosenberg--Business processes can't be fully automated like some manufacturing processes. They have to be monitored, managed, and coordinated with people who are part of every business process. Rather than depend on people to have the time and remember to check on the status of a task or situation, it is more efficient to have an automated process detect exceptions of concern and notify appropriate people in a timely manner to get things fixed or changed when necessary. That not only minimizes the high cost of labor involved in a group task activity, but also avoids or minimizes any losses resulting from the failure to resolve issues as soon as possible or to meet deadlines.

Rick Chin--Ah, this is where you start going beyond simple business process automation and into the world of Communications-Based Process Automation (CBPA). What’s the difference? Business process automation simply automates a process, leaving communications out of the picture. CBPA, on the other hand, leverages communications to further extend the effectiveness and efficiency. The ultimate end result is to unify all forms of communications for seamless interactions across all devices, applications and locations in order to improve business processes.

Ross Talbot--How does CBPA really do that and how does it go further than simple process automation?

Tim Passios--Good question! Let’s take another look at our previous fax example. So far, simple process automation got the fax into an email inbox and delivered to the right person or department. However, nothing is being done with it and unless someone is monitoring that inbox, nothing is going to happen to it.

With CBPA, that fax would never have made it into an email inbox. Instead, it would have been scanned for relevant information, identified for the right person or department needed to handle that information, and then routed into an electronic queue to wait for the next available person to read it. At the same time, it would have made an outbound communication (SMS, Email, phone call with a recorded message, etc.) to the person who sent it so that they knew it was being processed.

Ross Talbot--Is that it? Doesn't seem like much.

Tim Passios--No, there’s a lot more. CBPA continues the process to ensure that this is handled completely. Let’s say that our fax was delivered to the Doctor’s office on the 3rd floor of the hospital. The nurse sees a form presented to her on her desktop client and opens it. This form contains the patient information received from the scanned fax, a prescription request, and the attached fax (in the form of a PDF) for verification. The nurse clicks a button on the form to pass it along to the doctor for prescription approval. At this click, the form is routed back into the queue to the doctor for approval. However, using presence, the form gets rerouted to the doctor on-call because the primary doctor is currently out of the country. The on-call doctor receives the form along with a screen pop of the relevant patient information so that he can review all necessary records to be sure that this can be approved. Once approved, the form then gets routed directly to the pharmacy for fulfillment. The last step might be to automatically send a message (SMS, email, phone call with recorded message) to the person who originally sent in the fax indicating that their prescription has been filled.

Ross Talbot--What industries are best positioned to take advantage of CBPA?

Rick Chin--Lots of industries, including insurance and financial institutions, healthcare companies, higher education, entertainment and hospitality, and more!

Tom Parrot--What are a couple of examples of how my company can benefit from communications-based process automation?

Rick Chin--To be honest, it’s really easy to find these examples. Take a look around your organization and identify manual processes that could involve human error and human latency. Simple ones typically come to mind like vacation requests, approval processes, order processing, new hire HR and IT processes and many others.

Tim Seabrook--Your company can benefit from Process Automation in a number of ways across many of the processes that your company uses in every day of business. From basic communication with your customers to more complex process automation involved with Workflow Management across departments within the business.

Basic customer communication can be automated with automated outdialing applications to contact your customers for issue resolution notification, appointment reminders, or product release notification.

Workflow Management can be automated with various activities being queued / delivered to each department when the activity requires each department's skill. An example could be an insurance company handling claims. The claim is lodged and delivered to a Data Entry Operator who enters the details. The claim is then delivered to a Claims Assessor for investigation and approval. When approved / declined the claim is then passed to the Customer Service department to notify the claimant.

Through all these stages the Claim can be queued for the appropriate departments so that the activities can be automatically delivered to the properly skilled staff.

Apart from the automated delivery of the activity one of the main benefits here is that all these actions can now be reported on and monitored from a management level. You can monitor how long it is taking to process each stage of the claim and also see how many claims are being handled by various staff - in the same way that you can monitor the phone calls to your CSRs in the Contact Center.

Each process within your business can be automated in one way or another depending on the actual process and how it is implemented within the business.

Scott Todd--I’ve heard about other kinds of business process automation. How is IPA -using CBPA - different?

Rick Chin--Other companies offer products to try to automate parts of your business. Companies like IBM, Documentum, FileNet, and Lombardi all have products that attempt to do this. However, these companies are trying to take products that manage portions of tasks and extend them across the enterprise. Because their foundation was not built around communication, it’s not surprising to find that they are “walled gardens” with little ability to encompass all kinds of activity. Even other communications companies like Avaya and Genesys have taken a stab at automation. However, because their products are actually an amalgam of separate products brought together through acquisitions, they too lack the ability to present one unified view.

IPA is different. It’s the only product to use the new CBPA methodology that brings the proven contact technologies of ACD Queuing, Skills-Based Routing, Presence, Recording, and Real-time Supervision to any business process or work flow.

IPA knows how to route work, who is qualified and available to do the work, delivers the work, records what was done, and allows management and supervisors to see the status of that work in real-time.

Scott Todd--Customers are very important to my company. How would CBPA make my customers’ experience better?

Rick Chin--CBPA is built on the technologies that have existed for years within the walls of the contact center – a place founded and focused on customer service. Technologies like queuing, recording, reporting, alerting, monitoring and more are leveraged within CBPA. Simple screen-pops of your favorite CRM application with prefilled information about the customer can easily be routed to anyone within the organization during any steps of the process to ensure customer information is always at the fingertips of whoever services that process.

Jerry Brown--How high does CBPA seem to be on the priority list for CIOs?

Tim Passios--CIOs look for products that can support the business goals of their company. And CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs have all been interested in automation for quite some time.

CBPA should be high on the any CxOs priority list because it is easier to implement and maintain, does not require expensive custom programmers, brings the power of process automation to most businesses, facilitates market responsiveness, and establishes visibility into the progress and status of processes.

Existing solutions are expensive to buy, setup, maintain, and update. Expensive consulting and custom programming are constant additional costs due to complexity. Lead-time for implementation or change is very long, affecting a company’s responsiveness to the changing market. Lastly, these systems become “yet another” application with separate data to manage and they often create more “silos” of information because they only handle a small portion of the entire process.

Blair Pleasant --- Don't other vendors offer solutions similar to IPA? I've heard other vendors talk about routing, queuing, and automating back office tasks and workflows. What's different about IPA?

Michael Finneran Posted: Tuesday, June 30, 4:26 PM

We've run into some new ROI elements for CBPA recently that can really have an impact. A vendor of voice picking systems (that's where you have workers in a warehouse get their picking instructions via voice commands over a wireless headset) described his solution and along with the obvious benefits like improved accuracy, faster training, increased productivity, but then popped some real surprises. The headsets allowed the workers to be more aware of their surroundings, and that reduced accidents (a worker is killed in the US every three days from a forklift accident). One key one was that they boosted their fulfillment accuracy from under 90% to over 99.8%. That 99.8% was a magic number because it made them a "preferred supplier" with some of their biggest customers (e.g. WalMart), which meant their trucks got to go to the head of the line for deliveries.

Now no one is worrying about getting hit with a forklift in a hospital or an insurance company, but what it does tell you is that if you look deeper into the business processes (and talk to the managers who are directly involved), you can also find much more subtle but vitally important benefits that can be used to justify CBPA.

Blair Pleasant Posted: Tuesday, June 30, 4:27 PM

This all sounds great, but it also sounds like a lot of work. How can the process of CBPA be made simpler for enterprises.

Rick Chin Posted: Wednesday, July 8, 7:03 AM

Typically, other offerings only address portions of the process, leaving the company with pockets of automation in between areas of manual tasks. In between the automated parts, the company loses visibility and work can get lost. IPA seeks to automate the entire process regardless of whether it involves two people & ten minutes or fifty people & ten weeks while providing up-to-date visibility regarding work status and progress.

IPA also associates phone and email communications with work. That might mean it uses communications to reach out to the customer or places a call or email when necessary. IPA could also start a new action or continue and existing one based on an email from a customer.

One other difference in IPA is the use of presence and skills to know who is available and send work to the most qualified person.

Rick Chin Posted: Wednesday, July 8, 7:24 AM

The CBPA methodology doesn’t have to be complex. Bringing process automation and management within the reach of “normal” businesses was a key goal with IPA, the first automation system to embrace CBPA. People find that the visual design environment of IPA makes creating process flows very interactive and intuitive.

However, I would say that analyzing a process and automating it takes some practice. The first few times you do it, your eyes begin to see process and activities with much more detail and decision points. This is why engaging a consulting firm that specializes in process automation is recommended for initial implementations. Once you become familiar with the way processes are automated, you can do them without assistance. Learning how to do it right the first time is well worth the minimal investment.

Of course, you can jump right in and do it yourself if you feel comfortable with those skills.

Once you get comfortable doing automation, you will start to see automation opportunities everywhere and the CBPA methodology allows you to automate things other solutions couldn’t handle.

Why are gateways required in a Microsoft UC Solution?

admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 14:00:11 GMT

Brenda Perea

Posted: Tuesday, June 16, 10:54 AM

Joined: 12/11/2007
Posts: 6

Posted March 9, 2009

Brenda Perea--Why are gateways required in a Microsoft UC Solution?

NET--Gateways are needed to integrate with legacy networks and telephony equipment. Microsoft UC passes VoIP traffic between desktops without requiring any other modification to the corporate IP network. It does not, however, provide any connectivity to PBXs and/or external service provider networks. Its connectivity to IP PBXs and IP-based service providers is also limited to a small number of vendors and requires specific recent releases of those vendors’ products. Few if any companies, however, want to completely rip and replace their entire telecom infrastructure at one time. A Microsoft UC deployment is typically first implemented in a particular targeted area of the business where it will deliver the greatest ROI – and then rolled out to other areas in successive stages. Moreover, as providers compete with each other and offer different pricing incentives, the rules about which voice traffic goes where will likely change over time. Companies therefore find it prudent, if not and necessary, to implement a third-party VoIP solution that integrates Microsoft UC into existing non-Microsoft telecom infrastructure as a way to flexibly switch voice traffic originating from Microsoft UC users to multiple networks as required at any given time.

David Yedwab--What’s NET’s value proposition in the Microsoft OCS UC equation?

NET--Microsoft UC is a powerful platform for increasing staff productivity, improving responsiveness to business problems and opportunities, and reducing operating costs. But, the right gateway architecture is needed in order to fully realize those gains.

NET’s VX Series and Quintum Series switches and Gateways are significantly differentiated from commodity VoIP gateways in ways that make them particularly suitable for the challenges associated with Microsoft UC implementation. Key attributes of the VX Series solution include: Suitability for diverse telecom environments, remote office survivability, VoIP security and Active Directory integration. NET VX and Quintum Series switches provide many other capabilities that make them especially suitable for Microsoft UC deployments – including link quality management, support for consolidation of UM voice mailboxes, and music/message-on-hold functionality. In summary, NET’s VoIP switches and gateways minimize implementation challenges and enable companies to fully leverage Microsoft UC’s rich functionality for maximum business benefit.

Brenda Perea--Can you go into depth on the value prop differentiators?

NET--The VX Series’ Any-to-Any MultiPath architecture (along with its built-in SIP to SIP mediation) provides full connectivity between Microsoft UC users on an IP network and any other telecom infrastructure – including PBXs and IP PBXs – without requiring additional hardware or reconfiguration of existing devices. NET VX Series switches include built-in SIP survivability functionality that ensures continuity of basic calling functions on SIP phones in remote offices even in the event of an OCS failure – or in the event that IP network connectivity to a UC server in a central location fails. VX Series switches also implement a broad range of encryption protocols, including TLS for signaling security and SRTP for media security – as well as IPSec, SCIP, and MD5 Authorization. And unlike other hardware solutions that compromise performance when using encryption, VX Series switches encrypt at wire speed. VX Series switches allow programmable call control to be driven by telephony data from Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP servers. AD integration opens up a universe of possibilities for rules-based call routing – including the programming of failover scenarios that direct calls to users’ cell phones in the event that LAN/WAN connections to UC desktops are down. It also allows the VX switch to determine whether a call should be routed directly to a user’s phone or via an OCS Server to a UC desktop.

David Yedwab--What lessons did Avanade learn from its own OCS R2 deployment?

NET--Avanade learned that the projections for hard and soft cost savings appear to be pretty accurate. That network savings, travel displacement and other hard cost avoidance can be substantial. A roadmap to get to the end-state needs to be developed and organizational buy-in is essential.

Brenda Perea--What is your definition of UC?

NET--UC is communications integrated to optimize business processes. UC integrates real-time and non-real time communications with business processes and requirements based on presence capabilities, presenting a consistent unified user interface and experience across multiple devices and media types. In other words UC is communications integrated to optimize business processes. UC breaks down today’s silos of communications. Done right it’s really one application with a supporting rules engine that unites such diverse communications components as presence, messaging (i.e., IM, email, voice, video) and collaboration modes (i.e., voice, data, video telephony, A/V/Web conferencing and information sharing apps) with business processes, business applications and directories in a way that provides a common user experience regardless media type or device used be it hard phone, softphone or mobile.

David Yedwab--Including Avanade’s experiences, what’s the quickest most effective path to ROI in a UC deployment?

NET--In this economy the quickest route to ROI hinges on hard the cash savings associated with protecting, extending and leveraging your existing telecom investment while driving down telecom costs. SIP trunking (supported by OCS R2) provides businesses with a painless first step and a seamless migration path to VoIP. It enables businesses to leverage their bandwidth investments by sharing voice and data traffic. Businesses gain the cost savings and flexibility associated with VoIP without having to purchase a new telecom system. SIP trunking is a scalable and affordable alternative to traditional dial tone - offering local, long distance, toll free and international calling at very low rates. Putting Office Communicator (OC) clients on PCs will leverage VoIP to drive down local, long distance and cellular costs. Additionally, OCS LiveMeeting and A/V/Web conferencing capabilities drive away outsourced conferencing charges.

This doesn’t mean that companies should write off productivity gains. Far from it, staying nimble is especially important in this environment as companies are forced to compete with fewer resources. And where will companies get the best productivity ROI today? It’s in UC-BB – UC for business. That’s where you’re making UC an integral part of your collaboration strategy. It’s the concept of having context, presence and click to communicate embedded within your business processes. Now, communications-enabling a business processes is difficult because established practices, generally, are deeply entrenched, and changing them requires changing behavior. In some cases, it also requires changing the business process itself. If done well, however, it will lead to soft cost reductions, increased employee productivity and job satisfaction, tighter connections with customers, suppliers and partners, faster decision making and time to market, increased supply chain intimacy and competitive advantages.

Posted March 11, 2009

David Yedwab--I understand the need for gateways for connectivity to the PSTN and legacy gear. If I were trying to budget for a UC implementation, for about 1000 users across 5 locations with 5 legacy PBXes. What percentage of my OCS deployment budget needs to be set aside for NET or Quintum gateways?

Posted March 13, 2009

Art Rosenberg--It's not just Microsoft's UC solution that needs gateways. Any UC platform or communication application that starts to exploit IP Telephony, VoIP, and SIP connectivity will need gateways for the same reason. That is, person-to-person voice connectivity through the PSTN.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Tuesday, June 23, 3:11 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

I'm still trying to understand some of the technologies needed for a total UC solution. How do you know when you need a gateway, and what should enterprises be looking for when selecting a gateway vendor and/or product?

Suresh Tatavarthy

Posted: Tuesday, June 30, 4:59 PM

Joined: 6/30/2009
Posts: 2

Good question on how to select a good gateway vendor and the product. A typical UC solution includes a client component, server components, and voice network that includes integration with PSTN and PBX systems. In the case of Microsoft OCS 2007 R2, the client is the Microsoft Office Communicator. There are several servers defined as server roles.

Microsoft OCS allows users to make and receive calls from the public switched telephony network (PSTN) through the use of gateways. Most enterprises have multi vendor, multi-generational PBX systems in their networks. Therefore, it is important that the gateway should be able to convert any protocol to any other protocol to protect the investments made in the voice networks instead of requiring to do a rip and replace. Besides, a good gateway should provide staged approach to migrating legacy PBX users to Microsoft UC.

With the divergent networks, dial plans can become very cumbersome. A good gateway should provide a centralized dial plan for the entire organization taking into account the different dialing restrictions that are inherent to global number formats, and specific vendor implementation requirements.

Security threats can cripple voice networks and other IP network nodes. A good gateway should offer high reliability and resiliency with features like high availability, load balancing, and security through encryption and firewall capabilities to thwart Denial of Service attacks. Microsoft requires TLS and SRTP for protecting signaling and media traffic. A gateway should be able to support these encryption technologies.

It should be expected that the IP networks may go down once in a while. When an IP network goes down, the branch office networks may get isolated. A good gateway should offer protection against IP failures by providing survivability features such as providing alternate routing/failover connectivity to PSTN and local phone services with registered SIP/Wifi phones.

Many enterprises often require to switch calls from one service provider to another in order to keep their long distance charges low. A good gateway can flexibly switch calls between service providers to provide least cost routing.

Enterprise users still conduct business using fax machines, and analog devices like postage meters, HVAC equipment, security systems, and other modem based devices. A right gateway provides a smooth transition to unified communications for these legacy devices.

Finally, only a vendor that has the range of equipment that meets every enterprise use from small business to large enterprise can offer one stop solution and reduces UC deployment project risks.

Suresh Tatavarthy

Posted: Tuesday, June 30, 5:40 PM

Joined: 6/30/2009
Posts: 2

Marty and David, here is an approximation. The answer should be very similar to the PSTN case Marty gave. Looking at your scenario, multiply the number of users by $400 for the OCS costs (same as given by Marty). Then add the VX costs (2 GW’s). The GWs for 1000 users assuming 1:10 ratio, cost of each GW is roughly $18K per node. Assuming High Availability, 2 GWs will cost about $36K. The cost of GWs will be roughly 9 – 10%.

Performance Metrics For "Experts" vs. "Agents"

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:38:55 GMT

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Saturday, August 15, 1:05 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

In a UC environment, particularly when mobile, customers may dynamically switch communication modalities for faster interactions or to exchange data. This will make "agent" UC performance metrics complex to compare. For "experts," who have other business priorities and more complex response options, how should such performance metrics be used in the first place?

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Tuesday, September 22, 10:44 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

Although quite a number of people are interested in the posted topic, I notice that no one has yet commented on how to go about defining the metrics for "experts" vs. all the old metrics we have accumulated for "agents." This, of course, is a management rather than a technology issue and probably has not (yet) been tested in the real world of contact center "experts."

From a "customer experience" perspective, management does have to track the effectiveness (not just the performance efficiency) of "experts," directly or indirectly through "agents." However, mobility and UC will be key to involving "experts" no matter how the contact is initiated, person-to-person, person-to-process-to person, or directly by process-to-person CEBP) notifications.

In the latter instance, non-voice customer contacts can be based on any available experts choosing to respond when they can and, when there are several such "experts," work flow actions can be based on whoever gets there first. (Just like "dispatch!")

From the "customer experience" perspective, what is key is that the request is acknowledged immediately in a "personalized" way and followed up as soon as possible. With the increased use of mobile devices, the game is changing from "real-time" First Call Resolution to First Contact resolution and "As Soon As Possible" (ASAP) response, especially when information (not just voice conversation) needs to be exchanged.

Obviously, the choices can be affected by the contextual nature of the customer's request, but not every phone call is really "urgent" and with UC and presence, tradtional voice calls can now be effectively responded to in other practical ways.

Expert Agents and the Contact Center

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:36:58 GMT

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Monday, August 3, 2:33 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

The use of Expert Agents (knowledge agents or subject matter experts outside of the contact center) to provide information to contact center agents or directly to customers has been growing rapidly. But, there are many things enterprises should consider in order to best utilize the experts and to ensure that agents, experts, and customers are happy.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Monday, August 3, 2:34 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

The concept of using Expert Agents is great, but many companies are concerned about bombarding their experts with questions at all hours of the day. What are some best practices around scheduling/leveraging those experts?

Michael Kropidlowski

Posted: Wednesday, August 5, 9:39 AM

Joined: 8/4/2009
Posts: 2

What makes the contact center so uniquely positioned to leverage expert agents is the concentration of performance optimization technologies already in use. They can complement a unified communication strategy and help the contact center effectively schedule knowledge workers across the enterprise, determine availability to support customer interactions, or monitor these interactions to drive improvements in customer care.

Workforce management for example, provides direct, real-time awareness of whether agents and expert agents are where managers have planned them to be. It allows for recalibrating the tasks allotted to agents based on how their presence and availability relates to the presence-state of the customers. Additionally, it provides a framework to direct specific types of customers towards specific agent.

And workforce management software creates a template for extending that practice to the rest of the enterprise and to other kinds of expert agents who perform similar kinds of allocated tasks that depend on real-time awareness of external contexts. And, workforce management plays a key role in scheduling these experts in short timeslots, based on expected call volumes, which helps reduce the overuse of knowledge workers who are still trying to do their “day job” - a big concern of any UC strategy leveraging expert agent.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Wednesday, August 5, 11:18 AM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

How do you handle the situation when agents utilize certain experts because they're knowledgeable or helpful, but then it overburdens the expert when the agent keeps relying on them?

Candace Berman

Posted: Thursday, August 6, 3:44 PM

Joined: 8/6/2009
Posts: 1

Companies can handle this issue in a variety of ways based on what makes the most sense for their business. Of course, without rules or processes in place, agents will escalate to experts they are familiar with or most comfortable with. This is what creates the situation of overburdening that you asked about. However, with the right workforce optimization tools and processes, organizations can determine which experts can address which specific types of situations and how often/for how many hours per day or week they should be made available to do so. Then, agents can see, using presence, who is available to handle certain escalations at a given time. This technology, and the associated processes, eliminates the risk of overburdening only those experts that agents prefer to reach out to over and over again and will give agents access to others who can help them in the same ways while keeping everyone's schedules and involvement in check.

Michael Kropidlowski

Posted: Friday, August 7, 11:12 AM

Joined: 8/4/2009
Posts: 2

When experts are configured, they are assigned a skill or set of skill(s) which is used to define their profile as an expert. When agents decide they need assistance from an expert from outside the contact center, they can search for experts with specific skill(s) that match the requirements for the customer interaction they are handling. The agents will then receive a list of “available” experts with the skill set(s) criteria they selected. Presence determines the expert’s availability. If the expert’s presence indicates that they are not available, they will not show up as a choice in the available expert list presented to the agent.

Additionally, agents are not able to directly contact experts. They are only able to select the experts who are available at the time of the request. This way, agents cannot overburden experts or rely on the same expert.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Sunday, August 9, 1:40 PM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

Like many other things that are changing because of the Internet, the Web, and wireless mobility, access to "experts" may become simply a UC extension (via CEBP) to searching for information on a web site. That is really what people usually want first before they need to talk to someone about a business problem.

I like to call this kind of contact "contextual" because it is not simply a name or phone number that a user/customer may happen to know, nor is it necessarily anyone who happens to be "accessible" and "available" for a real-time voice connection. All that stuff belongs to the past of telephony when customers relied primarily on the telephone for fast information access and customer care issues. In today's world of Web search, online access, and mobile contacts, more practical options for both agents and experts are needed to support the potential flexibilities of "Customer UC."

Step one, as already mentioned, would be to identify the qualifications for the type of expert to be contacted. That kind of thing used to be done for years in legacy call center networks with Skills-Based Routing, except now it doesn't have to be just for a live call connection from a caller. The "context" for such a contact can be derived from a direct question, extracted from a messaging exchange (email, IM, etc.), or from reference information that is associated with an author, list of experts, authorized decision-maker, etc..

Step Two - If no "expert" is accessible and available within a minute or two, the expert contact with an agent can be extended as a real-time, "as soon as possible" connection set up (again, voice or text). With callers becoming more mobile, accessible, and multimodal, First Call Resolution, as with wired telephones, is no longer such a critical requirement for customer satisfaction. That need should be the contact initiator's (agent) decision based on customer need.

Step Three - The original agent doesn't necessarily have to be involved when an expert becomes available, and the response to the calling customer doesn't necessarily have to be a live voice callback. It can be a message contact to the customer. Customers just want an answer and, if necessary, they can "click-to-assistance" if they need further help.

The bottom line is that everyone involved in customer support activities should be exploiting the flexibilities and efficiencies of UC, including the customer, the agent, and the "expert."

Nancy Jamison

Posted: Monday, August 10, 10:46 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 9

I love the whole concept of Expert Agents and have heard some great stories about their use. We have the technology, what we need to be sure to add is education from vendors to customers as to how to change the mind set away from silos of expertise to expertise for everyone. That is, it takes a while to get managers to understand and accept that the system will work, and that their experts won't be over used. We have the statistical tracking to be able to show this to them, but it is a bit of a leap of faith up front. We also need to be able to use those statistics to show if some kind of compensation from one part of the organization to the other needs to happen, if in fact, experts start to get used enough that their time is really impacted.

The point is that we have the tools and the benefits are potentially great, but we need to change mindset as well.

Laura DiSciullo

Posted: Tuesday, August 11, 8:43 AM

Joined: 5/11/2009
Posts: 2

The technology exists to manage resources effectively and fairly. And, operational reporting exists to validate the usage (or over usage) of expert resources (inside or outside of the contact center). However, Nancy has hit the nail on the head with the argument for breaking down silos between the contact center and the departments housing the "experts".

Why would the call center supervisor be adverse to a program intended to drive first contact resolution? One major concern is a loss of control over performance and outcomes of the experts and the impact on contact center performance metrics. Who will be held accountable for customer satisfaction? Without a clear process and aligned goals, it is unclear how responsibilities will be appropriately assigned and measured. A second fear is the quality of infomation provided and tenor of the delivery. While one can argue whether they are always effective, most contact centers have "scripts" for how conversations with customers are structured, what is said and what isn't, and so forth. How are the experts trained to deal with customers? And, is a method in place to ensure quality and consistency? And, how are those metrics measured across organizations?

Why would the departments owning the experts balk at the proposition of increasing customer satisfaction? One reason that has been discussed frequently is the time burden placed on individuals who already have full time jobs. I proffer that this issue is actually less important than determining the value created by using these experts with customers versus the value created by these individuals in their normal routines. Therefore, a company needs to be able to define and measure value creation. These metrics will most likely be very different from those in the call center. And, they may require the combination of information from various resources to create relevant data in ways not currently envisioned in the company's IT systems.

The old adage of the CRM world (It's people, process and technology) hold true. Relative to expert agents, the technology exists. Issues surrounding people and process need further definition.

Aleassa Schambers

Posted: Tuesday, August 11, 2:00 PM

Joined: 8/11/2009
Posts: 2

A couple of great points were raised in the last posts. Silos in technology and communication have long been a challenge for probably just about every organization. Unified communications tools and processes have come to fruition largely to address these obstacles and make it easier for improved communication and processes across the enterprise. And, in the contact center some of the tools already exist for breaking down silos between agents and expert/knowledge workers in the form of presence technology and collaboration tools. But as has been mentioned, even if you build it, will they come? The good news is the technology to allay many of the fears that experts have in being used as resources for the contact center already exists, such as workforce management for scheduling these experts to keep them from being overburdened.

The interesting thing though was one of the previous posts mentioned the use of metrics to define and measure value creation, which could provide the incentive/motivation to get experts more excited/more motivated about being an additional resource for customer interactions.

Performance management applications address this issue by allowing managers to continuously monitor, measure, and improve contact center business processes, as well as those that may extend into the enterprise. By providing scorecards and analysis that keep employees focused on the organization’s key performance indicators (KPIs) – in this case it may be first call resolution - performance management drives improvements across sales, collections, and customer service processes to help companies realize cross-functional alignment with strategic goals.

Performance management applications also enable a structured process through which a company can take steps to improve overall performance against key metrics. These applications can initiate and track actions automatically in response to an indication of a performance problem, thereby reducing reliance on supervisor and manager diligence. At the same time, executives can immediately see performance issues in their organization and track their resolution.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Thursday, August 13, 12:36 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

Here is a practical way to look at UC for contact center applications. How will UC implementation be different for a contact center "agent" than for an "expert" working for the same company? What if the "expert" works for another organization?

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Tuesday, August 25, 2:44 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

Art:

Have you seen cases where this is applicable? It seems pretty dangerous in a customer service type of scenario. How can a company manage outside experts, and what happens if the information provided isn't accurate or useful? Is this theoretical, or are people actually doing this?

Aleassa Schambers

Posted: Thursday, August 27, 11:23 AM

Joined: 8/11/2009
Posts: 2

There could be some opportunities where this could be a viable option. If a company regularly works with a certain set of partners, they could federate with those partners and then be able to have the same visibility/UC functionality that the organization has internally.

One example of how this could be applied: an auto insurance company that works with the same windshield replacement company. They could federate and the contact center agent could easily access an expert at their autoglass company to have customer questions addressed perhaps about billing or scheduling, etc.

Laura DiSciullo

Posted: Thursday, August 27, 4:23 PM

Joined: 5/11/2009
Posts: 2

The ability for a company to manage the customer experience across brick and mortar, contact center, expert advisor or partner is the next wave of customer service. The "how" (even if not totally seamless) is available today. The question is the "what" is important to measure. And, based on these "whats", how should the experience be changed. Technologists have figured out how to measure and to aggregate. The winner in the next round will be the one who can determine what in the plethora of data can be used to create relevant information.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Tuesday, September 1, 1:39 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

I totally agree, Laura. i think the big issue will also be control - as Don mentioned in the UCStrategies podcast about expert agents, the contact center manager doesn't want to lose or give up control, and if they're measured on speed of handling and responding to calls, they'll be even more reluctant to let calls go outside the contact center where they lose control. The change has to come from the top - beyond the contact center. This will require organization shifts, including new job roles, like Director of Customer Satisfaction.

Michael Barbagallo

Posted: Thursday, September 3, 6:25 PM

Joined: 9/3/2009
Posts: 1

The use of non-resident experts has been a common practice in the contact center outsourcing industry for years. In many cases the outsourcer will provide a frontline agent, fielding between 80% and 90% of the calls and then escalate the rest to experts. In the Pre-UC days, escalation normally took the form of a code in the ticket. Today it may be a request for help through a UC system.

Let’s take an insurance company as an example. The front line agent is more likely not located in the same country as the experts. While the agents maybe in India, the Philippines, or the South Africa, the experts may be in Harford, Charlottesville, or London. In the old days, the expert would pick a ticket from the queue and call the customer back. No one was on the line and there was not the sense of urgency that UC offers. Today, UC brings more rapid escalation and the experts loose a measure of control. Not only do experts have to manage SLA of processed insurance claims, but they keep being interrupted by the agents. Tension soon builds between the experts and agents.

So how do you keep the customer and the processor happy? The insurance company needs to make assisting the outsourcer part of the job description of the processor. And at the same time, the expert must be treated in the same way as the agent. That is, he or she cannot be given the choice of answering a call and the experts results must be measured. Of the flip-side, the expert’s time must be protected. They must be given uninterrupted time to compete their job. A company will run in to big issues if it employs UC to increase collaboration between agents and experts and does not employ some sort of workforce management tool to manage and protect the experts’ time.

The technology will help bring agents and experts closer together. But like all tools, without proper management, a company runs risks of it causing more headaches than it solves.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Friday, September 4, 4:06 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

Great insights, Michael. It sounds like in the pre-UC days, when the non-resident experts who called the customer back, the contact center would lose important information - it wouldn't be able to report on the interaction, record it, monitor it, etc. With the UC tools available today, the contact center manager would still be able to have a view into the experts' interactions with customers, which is very important. Reporting metrics, workforce management, recording - all of those things are needed for the expert agent.

When you say that the insurance company needs to make assisting the outsourcer part of the job description of the processor, it sounds like you're agreeing that companies will need to change their corporate culture. I think this will be easy with new hires and new companies, but for more established workers and companies, it will be challenging. Workforce management and optimization tools will be essential - especially for the experts who still need to focus on their regular jobs.

Don Van Doren

Posted: Tuesday, September 15, 7:27 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 1

There has been a lot of good discussion about this topic in this thread. To summarize, I feel there are three issues that have to be addressed: 1) Identify and keep current the skill sets of expertise throughout the enterprise. 2) Harness technology to fairly distribute contacts to appropriately skilled experts. 3) Establish a business culture in which experts to be tapped are willingly responsive and the contact center managers are willing to let them handle the calls.

The first, identifying the appropriate skills, is similar to the issue with contact center’s skills-based routing capabilities as Art pointed out, but it’s much more complex. In many cases, the expertise is more fluid and changing, and the challenging requirement is to keep that skills database current, especially to do so without extensive manual intervention by potential participants. Therefore, techniques to mine corporate information, publications, email exchanges, etc. will be important.

The second, technology challenges, is largely solvable with today’s systems, as Aleassa points out. But it requires enterprises to go beyond the straightforward map-and-measure-what-happens-only-in-the-center approach that most enterprises are currently doing. There are challenges in correctly establishing “available” times for outside experts, and in measuring their contributions. And more work is needed to automatically keep and use updated skills inventories. But implementing appropriate systems will enable both successfully using experts’ capabilities appropriately, and having them feeling good about it.

The third, the cultural issue, can be the biggest challenge, and Laura and Blair made some excellent points. Success requires that the enterprise value “customer intimacy”, and, appropriately, not all companies should embrace that value. (See Discipline of Market Leaders by Treacy and Wiersema.) Companies that have or acquire the appropriate culture should make sure that the way the contact center manager’s “success” is measured doesn’t penalize for “losing control of the call”.

In our consulting work at Vanguard Communications, we find that the first step is to get the culture correct. That has to start at the top of the enterprise. When that is in place, get the measurements and metrics correctly aligned with the new culture. Then, identifying the skills, setting up the schedules, and implementing processes can work well.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Tuesday, September 29, 12:27 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

Does anyone have any good examples of companies that have found ways to overcome the cultural and personnel issues related to expert agents?

steven michaels

Posted: Thursday, October 22, 1:06 PM

Joined: 10/22/2009
Posts: 1

Rich presence engine is not enough to give you a robust method of using expert knowledge.When coupled with attribute based routing tool ,and one that will load balance the use of any one expert, will allow you to the best use of resources. Users may be listed by name or by skill depending on the needs and wants of the enterprise.Adaptive Engineering offers this product as well as including a collaberation tool all in a secure,enterprise grade product

Who in the Enterprise Supports Different End Users UC Needs?

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:29:31 GMT

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Tuesday, July 21, 12:46 PM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

While UC network infrastructures, application integrations, and implementation and support costs are very important to IT management planning, they also need to know what technologies different end users involved in high-value business processes require to perform their jobs most efficiently and effectively. Who in the organization will represent the selective UC technology needs of specific end users inside an organization?

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Thursday, July 23, 9:22 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

I should qualify the "WHO" in the enterprise as being one (or more) of the following:

- Business Managers

- Communication Application IT Management

- Business Application IT Management

- Individual End Users

- All of the above

- Other

What do you think? Which of the above will be most available or knowledgable to be involved?

Dave Michels

Posted: Friday, July 31, 11:17 PM

Joined: 4/15/2009
Posts: 6

I don't think it will be a centralized group any more. Telecom has always been centralized because of the PBX. IT was always centralized because of the glass room. When I was an IT Director at GE, we policed things pretty good. We had to worry about data base integrity, off site backups, disaster recovery, etc. We slowed things down. I imagine groups today will just go find a cloud service and be done with it. I see the same thing with voice. Hosted solutions, APIs, companies like Twilio, wireless solutions, etc. I think organizations will have a real tough time trying to keep UC and voice projects centralized moving forward.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Sunday, August 2, 10:02 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

Dave,

I think you are right on about technology decentralization, i.e., wired and wireless networks, business process applications software, mobile endpoint devices, etc. Mobility will also drive hosted application services for both business users and consumers. But I think that the bottom line for control of who will use what UC technologies will come from two sources - business management, that will require operational flexible connectivity and interoperability away from a wired desktop for their business processes, and the individual end users, who will decide what devices and software applications they will use when away from an office desktop.

IT management's role will be to match these two sources of requirements and provide cost-effective technology options to support such needs. As I have pointed out many times, UC flexibility is not merely required to support internal business users, but must also support key external end users who are involved in a high-value business process. That means business partners and customers (consumers) who contribute to the "human latency" in the performance of a business process. Customers and customer-facing staff, in particular, need UC support because they are the key to revenue generation and achieving business objectives, as opposed to simply reducing costs.

So, how do we represent those two user constituencies, business process management and individual end users, in defining operational UC needs for IT to implement and support one way or another?

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Friday, August 7, 10:19 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

What can and should still be centralized is for business process call and message routing to a non-specific recipient ("person-to-process-to-person"), as opposed to a direct "person-to-person" contacts. That applies to both customer contacts as well as internal suppport activities, e.g., IT "Help Desk" functions. With UC presence, these can all be more efficiently handled by whoever is qualified and available (Skills-based routing) and not limited to just conversational voice connections. Any form of contact that satisfies both parties can be used. With increasing "smart-phone"mobile accessibility and various flavors of messaging, what I have labeled as "as soon as possible" (ASAP) communications will be very acceptable in most business process situations.

David Zimmer

Posted: Thursday, August 13, 9:39 AM

Joined: 12/17/2008
Posts: 1

The question on the table is "Who will represent the user's requirements." I believe the obvious answer is "the users." I believe the users are speaking, but in many cases, no one is listening. Over the years of seeing technology deployed and used, I have seen some interesting applications of the features. Some users use the software and hardware in ways never imaginged by the creators. That fact speaks more to the ingenuity of the users than the creativeness of the developers. Therefore, the users will determine how they will use UC technology. In order for that to happen, UC facilities need to be available.

I believe the bigger problems lies in the lack of process developing requirements for the system. In my recent article, I defined a requirements gathering concept called IT Cube - Six Perspectives to Project Requirements. I published an artilce similar to it focused more toward the UC industry and called it Will the REAL DefinitionS of UC Stand Up: 6 Perspectives For A Single Definition.

In both articles, I discussed the six perspectives of any particular product or service.

To answer the question of who will reperesent the end users of UC, the answer is two-fold: the users must represent themselves and the business analysts must collect, analyze and collate the requirements into solution sets to let the users create their final solutions

The users must represent themselves. The beauty of UC is its ugliness: flexibility. Because of the many features involved in UC, users will adapt it for their use. For the mobile person, he will make more use of the mobility features. For the more stationary person, she will make more use of the stationary features. For the support staff, though, the variety of resulting solutions becomes a nightmare (different topic for a different time).

For example, email still is an important communication medium. For a mobile person, the use of a smartphone with a decent keyboard is a life-saver. But as a stationary person, the dinky QWERTY keyboard on the smartphone won't cut it, therefore, they will use the more robust and feature-rich email components.

The users will create the solution they need for their particular requirements. They need the building blocks and mortar to tie together. Fortunately, it is easier these days than the days of yore from the user's perspective to complete the process.

Of course, that makes it more difficult for the technology staff to create and support. They need to know what to supply and then learn how users will create the solution. The tech staff may be proactive and put together solutions that meet specific user groups, which points back to the requirements of the systems and the lack of requirements gathering processes.

For many companies, I find gathering requirements is a race to implementation, not a process with methodical steps involved. Fortunately, with the adoption of industry standards such as

Project Management Institute 's 42 processes (PMBOK v4),
International Institute of Business Analysis (BABOK v2), and
IT Infrastructure Libraries and IT Service Management,

we can put structure into the requirements gathering process with resulting benefits such as measureability, clarity, and requirements/functionaly grouping.

With the proper processes, business analysts can gather the requirements for the system. The end users represent their needs and requirements, which the analyst must document. From the gathered requirements, groupings of end users will emerge so packaged, supportable solutions can be delivered.

With that said, analysts must consider the other perspectives mentioned in the UC Cube article so their requirements can be met such as ROI, business justification, alignment with business initiatives and strategies, etc. No perspective exists in a vacuum, therefore, the final result must be a balancing act distilling all the viewpoints into something tangible and beneficial to the organization.

So, to answer the question "who will represent the users' needs," the answer is clear: the users themselves first and foremost and the business analyst is responsible for putting them in a form that can be implemented.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Monday, September 28, 9:43 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

To confirm your view about UC implementation planning responsibilities, I have started to see pundits, analysts and consultants increasingly warn IT management NOT to second-guess end user needs and requirements for telephony and UC technologies, especially when planning to replace legacy business telephone systems. One of the biggest mistakes IT/Telecom can make is to try to select new technology without doing any "homework." (And not just comparing pricing costs!) That "homework" is to ask business management what their current communications-based business problems are and what their new operational business process requirements will be in light of UC capabilities. If they don't have any answers yet, its time to find out more before making infrastructure implementation decisions, including the use of hosted services vs. traditional technology ownership, and the growing role of wireless mobile devices in business contacts.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Friday, October 30, 9:48 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

I want to call your attention to the interesting white paper by Blair Pleasant, highlighting the end user's perspective of benefits from unified messaging (UM) features. It does a good job of summarizing and confirming much of what we expect users, who have access to UM capabilities, to say (after the fact). They will then be able to reportfrom experience more efficient and flexible messaging capabilities, including UC-based "click-to-call" benefits such as responding to a message with a "call back."

https://ucstrategies.com/white-papers/end-user-insights-the-real-value-of-unified-messaging.aspx

The study specifically noted that UM benefits will apply to customers as well as customer-facing internal staff, reinforcing the need to view UM and UC as important to direct customer interaction activities (contact center), or what I call "Customer UC." This view expands traditional emphasis on inbound customer person-to-person telephone contacts to include inbound messaging and outbound process-to-person messaging contacts and time-sensitive notifications. The latter is based on integration with business process self-service applications and what is now being lebeled as Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP).

CEBP, coupled with the rapid consumer adoption of multi-modal mobile "smart-phones," will explode the use of UM capabilities as an integral part of both enterprise UC for internal use, as well as for "Customer UC" interactions. However, this all begs the original question posed in this Forum, who in the enterprise will be representing the different end user needs (internal staff, customers, business partners) and priorities for UC (and UM) for implementation planning? Will it be line-of-business management, IT management, individual end users, or all of the above?

If all of the above, how should you orchestrate their involvement and who should be in charge?

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Tuesday, December 1, 11:46 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

End users can’t always speak for themselves. They may know what their problems are, but may not know how best to remedy them.

It is at this point they will need the help of “experts” who know what solutions are available and how best to utilize them.

Read this piece about how IT can help end users move forward in defining their UC solution needs, while also helping to justify their implementation

Industry Changes Impact UC

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:25:31 GMT

Brenda Perea

Posted: Friday, July 24, 11:33 AM

Joined: 12/11/2007
Posts: 6

VoiceCon UC eWeekly is A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UCStrategies.com

"Is it possible that UC will become widely used, but not the profit-making machine some envisioned at the start?"

Allan Sulkin

Posted: Friday, July 24, 11:39 AM

Joined: 7/24/2009
Posts: 1

Marty, Just read your Voicecon eWeekly UC piece , and I agree totally that the Nortel UC MCS 5100 solution is definitely stronger than what Avaya kluges together. I think that Avaya, however, may decide to keep its own platform in place if only due to internal organization politics. It would be difficult for Avaya to port its UC capabilities to Nortel product, because too much of the software is embedded in Aura Communications Manager code, but it could be done over time. Sometimes companies make the wrong decision, and Avaya has shown to be an expert at this. It took a long time to develop and market Modular Messaging to replace the Audix and Octel platforms, and it may take as long to integrate the Avaya and Nortel UC offerings.

I am also wondering how Avaya plans to generate significant revenues from its UC platform, if many of the feature-specific station user license fees are given away free as part of its Enterprise edition for Aura CM or for only $50 per user with Standard edition. I don't think that UC, by itself, will be a major revenue generator for Avaya or others when the license fees are bundled with the generic software package. It appears that many UC capabilities will become standard at no additional cost to the customer. The application servers, third party equipment, won't generate much in way of profit. Blackberry would profit more from mobile applications. Is it possible that UC will become widely used, but not the profit-making machine some envisioned at the start? And what happens if Google Wave takes off?

Marty Parker

Posted: Friday, July 24, 11:59 AM

Joined: 7/24/2009
Posts: 1

Hi Allan,Thanks for your message. I think the eWeekly article will be posted on NoJitter tomorrow, so we can share this dialog with others.

You are exactly right on the three issue you raise below. The eWeekly is suggesting how New Avaya “could” act, and avoided comments on past acquistions. It is a new executive team, so want to give them the benefit of the doubt; however, the killer behavior exists in Avaya Labs, who can choose whether to play nice, getting the best of the two portfolios, or to play badly, making up all the reasons this can’t be done.

Yes, you’re right that Avaya will be tempted just to keep their own conferencing portfolio, Meeting Exchange (even the name shows little innovation), but the Nortel MCS/Diamondware/Web.alive suite, with Microsoft and IBM integrations, is much further along. If there are actually open, standards based products at Avaya, there is no reason not to do this. All of Avaya’s Meeting Exchange products were acquired, so there is almost no dependency on Communication Manager or on the management suite.

ACE is another question. Again, it is better in my opinion, but the Avaya engineers and product managers will likely say that Avaya Application Enablement Server, which is now buried in Aura, already has all the needed integrations to Communications Manager. Of course, they will be missing the point; for UC, the important integration is to the rest of the technology stack, especially applications on desktops and mobile devices, and ACE is way ahead on that.

Lastly, as to whether UC can make a difference, given Avaya’s packaging and approach, well, that’s the entire point. If they choose just to keep selling PBXs, their supposed 25% share will fall back to 10%, just like ATT/Lucent’s 35% share dwindled when those parent companies thought they had better technology and customers would not embrace upstarts with IP Telephony architectures.

The new spending is on the UC elements. If Avaya chooses to bundle those with Communication Manager so as to pump up the “PBX” share, rather than focusing on share of the new spending, they will be sorely disappointed in 3 – 5 years’ time. We’ll see.

Thanks for sharing your always valuable perspective.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Friday, July 24, 2:43 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

Allan: I think the revenue from UC will come not so much from the UC products and licenses themselves, but from value added capabilities like application integration, vertical applications, professional services, etc. Professional services will be key - especially when we start getting more into CEBP or business process integration with UC. The call control vendors (eg switch vendors) will need to offer vertical applications that they can charge a premium for, since call control will be a commodity. Things like voice mail and UM are being priced so low there's not much money to be made from that, so the vendors will need to get creative and find the value add. This is also where they can differentiate themselves from each other and the likes of Microsoft.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Friday, July 24, 6:55 PM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

Blair, I agree with you on where the real revenue-generating action will take place.

One way to look at that is going to be a shift from traditional "person-to-person" contacts to either "process-to-person" contacts (personalized,application-initiated notifications or CEBP) or "person-to-process-to-person" contacts (skills-based/availability routing). These contact activities can be heavily exploited by consumer customers and tied directly to revenue-generating, multi-modal experience benefits rather than simply personal time productivity. What will be needed, howver, is for the enterprise to be able to selectively support all aspects of UC flexibility for all end users, including those who are not within the organization, such as business partners and customers.

Dan Aronson

Posted: Monday, August 3, 6:48 AM

Joined: 8/7/2007
Posts: 5

This would be a more interesting conversation if you segmented out the different layers of the supply chain you are referring to when discussing whether or not UC is going to massively or only mildly profitable. However, for those of us working in the UC industry's trenches, the "profitability trail" is actually quite easy to follow on any level.

As long as technology trends in an upward spiral (as it has forever) it will always be in need of refreshing. Therefore, those manufactures of UC that either hold technological industry leadership positions or come to market with new, disruptive technologies (game-changers) will always do well. In other words, I wouldn't worry about Cisco, Polycom, or Sagem-Interstar going away anytime soon. Those, however, that fail to see new technologies on the horizon and/or fail to begin developing products and services to meet those new technologies will certain fail (see Nortel, Captaris).

However, the best barometer for measuring the UC industry’s wellbeing is really seen at the VAR level. The numbers of healthy and/or growing UC VAR's is tremendous, and their profitability can linked to three major practices. First, the health and wellbeing of their Level I vendors. These typically consist of their IPT vendor(s) plus one or two other complimentary technological leaders such as Microsoft, EMC, HP, etc. Next, all UC manufacturers have developed ecosystems wherein their Technology Partners are encouraged to develop UC add-on applications to fill the gaps in functionality that they themselves do not have the expertise and/or bandwith to create. And seeing the major source of profitability these applications represent, most have even put together programs that incent resellers to bundle applications with their basic UC offerings. This keeps their channel partners in the black and happy. And yes Blair, Fax-over-IP is one of those UC applications frequently included in these bundles. As for Professional Services being a source of profit, well, is that really a revelation? Ask any UC VAR what the single most profitable thing they sell is and they will all, without exception, tell you that it is professional services hours.

So the answer to your question is a resounding yes. Like anything else done right, UC is and will continue to be wildly profitable.

Criteria for Selecting a Vendor

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:20:49 GMT

Pam Avila

Posted: Tuesday, October 20, 5:20 PM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

There are many factors to be weighed when selecting a primary vendor for any UC implementation.

Anonymous

Posted: Wednesday, October 21, 9:48 AM

I’m evaluating a new UC solution for my organization and have a few questions regarding how heavily vendor performance should be weighed against product performance. For instance, with the persistent bankruptcies, mergers and acquisitions in Telecommunications marketplace, how much should I worry about the financial track record a vendor? After all, it seems the troubled ones will just be acquired by a larger competitor or “rescued” by some Venture firm.

RN Birge

Posted: Wednesday, October 21, 10:24 AM

Joined: 10/21/2009
Posts: 4

Even if a struggling company is acquired by an (arguably) stronger one, there are still major business disruptions created for the 1-3 years that it can take to assimilate the acquired company. And with the enormous debt some companies are taking on, it will be a long time – if ever – before they can “sell their way out”.

Robyn Thompson

Posted: Wednesday, October 21, 10:26 AM

Joined: 10/5/2009
Posts: 4

To play devil’s advocate, some companies have a good track record of successfully assimilating technology & personnel. Aastra has made several acquisitions in the last 4 years and has a provided investment protection for customers by creating applications with open standards that can enhance existing solutions rather than forcing an immediate conversion.

Pam Avila

Posted: Friday, October 23, 9:41 AM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

Given that some of the long-recognized “names” in the industry are in trouble, it seems there are no sure bets. I wonder if it is really riskier to go with a lesser known vendor if they have a solution that meets the customer's needs?

RN Birge

Posted: Friday, October 23, 11:42 AM

Joined: 10/21/2009
Posts: 4

Brand recognition can be as a result of large market share, but it could also be the result of a huge marketing budget. Look for vendors that invest in R&D and customer satisfaction rather than simply marketing. One great measure is of a vendor’s track record is to talk to their customers.

Tod Rehner

Posted: Friday, October 23, 1:04 PM

Joined: 10/23/2009
Posts: 1

My CIO won’t consider a vendor unless they are highly rated by industry analyst firms. How much weight do other companies place on these independent evaluations?

Anonymous

Posted: Tuesday, October 27, 2:42 PM

If you’re going to include industry analyst reports as part of your evaluation, ensure that you have the research in context (not simply a single quote). Also, look at research from more than one firm as they each have different core competencies. Look at their comments in relation to your specific needs rather than in general; concentrate on trends rather than absolutes.

RN Birge

Posted: Thursday, October 29, 10:27 AM

Joined: 10/21/2009
Posts: 4

I totally agree with Anonymous about taking the research in context. This has been such a problem that even a Gartner analyst recently blogged about it. It’s just a tool, Gartner may (and often does) recommend vendors that are not in the Leader column and as the aforementioned Gartner analyst points out “an MQ reflects only a tiny percentage of what an analyst actually knows about the vendor.” One final point to think about it…last year Gartner had Nortel in the Leaders quadrant – enterprise customers need to do their own due diligence on criteria that is important to them!

RN Birge

Posted: Tuesday, December 8, 11:42 AM

Joined: 10/21/2009
Posts: 4

Excellent post by Dave Michels "Unified Communications: Through the Magic (Quadrant) Glass" on Gartner's Magic Quadrants.

The Changing Business Model

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:17:42 GMT

Pam Avila

Posted: Monday, July 13, 4:03 PM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

The transition to professional services and solutions is a major undertaking!

Pam Avila

Posted: Monday, July 13, 4:08 PM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

One of the most positive aspects of unified communications, from my point of view, is that it is forcing the reseller community – VARs, Integrators, Telecom Dealers, etc. – to stop selling features and benefits and begin focusing on customers’ specific business needs and problems. The shift in sales strategy seems to be a tough one for many reseller organizations (yes, change is always hard), but I keep hearing from individual resellers that the shift is bringing rewards beyond their expectations. So I’m curious… how hard is it to get a sales staff to change? How long is it taking before a company sees positive results? What has been the success level with the consultative selling strategy?

Bill Vollerthum

Posted: Monday, July 13, 4:16 PM

Joined: 1/18/2007
Posts: 1

Making the transition from product driven sales to a practice that focuses on professional services and solutions is a major undertaking. The brutal economy coupled with shrinking product margins from vendors is making the change a “MUST” for any company who wants to survive beyond 2009. Too many companies today, are still depending on meeting their revenue goals by pushing products. The problem is that formula no longer works!

With every capital investment coming under intense scrutiny these days, demonstrating how your solution is going to bolster worker productivity, drive down costs, and improve business outcomes is essential for making the sale. Sales professionals who cannot present a justifiable ROI and deliver a strong technical presence,will fail miserably. Unfortunately, most sales people are inept and incapable of selling in this manner.As such, the worst recession since the Great Depression is going to send many sales professionals to the unemployment line.

Be advised, making the transition to a company focused on delivering pro services and solutions will require a complete overhaul of your sales team. Your employee morale will suffer, financial performance will suffer temporarily, and you’ll experience resignations from your sales team. This fallout should be expected. Most sales professionals who’ve thrived in the past as product peddlers, will not be able to make the change. However, it is absolutely necessary to ensure any chance of survivability in today’s economy. Those companies who fail to act or equivocate with their decision to change will face certain extinction. Don’t expect immediate gratification when making the transition. Patience, conviction to your vision, intense training, mentoring, and periodic performance assessments will be necessary. If you have the intestinal fortitude to make this radical change, prepare for at least a 24 month overhaul process. The corollary will be having a sales team that can effectively compete for larger and more profitable business opportunities. If you have the intestinal fortitude to make this radical change, prepare for at least a 24 month overhaul process. If you can remain financially afloat during this restructure, you’ll be rewarded with larger and more profitable sales. Moreover, you’ll become a sustaining resource and trusted advisor for your customer.