Will UC Solutions End “Voicemail Jail?”

While failed telephone call attempts have traditionally found some relief through voicemail, callers are not really happy about leaving a voice message in someone’s voice mailbox where they have little control over that message. This goes back to the old “mailbox rule” of agency in English common law where a letter deposited in a postal mailbox was considered the property of the recipient, not the sender. So, callers don’t necessarily hate voicemail, unless they really need to talk a live person fast, but they do hate “voicemail jail!”

What’s the difference? The latter typically applies when the caller has no way to escape from someone’s voice mailbox because of a failed telephone connection attempt, e.g., when pressing “0” to reach live assistance doesn’t do anything, or when the call is simply transferred to yet another voice mailbox. Many call center vendors highlight “voicemail jail” simply as evidence of understaffing live assistance for inbound call traffic. However, there have always been other factors in telephony and voice mail systems that are frustrating to callers or to call recipients.

These end-user frustrations include the following:

• While incoming calls may show “caller ID” information (who is calling”) they don’t show what the call is about (subject) and some indication of urgency (timeliness for expected response).
• Once a message is deposited in a mailbox (voice or text), the originator loses ownership and control over the message and access to its it’s status (picked up, deleted, forwarded, etc.)
• Voicemail controls still use cryptic legacy TUI (Touch-Tone buttons) that are not standardized and require memorizing different  button commands for each voicemail system being utilized.
• Navigating voice messages during retrieval is slow, error prone and inefficient. (That’s why voice mail-to-text technology is quickly being adopted in the industry).
• Initiating and returning phone calls is cumbersome because of the need to know a specific telephone number, rather than simply the name of the recipient for directory access, or the contextual contact  associated with information being viewed on a screen.
• The message sender may have needs for controlling a sent message that are not exercisable, e.g., if not picked up, acknowledged, or responded to within a certain deadline, the message sender must be notified and the message may optionally be “recalled” before initial retrieval.
• Recipients don’t appreciate having to check different voice mailboxes associated with different phone numbers for messages and that is compounded by including retrieval of text messages as well.
• Recipients would like the option to not only check all their new messages, but would also like to easily respond to individual messages with their modality of choice, i.e., voice calls, voice/text message, IM, SMS, video, social tweets, etc. This is where federated presence information will be useful for responding with a callback.

UC-enabled “Unified Messaging” (UM)  and Contact Centers

Unified messaging (UM) is often viewed as a “UC application,” but there are really several messaging applications including email, voicemail, SMS, CEBP notifications, chat (IM), and now the various flavors of social networking. So, while they all can be integrated contextually with telephony in terms of federated presence and “click-to-call” options, they must also individually address the negative end user caller experiences described above, where appropriate.

 In effect, “UM” has to move forward in exploiting all UC-enabled multi-modal flexibilities in order to benefit both callers and message recipients. This will be particularly true for mobile users who will have greater accessibility as well greater need for UC flexibility and interoperability.

As we extend UC into the contact center environment, it will also increase the need for performance monitoring and management of all communication activity. The “contact center” term evolved from the expanding the choice of media in the voice-only “call center,” but did not really make much progress because most consumers didn’t have more than voice and TUI interfaces for their needs.

Now, however, with mobile smartphones and tablets enabling personalized, multimedia access to self-services and live assistance on demand, the game has changed and the “UC Contact Center” is here. In addition to opening the contact center doors to information and assistance, the analytic data that can be tracked may now be used by operations management to track the needs of customers, the responsiveness to those needs with self-service applications, and the performance of customer-facing staff. For consumers who carry personalized smartphones, the UC Contact Center must support all forms of customer self-service, assisted service, and inbound/outbound contacts for comprehensive user experience management.

Moving Forward

IP communications will cost-efficiently support the convergence UC-enabled applications, including all elements of UM. Fortunately, the virtualization of cloud-based, hosted services will not only make such migration moves cost-efficient, but will also facilitate the graceful migration selectively from existing legacy technologies. So, look for technology and service providers to come up with new solutions to messaging functionality, as well as new options for implementation that won’t require internal IT effort.

Bottom line for expanded voicemail product offerings is for them to become a full-fledged part of UC-enabled, multi-modal unified messaging services (UM), not just a premise-based backup for failed phone calls connections. Voicemail systems originally replaced manual “message desks” and desktop answering machines. It is now time to move on to the stage of business communications.

New Opportunity For Telephony VARs and Channels

As with everything else that is changing with business telephony, UC-enabled unified messaging (UM) will be replacing legacy voicemail systems and will therefore be particularly important to both small and large businesses. By supporting new UC-enabled UM, either as premise-based, hosted “cloud,” or hybrid solutions, traditional telephony VARs will be well positioned to become key UC Solution Integrators.

Reseller channels can learn more about where business communications are going within the expanded context of UC by  joining unified communications industry leaders at UC Summit 2012, the only channel and consultant-focused event for the Unified Communications industry. The unique, invitation-only UC Summit in May, hosted by UCStrategies, is the place for experienced channels to get objective, expert advice on where UC-enabled applications are going, what leading vendors and service providers are offering in the way of software applications and tools, and opportunities for partnering with complementary specialist channels to satisfy the complex UC needs of a user organization. Invitations are limited, so apply now to qualify for acceptance.