Aggregating Customer Conversations Is Good Business

Constellation Orbits
Constellation Research, Inc.

Elizabeth is a well-recognized industry-leading analyst. She was previously Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.  Prior to Constellation, Elizabeth spent eleven years at Forrester Research as vice president and principal analyst.  She has managed large consulting projects for business and government organizations and provides technical insight and guidance to business and government organizations on their communication issues. Prior to her role as an industry analyst with Communication Initiatives and Forrester Research, Elizabeth held senior management positions with IBM, ROLM and Siemens ICN where she was a senior manager for strategic planning and alliances. Expertise Elizabeth’s expertise includes in-depth knowledge of unified communications,…...

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Today’s customers frequently use two or three communication channels, such as phone, email, social, mobile applications and Web, when engaging with businesses. However, the failure by companies to combine customer insight across all customer channels results in missed opportunities to improve business performance and gain competitive information. Although social channels are newer and contain a wealth of customer insight, they are often not integrated with other customer data sources. Due to this lack of comprehensive multichannel customer reporting companies often duplicate support processes and fail to take advantage of their existing workflows established with their traditional contact center operations. Lack of a holistic customer view affects marketing, sales, and service departments and may delay critical decisions regarding product positioning and service offerings.

Companies need a single dashboard of their customer that draws data from all channels for valuable customer insight and to understand the total customers experience. It is important to consider that today’s customer is more knowledgeable and relies heavily on social media communities when seeking out information. Because they are more demanding, customers expect consistent information, timely response to their social comments and personalized support regardless of channel.

Comprehensive customer insight supports better decisions for marketing, sales and service. Marketing departments have a major opportunity to quickly identify which products and services generate the most attention and evaluate how well their ad campaigns trigger the anticipated response. Sales organizations use cross channel information to identify competitive issues and measure customers’ sentiment. Service departments have a means to spot issues early and take steps to mitigate problems.

There are several vendors that offer applications for market analysis and reporting of social media behaviors. Most applications report only on social site activities and need to be combined with data from other channels to create an integrated customer view. When considering aggregating customer data look for products that will facilitate a real time and near real time collection of data across all communication channels. Vendors with notable multiple channel products for combining social media with web analytics include Attensity and Radian6.

Answers You Need Before Moving UC to the Cloud

Constellation Orbits
Constellation Research, Inc.

Elizabeth is a well-recognized industry-leading analyst. She was previously Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.  Prior to Constellation, Elizabeth spent eleven years at Forrester Research as vice president and principal analyst.  She has managed large consulting projects for business and government organizations and provides technical insight and guidance to business and government organizations on their communication issues. Prior to her role as an industry analyst with Communication Initiatives and Forrester Research, Elizabeth held senior management positions with IBM, ROLM and Siemens ICN where she was a senior manager for strategic planning and alliances. Expertise Elizabeth’s expertise includes in-depth knowledge of unified communications,…...

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Many IT execs that I meet are actively considering deploying Unified Communications (UC) Cloud solutions for voice, video, conferencing, messaging, and collaboration services. Virtualizing your UC communication infrastructure provides an affordable option for upgrades and frees your IT staff to focus their attention on other critical areas. While Cloud UC benefits, such as cost saving, convenience and faster deployment, are attractive alternatives for premise UC solutions, not all service providers are equal in their service delivery. Before you move ahead with a vendor’s UC cloud proposal, it is important to fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of their cloud platform.
Although the final decision should be made by evaluating comprehensive RFP responses, some initial probing may help you shorten your list of potential providers. Key questions for potential cloud service providers include:

• Network interoperability. Ask the vendor to what degree its network can interoperate and integrate with other network services across multiple UC technologies.

• Database support. What level of database integration support is provided by the vendor? Does it meet your specific requirements and what are the connectivity costs?

• Survivability. What level of redundancy can the provider deliver, such as 4 9’s, 5 9’s etc. Determine the platform’s fault tolerance and its ability to instantaneously failover in the case of a disaster? Also, ask for the geographical distance between data centers that provide redundancy. Nearby redundant back up from the main center is not sufficient due to potential severe weather disruptions.

• Security. This is a major issue for many and involves several components to meet your company’s requirements. For example, has the vendor established secure encrypted SSL or dedicated network connections and how often are applications reviewed for security compliance? There are multiple types and layers of security and all need to be formally addressed in an RFP.

• Latency issues for voice and video. Without low latency the quality of voice and video diminish quickly. Determine the latency for voice calls and video sent over the network. Use industry standards to evaluate the vendor’s capability in this area. For example a one way VoIP voice connections needs to be <200 milliseconds to be acceptable.

• Hidden costs. Be sure you fully calculate all vendor fees that are addition to core services. Additional fees typically include all premise based hardware, such as telephones, headsets, mobile devices, recorders, etc. Added services may also incur extra charges, such as Direct in Dial or mobile integration. Vendors’ fees vary for professional services such as design, configuration and implementation.

Cloud UC solutions hold much promise but are relatively new compared to more mature cloud services for data connectivity. Voice and video are real time and have additional requirements to ensure quality of services. As you delineate your service requirements create a service level agreement (SLA) that is realistic and well-defined and reflects the more stringent requirements for real time UC.

Siemens Enterprise Shores Up Its Cloud Offering With inContact Agreement

Constellation Orbits
Constellation Research, Inc.

Elizabeth is a well-recognized industry-leading analyst. She was previously Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.&nbsp; Prior to Constellation, Elizabeth spent eleven years at Forrester Research as vice president and principal analyst.&nbsp; She has managed large consulting projects for business and government organizations and provides technical insight and guidance to business and government organizations on their communication issues. Prior to her role as an industry analyst with Communication Initiatives and Forrester Research, Elizabeth held senior management positions with IBM, ROLM and Siemens ICN where she was a senior manager for strategic planning and alliances. Expertise Elizabeth’s expertise includes in-depth knowledge of unified communications,…...

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Siemens Enterprise Communications announced a new global distribution agreement with inContact, a cloud-based call center software provider to privately label, resell and support inContact solutions with a $24M equity investment. Siemens has also committed to pay a minimum of $15M in net software revenue to inContact over the next 2 years.

This partnership adds an important component to Siemens’ OpenScape Cloud, which delivers a comprehensive suite of Unified Communications (UC) applications. In February 2011 Siemens introduced its OpenScape Cloud offering that expanded its UC and collaborative applications solutions to the cloud. The partnership with inContact broadens its offerings with a feature-rich SaaS contact center cloud offering. It also enables Siemens to enter new accounts by selling specific contact center or communication applications without requiring the customer upgrade its existing communications or contact center infrastructure. During the last year UC vendors have been adding more cloud services to their portfolio and offering a hybrid mix of cloud and premise solutions.

Siemens has taken a lead relative to other UC vendors by having its entire UC product portfolio including contact center applications available in the cloud today. Siemens also will continue its support for the Genesys contact center software solution, which is highly regarded among large enterprises and believes its inContact solution will attract those customers that want a simpler and less complex call center solution. Although more than 90% of companies have premise based solutions for their contact centers, the robust double digit growth in contact center cloud services is notable.

Cloud based offerings are becoming more in demand, as vendors address security and reliability concerns and deliver new services with cost-effective subscription based pricing. Siemens expands its ability to reach its global customer base with a more complete cloud offering and bolster it managed services opportunities with this announcement. It remains an important communication market leader with an extensive global reach, despite its lack of stellar performance in North America (NA). For inContact, a leading cloud based provider in NA, this partnership extends its global coverage and market presence. Siemens recognizes the cloud market potential and has chosen a good partner to grow its revenues in this area. The announcement lacked specifics on the timing of the full integration but sales for the combined cloud portfolio begin immediately.

Contact Centers Not Prepared for Deluge of Social Media Customers

Constellation Orbits
Constellation Research, Inc.

Elizabeth is a well-recognized industry-leading analyst. She was previously Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.&nbsp; Prior to Constellation, Elizabeth spent eleven years at Forrester Research as vice president and principal analyst.&nbsp; She has managed large consulting projects for business and government organizations and provides technical insight and guidance to business and government organizations on their communication issues. Prior to her role as an industry analyst with Communication Initiatives and Forrester Research, Elizabeth held senior management positions with IBM, ROLM and Siemens ICN where she was a senior manager for strategic planning and alliances. Expertise Elizabeth’s expertise includes in-depth knowledge of unified communications,…...

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Customer support rules are rapidly changing, as unprecedented numbers of customers use social media channels to express options, seek assistance and purchase products. Customers have quickly adopted Facebook, Twitter and Google, as their primary means for gathering information regarding a company’s products and services. In many cases social media customers receive support from multiple departments within a company but are isolated from the contact center. This is because the traditional contact center is generally not ready for reaching out to the social customer or will only provide secondary support when its telephone agents are free. Regardless of how companies choose to market and support their social media customers, they should apply the same basic procedures found in contact centers to positively engage their customers.

Contact centers operations basically engage in the similar processes to ensure their customers receive the support needed. These tasks can be readily applied to customers who choose social media sites as their first choice to contact a company. Examples of these processes include:
• Identify the customer and request. With telephone interactions this may be done via an IVR that asks customers to identify themselves and reason for the call. On social channels, it requires a company to proactive monitor Facebook, Twitter and other sites and to sort and classify comments and queue for a response.
• Prioritize customers. Phone channels often use customer data bases to prioritize important customers and route requests to the appropriate party for handling. Social media requires access to the same customer profiles to classify and prioritize customer requests and ensure these requests are directed to the suitable resource for response.
• Solve issue. Traditional phone channels support their agents with knowledge bases and product information to quickly respond to the caller within a single session. Resources engaged to answer customer requests from a social site need the same access to product and customer information to deliver the same information as telephone agents.
• Provide adequate staffing. Phone and email channels typically use scheduling tools to ensure that the right amount of agents are available during busy times. Social channels must also respond back quickly to posted comments and not be delayed due to inadequate number of resources. Information posted on these sites goes viral quickly and require companies respond quickly to all relevant postings.
• Monitor and measure. Contact centers have numerous reporting tools that monitor and measure how well agents handle contacts and engage with customers. These tools form the foundation for efficient operations. Social media channels require the same attention to measurements. This includes metrics on the number of conversations on social media sites, transaction recordings, average handle times and accuracy.

Bottom line is that companies cannot afford to support social media customers with any less care than they do with traditional channel customers. Importantly, most companies already have the structural support tools in place and need to extend their core functions with some modifications to social sites. Although there are a few good examples of companies who understand this and are successfully supporting their social media customers, there are even more examples of major corporations who saw their brand badly tarnished by not paying attention to what was occurring over social media sites.