One of the major technology trends of the past few years has been the consumerization of technology adoption. Meaning, unlike in previous decades where the business market was the first one to adopt technology,  consumer applications or devices are now the leading edge of technology.

This trend has resulted in consumers (all of us)  pushing to make our employers and business relationships adopt the technology that we use most regularly.  Social Media networks like Facebook and mobile sms tools like Twitter are great examples of consumer apps being pushed into the business community to create  a new social crm channel.  Opening up these new tech empowered social crm channels has become a real challenge for businesses of any size.

Creating and sustaining  a customer, vendor, friend, social crm strategy has real strategic and tactical complexities as well as opportunities. For large consumer driven enterprises, the massive scale attached to managing social crm channels can become mind boggling.  There are two very good recent reports by Gartner and Altimeter covering these social CRM trends.

With many billions of customer service contacts each year at an average per call cost (domestically or off shore) measured at $5.00  adding tens of billions of additional consumer interactions requires new thinking and tools.

Of course, these  new consumer channels need to flow through the businesses contact centers. Yet, this rapidly becomes a tsunami of  real time communications and social media traffic  that will test the capacity of any contact center.  More vitally, consumer expectations have changed. Proactive responses into the consumers’ preferred communication channel are the new standard. The traditional  metric of first call resolution within so many hours is dramatically out of step in a world of consumers posting their negative experiences to their networks of hundreds and thousands.  The old saying that a happy customer tells 5 people and an angry customer tells 25 people  about his experience needs to be exponentially updated.

To add even more complexity, an old issue creeps up again , identity verification, becomes even more important as we add millions if not billions of consumer contacts into these channels. Most of us have had email or Facebook viruses impact our identity for at least a short while.  On the other hand few of us have lost our phone number as an identifier.

CEBP solutions like VoiceSage can provide integral functionality within these social crm solutions.  Fortunately, VoiceSage’s ability to leverage  telco grade database queries (depending on country) offers a fast and simple method to provide identity verification for any consumer facing enterprise. These types of massive data queries are no longer a function of hardware but of programming interfaces and regulatory guidelines.

I’ve  previously touched on this theme of CEBP solutions as a glue technology. Social media and mobile technologies are the tools of choice for consumers.  Connecting, pulling, leveraging these consumer tools with traditional enterprise contact center or crm technologies is not being done well now. CEBP solutions can be used to connect these two distinct worlds.

CEBP solutions allow our enterprise clients to buy themselves time to open these new social media/mobile communication channels without drowning their business in scale or fraud issues.

Patrick Murphy

VoiceSage USA

The US postal service is once again running billions of dollars in deficits. Its total volume continues to decline by billions of pieces each year. The number of employee layoffs increases. The requests for rates increases and reduced services continues. A Newsweek post argues that this decline in the postal service is actually good for the economy.

My colleagues in the UK tell me about the rather unique tradition of regular postal strikes that tend to be timed to cause maximum disruption near holidays. To be fair, it can be argued that the Royal Mail may have turned the corner at least from a financial perspective if not with service improvements. Their total volume continues to decline too. Despite declining volumes, revenues, and technical obsolence postal services remain some of the world’s largest employers.

Despite these negative signs it is understood there are remaining social contexts and regulatory demands for ubiquitous mail services.Yet, that is really the only supporting argument. Many of the  business related reasons for using traditional mail are obviously outdated already. For the majority of us the mail has become a test of our commitment to recycling rather than a useful government service. It is difficult to imagine a true transformation of something now popularly referred to as snail mail.

At the same time, we can look at the Telco industry (once also a government protected monopoly) and ask if it has a hope of evolving into anything more than a dumb pipe. The next question that comes to my mind may seem a bit unusual.

What if Telcos or possibly a major CEBP focused business process outsourcer decided they were going to directly compete for business revenue and functions that traditionally go to the postal service?

For major Telcos and BPOs  the first question is whether the potential market  is large enough. Are there billions rather than millions in potential revenue? The postal service is a perfect example of a two sided market that benefits from winner take all economies. Thus, the revenue numbers attached to even niche processes such as enterprise sent consumer mail  are in the tens of billions of dollars in the US and hundreds of billions globally.

The  only major difference between the business functions provided by the  postal service and CEBP solutions is in terms of the  marketing function.  At least in the US and UK, permission based marketing is the regulated and cultural standard for telco inspired solutions .  A similarly enforced permission based marketing regulation would be the final nail in the coffin of mass mail marketers who rely on gross volume to generate  single digit responses.

This “marketing” difference is not as clear cut in many developing countries that use affinity marketing as a means to subsidise mobile phone adoption and mobile payment transactions.  Interestingly, I wonder if many of these same countries have as strong a history of government sponsored mail services compared to the UK and US.

This current marketing difference is more a problem of creative business models and culture than one of technology. Being able to proactively send a customer a targeted appreciated  marketing message by voice or sms will become more common as consumers and retailers  continue to get comfortable with social media and understand the value of creating opt in permissions for their trusted networks of friends and businesses.  Marketing guru Seth Godin bluntly describes the difference in business models as smart versus dumb.

If one goes through the range of reasons why mail has traditionally been most useful for all industries VoiceSage’s clients have already found many more productive solutions through the use of our CEBP application. In many instances the client uses CEBP solutions to remove the need for postal mail entirely from their processes. In other cases the enterprise uses CEBP solutions to improve the experience of any remaining paper based communications.

Our  UK, Irish, and US based VoiceSage clients rely on CEBP solutions to provide logistics, collections, communications, and customer service  business process improvements every day.  With a global Telco or BPO style strategic partner, new VoiceSage clients in parts of EMEA could immediately tap the marketing power of CEBP.

We have never thought of ourselves as competing with the largest postal services in the world. Maybe we should.

Patrick Murphy

VoiceSage USA

July 12th, 2010

Sometimes working in and around customer service environments gives you an opportunity to stand back from a situation and just see it from above, and most importantly, from “outside”. Seeing first hand how failures in notification, communication and co-ordination effectively destroyed customer trust really brought home to me, again, how much value there is in CEBP coupled with service design and a customer experience focus.

Recently I was in the United Kingdom and hired a car to get from A to B for an important family event. The short version of the story is that car was malfunctioning badly, and only barely got me to my destination, shaken and stirred. This is where my customer experience journey began. First of all let me outline how that proceeded.

(1) When I phoned the hire company they told me to phone the breakdown service.

(2) The breakdown service gave me an ETA of within an hour, and turned up 3 hours later.

(3) They didn’t actually fix the car, and next day it didn’t work, so I was late form my family event. I had to get cabs, back and forth and pretty much I lost half my day.

(4) I phone the breakdown service and am told I can’t book ahead for a mechanic, I have to call from my hotel and wait until one shows.

(5) I phone the car hire company and am told that unless the car it toable I won’t be able to get a replacement, or/ and could I bring it back to the airport to get a new one today, because they are understaffed and can’t get out to me.

(6) Mechanic arrives but didn’t know the car type, my phone number, or any other details, that made it hard for him to find me on site. I had given them to the customer care people fronting the breakdown service, who were representing the car hire company and were “there employees” Anyway, the guy fixes the car.

(7) I call the car hire company, and front desk apologizes for the bad experience I’ve had, and she says obviously we won’t be charging you.

(8) Next day I get back to the airport and the staff at front desk have no record of my interactions and my experience to date, they can’t refund me because of some technical issues, and I’m given the name and email address of the location manager.

(9) I email the location manager with a full, and detailed description of my experience on the next working day, Tuesday morning. I don’t receive any notification that my email has been received or read. Nobody contacts me on the next business day (Wed) to tell me they are on top of this etc so I phone them. As a part of this telephone conversation I am assured a cheque will be issued, and that the systems did have my details, and that the notes on my experience were on the system.

(10) Today, still no cheque. Still no notification from the company as to where it is in process: is it sent, is it in the mail, when can I expect it to arrive? Still no trust in the company. Real and significant Brand Damage potential.

Some Take Away Points:

(1)  ”My experience” was what I lived, and what lives with me. That’s just how human memory works. You may have many good reasons why things just didn’t work out, but that’s not how the customer will view it;

(2) Although “Company” are not “crazy bad” the cumulative effect of all the mis-matches, mis-communications, and un-ordinations is that I lost Trust. Once my Trust was gone, no amount of reason would bring it back. Customer experience is almost an “emergent quality”, a culmination of all the little things you get right.

(3) It could have been all very different. Let me hypothesize another scenario.

Using CEBP to Delivery Customer Care Experience

(1) You take my phone number and make it a unique identification. When I ring you, you should know who I am. You tell me who to ring if there are any problems and you send two numbers to my phone (via sms/ email/ or as a contact) so that I have those numbers at point of need.

(2) You ask do I have a map to get me to my location; have I been on this journey before; you ascertain if there are any special contexts to my journey that might enable you to understand my total journey (going to a wedding, important meeting, holiday etc.). You figure out what kind of traveller type I am.

(3) When the car breaks down, I call the number I have been given and the person I was last speaking to answers at the front desk. She greets me by name and listens to my problem. While on the call she locates the AA service, ascertains where I am, and directs them to my location. She assures me that they will be there in under 20 minutes, and informs me that if the mechanic thinks it will be more than 20 minutes to fix when he gets there, they can arrange a cab back to the hotel, and the car will be delivered to the hotel car park for me. Basically don’t worry, we’ve got your back.

(4) At 20 minutes after our call, the AA is running late due to traffic. An automated call is generated by the AA (reading the van location and the traffic flow) calling me, and telling me that my AA mechanic John, is approximately 20 minutes behind time. If I’d like to activate a call to a local cab company to get a taxi sent to my location, just press 1) and you will be connected to the nearest taxi cab provider.

(5) The AA mechanic receives an email with all my relevant details: my name, the make of car, the hotel I need to go to, and the name of the person to contact in the hire company if anything more needs to be arranged. This is all a part of their Service Breakdown InterAct. The mechanic fixes the car and signs off on his mobile device that the car is fixed and the job is closed out. This triggers a call to the car hire front desk and to the customer. The AA mechanic drives it to the local hotel, and gets a cab back to his own van.

(6) Because the Car Fix event has been closed out the car hire people are prompted to phone the customer to ensure that they made it to their event on time, and also to ascertain how they felt about how the Car Hire Company has responded to the situation. Would you use us again? recommend this service to a friend etc.? OK. Push button 1 to activate your credit card repayment. Thank you for your continued custom.

(7) I receive a full report from the car hire company detailing the days events, the times and reports from all parties, and a total due balance of zero on my statement.

So Finally, Finally.

I saw a lot of comparisons with my Ashcloud experience. In this instance it was the car company that was impacting on my wider life, on my connections, on my commitments. The car hire company needed to co-ordinate with other service providers such as the car repair service providers, potentially with taxi cab companies, with airports, and with other car hire providers. They were part of a network of service providers and being able to Pull on the Resources of these other providers in a real time, synchronized fashion was the key to delivery. Of course, getting your own systems, processes, and people lined up properly in the first place is stage one.

We regularly talk about unlocking Value at the Edge of our clients’ businesses. What we mean is that using real time voice and sms communications with consumers consistently has a positive effect within the enterprise.

What has caught my attention recently is how the VoiceSage CEBP application can be easily connected into other enterprise solutions in ways that create synergies and  add value at an even faster rate than we have experienced so far.

I have had two recent gotcha moments where I figured out that our VoiceSage client experiences are the same

everywhere. Reading the May 24th issue of Information Week, the headline asks “Are your Apps smart enough.” Then it states “Until embedded Business Intelligence can tap into real- time transactions, decision support will be stuck in the past.” At VoiceSage we have been referring to this lack of real time decision making and consumer communication as the “Lags and Drags” within the enterprise. Last week, I noticed a Tweet coming out of the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. It stated that conference attendees want to see more about business value creation and less about tools.  The VoiceSage mantra is we move business metrics.

BI tools or status reports from various enterprise software tools  are notoriously bad at informing real time communications to the customer facing staff, let alone  moving beyond the walls of the enterprise directly to the consumer. Over time, BI can provide management data but it rarely helps front line staff immediately. For the world we live in,  real time reporting, decisions, and communication is becoming a requirement. Our experience ramping up American Airlines to communicate  with their volcanic, stranded  passengers sets the expectation bar a lot higher now.

If we consider a single core business process that makes economies run, like scheduling a meeting with the customer in person,virtually, or  by phone it is easy to see the inherent weaknesses in major classes of enterprise software solutions including CRM, BPM, BI, HCMS, UC, and ERP.

How can we most effectively connect  and  directly communicate with the consumer or our staff around the globe. More specifically, can an appointment be automatically made, confirmed, reminded or changed between a customer and an available, knowledgeable company representative? It sounds simplistic but it is not being done within consumer facing business processes. Just by focusing on effectively and efficiently scheduling customer/client/ or patient meetings we have seen dramatic improvements in ROI.

The complete lack of embedded real time, interactive voice and sms communication processes is strikingly absent from so many other software solutions today.  Obviously at VoiceSage we are working with vendor partners to change this now.  Just as importantly, we approach every client with a direct question before we engage them. What business process do you want to improve?

Just as real time data is a requirement in the financial markets and media world, real time data combined with real time communication functionality is becoming a requirement when dealing with consumers.  Consumers now expect proactive,personalized,  interactive communications from their preferred brands.

By adding an ability to enrich real time communication  using other “edge” data we can begin to see how business transformation may look over the next few years  Furthermore, the massive investments and expectations from enterprise software are not going to be fully realized without the real time functionality and “Value creation at the Edge” that is provided by CEBP applications.

As a standalone application VoiceSage has proven its ability to move business metrics. Working  across the enterprise suite of existing corporate software solutions VoiceSage can help unlock true business transformation.

Patrick Murphy

VoiceSage USA

June 21, 2010

During the first day of the crises VoiceSage was up and running with pro-active notifications to stranded American Airline customers within four hours. This is from “no relationship” to full interaction with their client base. There was no integration project, it was “loosely coupled, tightly integrated” in conception. American Airlines could have adapted, augmented, extended the messaging and interaction intent at any time, in real time. No, its not the full journey, but its a long way down the road.

Feelings of Abandonment

As the world becomes more and more interconnected the speed with which companies and individuals have to react to events changes. The ashcloud event left hundreds of thousands of people stranded, away from home, away from family. I was stranded comfortably at home but I was due to go to eComm in San Francisco. Many companies have a hard enough time living up to the demands of customers in times of ‘business as usual.’  Yet I am betting that people end up talking to others about the companies that responded “exceptionally well”, that were “just awesome’, that “totally made me feel I was going to be looked after, eventually”.

You see, the customers biggest fear was that they were going to be abandoned. The amount of frustration that people experienced on not being able to reach a call center was palpable. I tried myself. Tried to log onto my airline site as well to check the status of MY flight. No luck. Worse than no luck, no screens at all. Eventually I found the various airports on twitter and followed them for updates. I followed most of the e-vent on twitter after that. A brief check in this morning with the various airlines and airport twitter profiles shows them very active. I suspect that for many people this event has turned them onto social media for “practical purposes”.

Ashcloud Sparks Social Media Continuity Response?

Dan Levy at Sparksheet.com has an interesting survey of the Post Ash Airline Customer Care landscape.

(1) Inform: Not just what is the flight status, but how to rebook (add link?), what might be around your specific location that might be of help, provide links to more specific content. Airlines could have gone a step further and understood that the customer really needed help with their extended network of relationships. Who was waiting for them? Had they rented cars? How will delays affect their extended journey?

(2) Reassure: Examples given by Dan Levy include giving people hope by tweeting that some other people were getting flights, or had found hotels, etc. Standard positive reinforcement. But I think there was also the opportunity to let people see that you are ramping up as an organization, that you are getting on top of it, that your agents had now “rebooked 25% of all passengers” etc.

(3) Engage: Employees of the company engaged directly with passengers by replying to their twitter messages, or in such media as the company’s Facebook page. Passengers then shared the information they were given with others. An employee might have posted a link to Transport maps for Dublin for one stranded passenger, only to find that this passenger was now sharing and spreading this information in multiple social sites, and on the ground.

Enacting A Social Contact Strategy

Mark Tamis in a conversation elsewhere a few weeks ago, reminded me that to reap the rewards of a well defined and managed Social Strategy you need to have a Data Strategy, and Data Analytics capability.

There is indeed lots of information out there that could be made available at the right time, and right place. But there is usually data within the company itself that is a good predictor of customer behavior. Mark gives an example of where companies send out a win-back call when a customer terminates an account.  If they have high variability in their bill, or there are other standard preconditions to someone leaving the company, call them before they leave! (duh). In this Ashcloud instance the company might have used its data analytics capability to communicate with high value customers, or customers with more than 2 children, or with children under the age of 5. The company may have chosen to give first offers on Hotel bookings in a way that maximized customer lifetime value.

Meta Strategy: from Real Time to Right Time?

David Pakman seems to have initiated a discussion about the various merits of real-time versus right-time.

The Ashcloud customer service crises exemplifies how real time access to everything isn’t always useful. What we the customer want is the real-useful information at the right time. What would have been useful? Well if I was stranded in Dublin airport and my flights were not going to happen, I would have liked a proactive message from my airline alerting me to this fact as soon as possible, and giving me the option to connect to a local hotel to book a room ASAP. I would like the airline to tell me that they were able to get me this offer now because they used their existing relationship with this hotel to free up as many rooms as possible. I would like to be able to hear what the next bus time is, or to be told where the taxi’s to the city center are. I might even want to be inform my credit card company that I am in another country overnight and to honor my credit card requests.

Culture of Right Person, Right Time

Lior Arussy on mycustomer.com has a very human response to the logistical nightmare. Things to praise: smiles, friendliness, hotels that check how are you doing, will you need to stay another night? We’re not going to charge you excessively for that by the way, come talk to us. The system hasn’t got you booked in? Let me do what I can to fix that for you…. This is what people will remember. I have heard that in Lanzarote the hotels actually reduced the price of an additional night if you were stranded, and gave you vouchers for half price meals in town. The opposite seems to have happened in Amsterdam. Which location has the culture that you want to experience as a holiday destination?

Somehow these people “shared your experience”, and not with a knowing nod, but with real concern and actions that demonstrated that they were “going beyond the machine” to help you. What you were “feeling” is that you have been touched by the culture and values of the people that make up that company.  That you were being cared for.

Outcomes- Power of Pull Networks?

An airline that shuts off its website and has a call center you can’t get through to is displaying the signs of being overwhelmed. The structures, the systems, the people could not scale or adapt to the new situation.  The airlines that had the capability of pulling together many different resources, companies and people to get “the job done”, had a 21st Century Network, or “Pull” capability.

Those airlines that were able to reach out, at the right time, and right place, to give the right information, and make the right connections, for an extended context, were part of a pull network. They were co-ordinating and orchestrating processes using real time information. I think this lesson will be extended to other contexts and other industries really soon. The power of networked organisations; the power of culture; the power of enabled employees and enabled customers; the power of pulling information and actions together quickly “at the edge”; I think we’ve all learned a lot from this crises.

Explore Tags: ashcloud, CEBP, customer service., SCRM, voicesage

In at least 4 recent articles Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) messaging was being used to push renewed enthusiasm for non CEBP product offerings. Several articles or posts in NetworkWorld and UC strategies provided a recap of the Unified Communications Summit which focused on CEBP messaging as a way to sell the value of UC solutions. Reduxonline also referenced CEBP messaging relative to needed BPM (business process management) product iterations.

Now, VoiceSage as a world class CEBP hosted application has been evangelizing the CEBP message, improving our enterprise clients’ business processes, and focusing on creating hard and fast ROIs for many years.

Given the new interest in CEBP by UC, BPM and other solutions it is important to take a deeper look at how VoiceSage can be used by our clients or partners as an ” over the top” application to provide the equivalent of glue or a lever for these other applications.

There are lots of ways the VoiceSage application can make up for current limitations in the standard UC and BPM suite of solutions. Here are two big examples.

1. SILOS
Interoperability between vendor specific UC solutions is a big problem that is dampening down the CIO enthusiasm needed to drive UC purchases. Interestingly, there is a new protocol being presented by Cisco and other vendors refered to as Viper or Verification involving PSTN Reachability. The purpose of this protocol is to find a simple, realtime method of recognizing if/when phone numbers within different UC systems can be recognized, authorized and reached. This would help to bring competing UC installations beyond the silo of the enterprise.

One of the hidden assets of CEBP solutions is, like Telcos, they have enormous amounts of data that come attached to telephone numbers. The vital, real time requirement to identify whether a phone number is working and attached to the right party is what the VIPER protocol requires. In its simplest terms the Viper protocol would act as a shared database that can be accessed by varied and competing UC solutions to authenticate numbers. CEBP solutions like VoiceSage already have this functionality and often possess a realtime database that rivals anything easily leveraged within even a single telco.

In the BPM world, if a human is required within a particular process, email tends to be the only notification option. CEBP moves BPM beyond the walls of the enterprise by leveraging voice and sms functionality while providing simple ways to pull consumers around the world into a process too.

VoiceSage’s ability to quickly glue together or leverage other solutions in our work with the National Health Service or the world’s largest business database firm provides just two examples of how our CEBP tool can strengthen other solutions.

2. SCALE
UC and BPM solutions are frequently limited in their scalability by being attached to standard server license or hardware focused business models as opposed to cloud applications. Furthermore, UC solutions can be limited by the IP or PSTN infrastructure of the enterprise they are serving. VoiceSage as a SaaS or Cloud Communications service provides a platform for our clients and vendor partners to overcome these real time scale issues. A spectacular example of the power of CEBP scalability is VoiceSage’s work in bringing American Airlines on board within 4 hours to help respond to the volcanic ash cloud disruptions.

Our experience shows the vast majority of important business process improvements required by the world’s largest industries involve communicating beyond the walls of the enterprise to thousands or millions of customers. BPM and UC solutions have a distinct disadvantage when the requirement is consumer scale at a truly domestic or international level. VoiceSage clients and vendor partners can scale up,down, or around the world to meet the real time needs of their customers.

UC, BPM, and other application vendors are certainly beginning to come to terms with their Silo and Scale challenges. In a world driven by the ubiquitous mobile device using sms or voice as the preferred method of consumer transaction, CEBP solutions can be used to glue other applications and leverage business processes immediately.

VoiceSage allows our clients and partners to improve their own business processes and at the same time better utilize existing software investments. When we talk about this internally we talk about “edge processes”. It means we strive to understand how we can deliver improved business performance by using our transactional business model. This allows us to eliminate the capital expenses, eliminate large integration project costs, and eliminate the long wait to achieve ROI. In essence, we strive for Win/Win/Win business models that are by definition unbeatable!

Patrick Murphy
May 13, 2010
USA

Explore Tags: BPMS, CEBP, Cisco, Unified Communications, Viper, voicesage

Despite the volcanic eruption that shut down much of Europe last week,  the US version of the biannual ECOMM event was certainly a success.

Although I have been following ECOMM since 2008 and VoiceSage has sponsored the 2009 EU event this was the first time I had the chance to attend.

ECOMM is three full days of presentations done in 12 to 15 minute bites. A couple of keynote speakers may be allowed 20 minutes but even they are subject to the time clock “gong”.  The goal of the event is to be a force in reshaping the world’s telecommunications industry. The first two days of this event were primarily focused on Telco subjects that are current but may still be considered cutting edge by the main stream media.

The third day was dedicated to Augmented Reality which by everyone’s definition is on the bleeding edge of technical innovations. My takeaway from Day 3 was a simple one. There are seriously talented people spending a lot of time and money in AR. Over the next few years, we will see amazing results.

On Day 2, I had the opportunity to present the VoiceSage Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) story in a way that everyone in the room could appreciate. Our  amazingly fast response helping American Airlines deal with their passenger communications needs during the volcanic disruptions across Ireland and the UK showed the power of CEBP applications and Cloud Communications in general.  The previous keynote speakers, including Martin Geddes, had all used the language of CEBP or touched on the topic briefly.  Fortunately, I had the opportunity to drill into CEBP and differentiate VoiceSage as a leader in the space with our focus on moving clients’ business metrics.

Telcos are looking for new ways to replace traditional revenue streams that are going away. CEBP applications clearly open up billion dollar business process optimization market opportunities.  One variation on this theme is for Telcos to open up or buy API platforms that will leverage  their infrastructure to the innovative creations of the world’s developers. In my opinion, the few big winners and many losers have already been decided in the Telco API space.

However, regardless of their size or scale,  firms that view themselves  as developer platforms miss the game changing opportunity to directly understand and impact clients’ business processes in the valuable way that is  available to VoiceSage or other CEBP applications. Replacing billions in old telco landline revenue with millions in developer api revenues is the tradeoff that many Telcos are grudgingly reviewing now. Replacing billions in landline revenue with billions in enterprise class CEBP revenue is a tradeoff that is also  available to Telcos but will appeal to a wider variety of enterprise focused vendors too.

Thanks to ECOMM, this CEBP message is being heard widely and clearly.

Patrick Murphy

VoiceSage USA

April 26th, 2010

We have made good progress over the past few weeks with VoiceSage’s launch into America. Mark Oppermann, VoiceSage’s Sales Director, spent a week with me in and around Boston talking with partners and potential clients.

One of the highlights of this visit was our chance to provide a keynote presentation called Social Media meets the Contact Center for the NECCF Spring event. This is a slightly edited version of the presentation that we gave to the folks in attendance. I am confident we will be seeing lots more of the NECCF community. Our practical message that VoiceSage helps enterprises move their business metrics using a variety of phone and web tool sets was very well received. The questions about great business cases were fantastic. The business challenges seem to be the same regardless of where we are in  the world.

A second highlight was our meeting with members of the Dialogic team. VoiceSage has been a long time Dialogic customer and is now a member of their partner program. Dialogic has been an early advocate and enthusiastic supporter of the CEBP space. We look forward to working with them.

We enjoy providing a bit of a promotion to the April ECOMM conference being held in San Francisco. I will be attending with colleague Paul Sweeney. VoiceSage sponsored the ECOMM European event last Fall. This is always a fantastic gathering of thought leaders in the Telco industry. For those not able to attend in person, I would encourage following the event via several virtual back channels that are available.

Sincerely

Patrick Murphy

VoiceSage USA

April, 2010

Explore Tags: CEBP, Dialogic, ECOMM, NECCF, voicesage

Thomas Howe gives VoiceSage some airtime on his respected Industry Blog www.thomashowe.com The only picture of me poor Thomas could dig up is a few years old now and before the arrival of my two daughters, so if you meet me, no I am not ill

Thomas is a leading light in the next generation of Telco services, particularly in the area of Cloud Communications technologies and an advisor and service provider to some of the leading Telecommunications companies, vendors, and new entrants.

Explore Tags: ThomasHowe VoiceSage

This week the Operations Division of VoiceSage announced the second phase of their strategic rollout of Service Management processes.

Four new jobs are envisioned for the service desk, incident management and problem management processes. The investment has taken the form of hardware, software, new accommodation, as well as increased staffing levels within the department. The first of the new members of staff have already been recruited and will be joining the team for on-boarding and training in mid April

Commenting on the increased capacity Hugh O’Malley, Operations Manager said “the investment from the board will allow the service management function to improve effectiveness and drive efficiencies through the service deliver processes. The money also confirms VoiceSage’s commitment to providing our customers with the best customer experience.”

In tandem with service support investment this week has also seen a huge investment in the form of new infrastructure. The infrastructure is an integral part of VoiceSage’s commitment to IT Service Continuity. The new hardware with multiple node and element redundancy builds upon the ‘always on’ nature of VoiceSage.

Explore Tags: Jobs Ireland investment ITIL ITSM