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
