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

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

One of the VoiceSage company goals entering 2010 was to launch across the USA. So, I was excited to join VoiceSage a few months ago after seeing its fantastic success with the largest enterprise clients across the UK and Ireland.

In this CEBP, Cloud Communications or Telco 2.0 industry (pick your definition), that I’ve worked to grow and written about here in the US since it’s inception, we have seen years of talk, research, and pointing towards a future filled with opportunities.

However, VoiceSage stands out as unique within the industry simply because it has been able to create real value for the largest and most demanding clients across Retail, Utilities, Government, Healthcare, Banking,Insurance, and the Telco markets. For a company of any size, anywhere, the VoiceSage client base in the UK and Ireland is impressive.

Over these first few months, our “soft” launch into America has been recognized by thought leaders across the industry. Here are a few mentions.

During the Telco 2.0, Orlando Executive Brainstorm conference in December, Thomas Howe’s CEBP presentation to the crowd of Telco executives identified VoiceSage and Ifbyphone as the two leading examples of CEBP solutions in the world.

In January, VoiceSage was invited to join two CEBP panels as part of the ITEXPO’s Cloud Communications Summit in Miami Beach. Here is a video link to one of our panel discussions.

In February, VoiceSage was mentioned as an industry leader in an interesting article about the difference between CEBP and Unified Communications by UC-Edge.

VoiceSage was invited to add our thoughts on improving customer experiences using CEBP with an essay in the Cloud Communications 2010 ebook being published later in March. This book has a stellar cast of industry participants and will certainly be required reading throughout the telecommunications industry.

The NorthEast Contact Center Forum asked VoiceSage to offer a keynote presentation during its March 23rd Summit near Boston. The theme is Social Media meets the Contact Center. We are excited to share client uses cases from a wide variety of our customers’ experiences.

Finally, we will be attending and supporting the Spring ECOMM event in San Francisco in April. This event is certainly where the future of Telco gets talked about and launched. VoiceSage sponsored the Fall ECOMM conference in Europe.

With this progress, VoiceSage’s launch across the US is just getting started. Be sure to look for regular VoiceSage announcements and updates coming soon.

Sincerely
Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage
March, 2010

Explore Tags: CEBP, Cloud Communications, ECOMM, NECCF, voicesage

Telco2 4th Executive brainstorm was last week, and it was in London, and it was some fun. It was also a little worrying. Thomas Howe did a great job of summing up over on Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Perhaps it is a problem of “big numbers”. There is still money in connectivity and IT outsourcing. The Telco’s can’t seem to get their heads around how to get started, and even it’s worth doing. How to and why they should expose API’s is an unknown. And these are some very big numbers, it is perhaps difficult to get excited. Now a bit of a drum roll please….

VoiceSage announced that a major study had come in from a large client showing an 800% overall improvement in the processes enabled by VoiceSage. Uh hum. Yes. VoiceSage brought their cash in 100% faster and the cascading effects of this were significant. So when I was saying we can make dramatic offers, I wasn’t joking. Now here is the kicker: “Every $1 spent with VoiceSage makes or saves you $12″: again, validated.

So what’s with the big diagram folks? (HT Dion Hinchcliffe) The Web and the Company will mash together. The ease with which this is possible has the potential to release a lot of new data, and create a benefits that are orders of magnitude above what current IT deployments are able to achieve. Oh and as I was at Telco2, Dion and his crew were building, in realtime, applications within the new Google hosted development environment. So, under the floor boards, the ants were already swarming.

So, I can build an application in the cloud, host it in the cloud, scale it in the clowd, and promote it through Google, and manage the logistics of delivery through Amazon. That’s cute. And what do Telco’s do? We do what we always do, we provide you with connectivity……..

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

Explore Tags: device ecosystems, Dion Hinchcliffe, Google App Engine, Outsourcing, voice2.0, voicesage, web 2.0

Telco2.0 is brought to the industry by STL partners and its executive brainstorm is positioned as a genuinely open environment where industry people can challenge their own assumptions and gain insights. Let me boil it all down for you:

(1) “if the browser is the gateway to the pipe, how in the world are telco’s going to make some serious money”?

(2) “is there anything in the mobile experience that can be tied to the telco network capabilities that delivers superior user experience”

(3)”to get real breakthrough services, you need to have a deep understanding of the social-anthropological background that people use these services in: social networking is a result of peoples de-communitisation in the physical realm, that’s why they play with age, identity, and relationships in the virtual realm”.

(4) “what’s the point of innovating at the edge where even complete absorption of the online advertising industry would barely move the needle for the CEO of a major telco” (actually those figures are quite frightening).

There is just so much money involved in network based investments that its hard to walk away from this kind of thinking. This is where Martin Geddes analogy of the experience of the shipping industry when it moved to the container based model had its real import: “the money was in shipping. with containers, it moved to the ports”. I took this to mean “the edges”. This is big strategic thinking here, and I am not sure how many people in the room really understood this. Sure, graphs and charts of value migration might have hammered the point home, but the overall narrative in the room was still rooted in “we have huge assets, how can we muscle in”.

Our CTO Graham Brierton had a clear idea of what the telco’s needed to do to support innovation and companies like VoiceSage: hosted apps, hosted services, hosted data, common standards.

Finally, I think that VoiceSage received a lot of very positive attention at the event as a great example of the “new thinking”. We met a few people that very much “got it”, and we look forward to continuing the conversation.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

Explore Tags: brainstorm, conference, telco2.0, voicesage

This thought may strike some people as a bit strange, but innovation is happening at the edge of networks, at the edge of social networks, and in the edges of the enterprise, and in short, at the edge of your business. Sick of waiting 12 months for an approval process, business process owners such as Customer Service Directors, and Logistics Managers, are making smaller below the radar adoptions of products and services. Customers are adopting new and innovative ways of interacting with you, through blog posts, wiki contributions, ratings, or even forming pressure groups on facebook. Companies like GetSatisfaction are doing a great job of inverting the customer service issue and making “problems” and “issues” public, and encouraging customers to help each other out, often called “crowdsourcing” customer service. These trends are a big deal.

The same thing is happening from the Telco perspective. The big innovations aren’t solely happening in the core of the network, in the network switches, and fibre optics. They are happening when customers decide to use a capability in a new way, that suits them and their particular sets of needs. A lot of people are calling this 2.0 Thinking. Here’s an example I came across today, and already two people I know are using it. Damien Mulley pointed out that you can use Google Mail to filter spam from your eircom (or any other) account. eircom have a nice product in providing you with a hosted security service, but with google buying out postini how long before I can get a similar hack or mash up for this functionality?

Now imagine that I am connected to a network of other people that can share tips such as these, and that I can share them, and adopt them easily. Yes, free voicemail. Yes, Free conference calling. Free wireless roaming. Free International calling. The only thing stopping this now are information asymmetries ( a fancy way of saying you just didn’t hear about it because there are barriers to you hearing it). Well most of these functionalities are available on facebook, today, and as social networks open out to each other, pretty soon everyone else. Once your friends start using it, so will you.

When you give customers access to your product, allow them change what they wish, recombine, customise, re-purpose, you open out a world of opportunity. One company might use VoiceSage for an appointment remindering service another might use a variation of this routine for soccer practice or event management. So far, so traditional. You sent messages, and take messages from the people that you know.

However, more and more of our presence and friendships take place, or are mediated, by our internet participation. In a company, it might be ok to have a click to call button straight to my work number from the company website, but do I want that capability from my Facebook profile? The difference here is context, and context is everything. Do I want to hear from someone that knows someone that I know when I am in city I am travelling to? meetup, pairup.

FOWA (Future of Web Apps) London was some fun, and from a 2.0 technical perspective, interesting. What was missing (besides the GetSatisfaction guys) was a clear sense of how 2.0 thinking was going to effect the enterprise space (or E2 as it’s been monikered). Now comes the time for the Telco to think about its role in this whole emerging ecosystem.

More interesting for us is that VoiceSage will now be presenting in the Innovators Zone of Telco 2.0 Brainstorm in London, Oct 16th to 18th. Not only is this a global forum on the future of the internet and telecommunications, but some of the true thought leaders in the space will also be there. Strong Irish contingent at the show, unsurprisingly, as Ireland has a cluster of telecommunications software and services companies. Acision, Aepona, Openet, as well as Google, Yahoo.

One of the core themes in the show is Voice and Messaging, and what is next in that arena, because that is what is driving value today, and what will continue to drive value in the future, a future that is looking far from bright for traditional telcos.

Wondering what is driving internet stocks up and telecoms stocks down? One word: Google. Its thus even more of an honour to be guest panelist speakers for this thread. Later in the day Thomas Howe, he of US Voice Mashup fame will be giving a presentation and we look forward to what Thomas has to say. For those of you interested in that kind of thing, you can see a presentation Thomas gave here.

VoiceSage is invited to this kind of conference because we are not an ordinary company. The next six months will see a lot of interesting developments coming out of this company. How do you know you are doing something right?

Key “2.0 questions” to ask yourself if you produce a product or service :

- Am I doing everything I can to build applications that learn from your users?
- Does my application get better with more users, or just more busy and more crowded?
- If “Data is the Intel Inside” of Web 2.0, what data do I own?
- What user-facing services can I build against it?
- Does my platform give me and my users control, or take it away from us?

Source:ReadWriteWeb.

So, I’ll put the offer out there again: “If you are a leading edge 2.0 Company, give me a call. I want to work with you”. Simple message. Lets see what happens.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

Explore Tags: brainstorm, conference, telco2.0, voicesage

Well some people must be reading this blog because we’ve had a number of enquiries about enabling web2.0, voice 2.0, and related services. Thanks for getting in touch and there are some interesting projects coming forward. We are also about to make a number of announcements about client wins with our enterprise offerings so stay tuned. We will also get to talk a little about the results our clients have been achieving through the service, and that will be good too.

Now some other notes:

(1) Mashups have begun in earnest, and I’ve liked to just keep an eye on one sector in particular and that’s real estate. It ticks a number of boxes for me in terms of people cruise the internet looking at pricing of houses in their area, they compare other areas, and its fairly high involvment as a decision type. Maps has proved to be a very valuable baseline asset; now if you can get others to overlay their data assets you begin to get some serious analytical capabilities. For example see www.nestoria.co.uk which has built up a huge amount of interest through this kind of strategy. Now take something like a map of reported crime figures and overlay this data http://www.mibazaar.com/unsafecities/ overlay data relating to the rate of sickness in an area; and you begin to see that the next range of mashup services could very well be mashed-analyics.

Why is this link to unsafecities interesting to me? well the video it chose to link to for it’s number one ranked unsafe city, was a user generated review of a boating tourism attraction in the city. The review was largely possitive, but that will change with better faceted search. User reviews, and user commenting are powerfull because they are often returned first in search, and browsers trust reviews more than companies, and they trust reviews from friends more than all the rest.

And by putting all of the above together, you can see why I am so interested in Nestoria and Facebook: (still my absolute favourite app is Plazes.com app on facebook: stunning).

(2) No, we are not overcome with fb hysteria, but we do think that fb offers some genuine opportunities to develop and test applications ideas that may have broader applications. In short, its a great place to innovate. We do have a facebook application in alpha, and we are going to release an upgrade sometime next week. We are just fixing the sign up process, and some look and feel issues, so thanks to everyone for their feedback.

(3) Looks like we are going to go to the FOWA London, so if anyone is planning on going let us know and we might meet up and have some conversations around the event. Looks like an interesting event.

(4) Finally, the very best of luck to Pat Phelan, Sean O’Mahoney and the cubic telecom crew at Techcrunch40. They are in amoung the big boys of the Internet world and my guess is they will walk away the lions share of the news coverage.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

Explore Tags: customer service mashup, mashups, nestoria, pat phelan, techcrunch40, voice 2.0, voicesage

It would seem so. Well, we are of course very pleased to be nominated for Best Business Blog in our first year of Blogging. If you are a reader, and find what we do interesting, why not pop over to the Irish Blog Awards! Of course we wish everyone nominated for awards the best of luck and hopefully new and interesting connections will be made through them.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

Explore Tags: customer interaction, irish blog awards, voice messaging, voicesage

When devices connect to the internet, and to widgets, you can get some pretty interesting personalisation. For instance, the new Nike-iPod relationship means that you can “connect” your running times from your shoes, to your iPod, and then examine your data for performance. If you take it that 97% of all music players are iPods, and that, lets say, 30% of all running shoes are Nike… that’s a pretty big data field. Now if this data tells us (perhaps through a widget that we post on our mySpace account) that Paul is hitting targets but has a potential high blood pressure issue, that is interesting advertising information. If you make gym equipment, or personal fitness equipment, or if you provide personal fitness services, ask yourself “how will I get and share the data to create value”…..

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

Explore Tags: device ecosystems, voice 2.0, voicesage, web 2.0