Time Warner Cable is an interesting company in that they are decentralized to some degree in their management and autonomous regional groups decide how to manage their divisions. Having said that, the
As an enhancement to Concerto EnsemblePro, Time Warner Cable is also implementing, LYRICall , a scripting design tool that helps agents navigate through calls. LYRICall gives Time Warner agents real-time access to multiple data sources through a single view, enabling them to easily access the information they need to conduct successful customer interactions. The LYRICall Script Flow Tool enables administrators to build and deploy scripts to guide agents through calls and call flows, allowing agents to more quickly handle calls and provide a higher-quality experience for Time Warner's customers.
Here is an excerpt from a press release. My favorite part of this excerpt is where Time Warner tells us they want to have customers repeat their information less often. Thankfully a large company such as Time Warner Telecom is seeing the light and I hope that their embracing of better CRM practices rubs off on other companies in the country – and world forthat matter.
"Our focus at Time Warner Cable is to ensure that our customers are satisfied and that their cable needs are being met," said Richard Brashear, director of TeleSales for Time Warner Cable/Charlotte Division. "With Concerto EnsemblePro, we will have more functionality in the telemarketing and collections, including a desktop browser, blended outbound and inbound capabilities, as well as call recording and agent audio options. All of this allows us to achieve quicker collections, increased sales and provide superior customer service."
Time Warner Cable collections agents will use the blended call and routing functionality of Concerto EnsemblePro to handle inbound calls. In addition, the telesales group will use the predictive dialer functionality to add incremental business from existing customers, while the collections department will use Concerto EnsemblePro to initiate calls reminding customers when payments are late.
Concerto EnsemblePro unites inbound, outbound and blended multi-channel contact (voice, email, web and fax), while delivering robust queuing, routing, reporting and agent empowerment capabilities in a single solution. Built from the ground up to scale from 10 to thousand's of seats, Concerto EnsemblePro helps increase agent productivity through automated dialing and real-time access to customer information, while offering a higher level of service by providing consistent messaging through agent scripting and improves the customer experience by not asking them to constantly repeat information.
June 2005 Archives
You can’t argue the fact that VoIP is the worst thing for balancing the federal and state budgets since the dotcom bust. A few years ago, you just couldn’t have imagined how much revenue is being lost on long distance to Vonage, Skype and a host of other companies eager to help consumers reduce their phone bills., But what’s great for consumers is obviously terrible for a government that feeds off the taxes we pay on local and long distance calling. Add to that the fees for the Universal Service Fund and you have a recipe for upset politicians ands federal bean counters that keep coming up a few beans short. An excellent USA Today Article details the potential crisis.
Many of life's questions can be realized when flying cross-country. For example, why when you fly over
Another mystery, where are all the pillows on flights? I estimate millions of them have disappeared from domestic airlines in the last few years. What happened to them? Can we find all the pillows we can use on a variety of international flights now? Did they have tremendous resale value? Did they show up on eBay? Were the pillows so heavy in the first place? Sometimes I am really surprised that they didn’t just remove the chairs.
Finally, we are we told that wireless devices will interfere with the plane's normal operation and that we need to turn off such wireless products during flight. Recently though the airlines have started to tell us that they will soon have in-flight WiFi. If you pay for wireless service, you can use it. Weird, huh?
What about airline service? I flew Song to LA and Delta back. I appreciated the flexibility in switching airlines as they are owned by the same parent but I wonder why Song is so awesome and Delta so crappy. Same company, same management, different culture and service levels. It is tough to see how the low-cost carrier can be so much better than the expensive parent.
If you have flown Song you know they have near-gourmet food such as wasabi-peas and other really interesting food items. Delta – just a basic snack. Sure Song charges you but why can’t Song do the same?
When I think of the airlines and Delta in particular, I see similarities to LECs that are now investing in fiber to compete with cable and VoIP service providers. What's happening in both markets is too similar to ignore.
If the airlines are any guide, LECs are in trouble. They are too fat to compete with new entrants. The only way for them to compete is to use the lobbying pull they have and gobble up the only competitor who knows how to lobby effectively against them -- AT&T.
As Matt Drudge would say: Developing.
I know this has nothing to do with tech but I think it is pretty funny that reporters decided to squirt water in the face of Tom Cruise. In this article they say you don’t squirt water in Tom Cruise’s face and while I agree you shouldn’t do this, there is just something about his behavior lately that makes this whole incident something I can’t stop laughing at. If I every start to profess my love so frequently and forcefully and publicly in the future, I will understand if someone tries to douse me back to reality as well.
On or around July 1, 2005 please check this blog at tehrani.com and TMCnet for the results of the latest study on VoIP quality. Details forthcoming.
Yet another way for valuable customer data to be stolen – via an iPod.
Pod Slurping:
Just when you thought it was safe to wear ear buds.
Tom Keating just blogged about a new product from Fonality that just came out of stealth mode. The amazing thing about open-source software is that you can release something that is improved upon forever by the developer community. In this case the company took an Asterisk PBX and added 110,000 lines of code. This is an amazing amount of effort to put into another platform and I wonder how much better the product can be than Asterisk. The company charges $995 and they do things a bit differently as much of the smarts of the system are hosted on Fonality’s servers, making them easier to manage than having to deal with issues such as moves, adds and changes yourself. In addition, upgrades can be done seamlessly.
See Tom Keating's Fonality Blog for more.
Fonality Web Interface
Sometimes when you receive an e-mail, it is best to pass it along in you blog without much editing or rewriting. Such is the case with this e-mail from Siebel who basically blasted Salesforce.com in what I can say is perhaps the most strategic “dig” I have ever seen in this business. Even though Salesforce.com has had some significant customer wins recently, Siebel fought back in a way that doesn’t take Salesforce.com head on but instead it erodes their mindshare lead and creates a lot of doubt about using Salesforce.com in a large scale implementation where considerable customization is needed.
This single paragraph is perhapos the crux of the entire argument being made. I haven’t verified the facts but assume they are accurate (unless I hear otherwise – Salesforce – you reading??)
One of the primary reasons Siebel has been able to deliver innovative technology so rapidly is that we invested approximately $299 million in R&D last year -- 22% of our total revenues. During the same period, Salesforce.com invested around $9.8 million -- only 6% of their total revenues.
Here is the letter:
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
As many of you know, last week we announced the next version of our hosted CRM offering, Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 8. This marked the fifth upgrade to Siebel CRM OnDemand in the past 12 months. The result of this ongoing innovation and dedication to success is a win rate of more than 56% in head-to-head deals against Salesforce.com.
One of the primary reasons Siebel has been able to deliver innovative technology so rapidly is that we invested approximately $299 million in R&D last year -- 22% of our total revenues. During the same period, Salesforce.com invested around $9.8 million -- only 6% of their total revenues.
You've also probably seen the many new CRM OnDemand customers Siebel Systems has announced over the past couple of months. They chose Siebel CRM OnDemand for a variety of reasons, but they all have one thing in common -- they chose to buy a CRM solution rather than a CRM software development toolkit. They have told us that they want the onus of development to rest on their CRM provider, not on their shoulders -- while Siebel makes heavy investments in R&D, our primary hosted CRM competitor has outsourced its R&D to its customers and partners so they can invest in more important areas such as PR and advertising.
Analysts including the Gartner Group are cautioning customers that complex Salesforce.com deployments can be costly (see http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=127182). Here is what our customers are saying in their own words:
"We wanted a single view of the customer across multiple touch points. With its ease of use, the Siebel CRM OnDemand Life Sciences edition gave us out-of-the-box support for the complex relationships between doctors, hospitals, practices, clinicians and insurance companies that is simply not available with other hosted solutions or would have required costly customization and time to address through workarounds. We chose Siebel Systems because of its superior reputation, rapid deployment capabilities, limited upfront capital investment and overall reliability." -- Scott Coleridge, Executive Vice President of Sales, FEI Women's Health
"As the premier data center provider for managed dedicated server hosting in the
This kind of growth could not be handled effectively without the comprehensive customer relationship management capabilities that Siebel CRM OnDemand provided. Salesforce.com didn't offer us the real-time analytics capabilities that have given us 24/7 visibility across our entire systems. With Siebel CRM OnDemand we can tightly manage all areas of our company, regardless of location or time of day, something that is essential to our competitive value proposition of providing superior application support."
-- Daniel Milburn, Director, Sales and Operations, Consonus
As I've said before, if you're interested in talking with me about Siebel CRM OnDemand or new developments in the hosted CRM market, please reply to this e-mail. If you would like to be removed from this list, please let me know at any point in time. Otherwise, I look forward to keeping in touch.
Best regards,
Bruce
Bruce Cleveland
SVP and GM, OnDemand and SMB
Siebel Systems
www.crmondemand.com
A while back I switched to Verizon Wireless from T-Mobile as I often had dropped calls on the T-Mobile’s GSM network. One thing I missed from being on GSM was the great devices the GSM networks supported such as SonyEricsson phones that have e-mail clients built into them. I often used the voice recording function of the phone to then e-mail a WAV file to others. It was such a great productivity booster.
Alas, when I switched to Verizon I ended up with a phone that supports bluetooth but is so handicapped in features and has such a terrible user interface that I feel deprived when I use it. Not to point fingers but it is the Motorola V710.
An Actual Vemail Screen on a Phone
I also miss the simple e-mail client that at least let me keep up with what was happening in my inbox – even though I never really typed long messages via my phone.
Enter VeMail, a service provided by VoiceGenesis that is integrated with Verizon Wireless devices as well as a number of other carriers such as Alltel, Cellular One, and a bunch of smaller providers. I found the company by accident and am surprised that Verizon Wireless keeps this service a secret.
Why you ask? Because it is very useful as you get all the benefits of having access to your e-mail on a mobile phone without the need to type using a mobile phone. The way this works is you record your message and send it as an attachment via e-mail. Unlike the WAV messages I used to send via my SonyEricsson phone which sometimes could not be opened, the company has employed a clever workaround.
What is this solution? Simple – in the e-mail you receive, you get a link to an audio file that streams and you get a phone number with an ID so you can call in and get your messages. This latter addition is perfect for computers or devices that don’t have speakers or can’t stream.
Other benefits of the service are the ability to upload up to 10,000 contact names into the service and have them accessible via your mobile phone. This number is dependant on the model of device you have.
In order for the service to work, you need to download what Mark Marriott, the CEO of VoiceGenesis jokes is a “fat client” which is really just a 325K file. One of the benefits of this file is that it helps avoid the pitfalls of WAP-based e-mail where you need to have the server download every screen to your cell phone and you need to wait for this download to happen. Once you have the “fat client” on your phone, you no longer have to wait for screens to redraw as many of them are in the phone’s memory. You can see 50 e-mails per screen and up to 1,000 messages are cached on your phone (that’s a lot of Viagra and mortgage messages.) at a time There is currently no support for other folders besides the Inbox but it seems like the company is considering adding this functionality down the road.
The service costs $5 per month plus air time. Some service providers will charge you a separate data rate while others will just use plain old minutes from your plan. Some upgrades we can look forward to are the ability to make calls from the address book stored in Vemail’s database as well as getting attachments downloaded to your device.
The downside to this service is that you can’t use voice messaging for large amounts of e-mail. At least most users would probably be annoyed if you kept sending them voice responses to e-mail. This is unless of course they work for you. One day soon when speech recognition gets good enough, this solution will get even better. The other drawback is that speech is a great interface for many situations but doesn’t work too well on a train or in a crowded location where you need privacy. For these situations, typing is still preferred and the ultimate killer device would probably allow a blend of voice e-mail with recognition and typing, depending on the situation, privacy level needed and your mood.
According to the WSJ AT&T is going to test pre-WiMAX roll-out in
For the
I wonder if this deployment will be the kick start the WiMAX market needs to get it into high gear.
The old adage of eating one’s dog food is what is referred to when a company uses its own products internally. This is exactly what I thought of when I saw the announcement from Avaya that Vonage will be using their IP contact center solutions that are based on SIP. Is there a more synergistic merging of a company’s business model and the technology they choose to deploy in their customer-facing applications? I don’t think so.
This is an amazing example of how Vonage will be able to take a giant leap forward in customer service. I still hear complaints about Vonage service but didn’t experience any problems with customer service while I was a customer. I did have major problems getting my local number portability issues resolved but the service up until that point was excellent.
Now that Vonage has IP enabled their agents, they can provide killer applications to their customers such as the ability to escalate a chat to a call, enable video during a call and more. Here is part of the release that the companies put out today:
Based on Avaya Customer Interaction Suite and powered by Avaya Communication Manager IP Telephony software, the main contact center will serve as a hub for other customer care centers as they open around the world. The integration of SIP into Avaya solutions heightens interoperability with other Vonage applications and networks. Additionally, new SIP-based capabilities in Avaya's Customer Interaction Suite can enable Vonage agents to establish buddy lists of fellow agents or experts located anywhere in the business who could be quickly tapped through presence and instant messaging while a customer is on the line.
Everyone tells me Vonage’s churn numbers are too high. As they are the trailblazer in VoIP, I am not sure how we can determine what the proper churn number should be. This purchase of Avaya equipment is by definition a big financial commitment to improved customer service by the company and may also signal that the rumored purchase of Vonage could be a long way off. Would you spend all this money on new equipment just before you are acquired? Probably not. I would expect the ROI of this acquisition to be a year or more. Perhaps there will be some M&A news then or the company will go public.
How much is enough? When you are a successful executive in the cable TV industry and you are making a nice healthy living, do you need to go out and defraud investors by using corporate money to purchase jet trips, cars and golf club memberships? Does it make sense to buy a $25 swath of land to protect the view from your house on the shareholder’s dime?
Well if your goal in life is to spend your remaining years behind bars then you should do all of the above and be just like John Rigas the founder of Adelphia Communications Corp. who just received 15 years in prison for doing all of the above.
We probably recall how this story ended – a company is bankrupt and sold off to others and shareholders – as they often do, lost out.
As seen in the LA Times.
Last fall, Niklas Zennstrom honored TMC by choosing our show, Internet Telephony Conference & Expo to speak at via videoconference. This was his first-ever keynote in the
Here is Tom Keating’s take on the Skype - Zennstrom keynote.
We are very excited to be announcing that Niklas Zennstrom will once again be keynoting at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in LA via videoconference. So much has happened in the past year and Skype has had over 123 million downloads as I sit to write this blog entry.
Skype still doesn’t support SIP and the industry buzz is that Skype will eventually license their protocol to cell phone makers and get a dollar for every cell phone sold. Whether this is true or not is anyone’s guess but it makes for some interesting food for thought and I am excited to get Zennstrom’s viewpoints on where his incredible success in VoIP software will take him next.
He made some big announcements at our show last year and I expect he will make even bigger ones this year.
As a side note, it is refreshing to see that when we decided to choose the name Internet Telephony for a magazine and conference name back in 1996 that now almost ten years later, the concept is alive and well and the term is being embraced by true industry pioneers like Zennstrom.
Registration is open for ITEXPO and we will have the best conference program of any communications event in my opinion. Believe me, there has never been so much effort put into a conference program at TMC and we have been putting on VoIP conferences since 1986!
There is a great article on Dinosaurs in Newsweek which discusses new dinosaur discoveries and how the science is changing. Perhaps most interesting of all are debates about whether T. Rex was a scavenger or a hunter -- an age-old argument that is the equivalent in the tech world of saying a PC is better than a Mac. The story talks about feathered dinosaurs, the fact that anyone can make dinosaur discoveries and who is financing all this activity. There is even a quote from a Rabbi who fears all this talk of birds evolving from dinosaurs (there is more proof of this in the article) could make people stop eating chicken as they would consider them unkosher.
The Power over Ethernet market seems to have a bit more "juice" in it recently (sorry about that). I am hearing more about this nascent market and have spoken to a few people that have used the technology and are happy with it. To me it is counter-intuitive that PoE will be easily adopted on a large-scale basis but many people thought the same of broadband over cable and I have had a number of letters from angry professional engineers who worked in cable plants in the mid -nineties telling me the cable industry would never figure out broadband. Here is the most recent release I have received on the topic:
Frederick,
As part of the license agreement, SEI, is authorized to manufacture and sell Midspan PoE and related products utilizing the intellectual property referenced in the patent, both in the
"It is vital that our distribution channel and end users understand the breadth and scope of the license in that they are now protected against any potential infringement suits in the deployment of the SEI Juice Box PoE units by a third party patent holder in this rapidly growing market," said Martin Grolnic, President of SEI.
This patent addresses an Ethernet LAN, in which "power enabled" elements are detected so that current limited power can be distributed safely via spare pairs of the data Ethernet cabling infrastructure to those elements without effecting legacy devices. The patent covers PoE Midspan products that connect to an Ethernet switch in order to PoE-enable an enterprise network.
About System Engineering International (SEI):
SEI is a thirty-year-old telecommunications power company headquartered in Frederick Maryland. SEI has been designing, manufacturing and supplying premise based power systems to Telco service providers and enterprise end users in the digital Centrex market. SEI power equipment now powers over 1,000,000 ISDN phones. With the advent of VoIP, SEI has introduced its line of "Juice Box" midspan powering units that have the ability to provide their own battery backup. SEI is a participant in the IEEE 802.3af task force on PoE. For more information please visit SEI at www.seipower.com
