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Surprised But Happy
September 10, 2007
Today I witnessed one of the best shows I have seen in a long while. Thanks to all the attendees who came to the show and made it a great success so far. Two more days of the greatest IP Communications experience remain. I am off to a dinner and then a party at the Standard Hotel. I can't wait.
This weird picture is a self portrait with the aid of a mirror. This is how Rich Tehrani looks when he is happy. TMC team, great job so far!
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Norman Stout from Mitel
September 10, 2007
Here is Norman Stout the CEO of Mitel US captivating the audience.
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Mark Spencer Speaking
September 10, 2007
Here is a shot of Mark onstage at ITEXPO.
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VoIP Peering at ITEXPO West 2007
September 10, 2007
This session is hot at the show. Lots of interest.
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SIP and IMS Session
September 10, 2007
IMS is a popular topic today. This session focuses on IMS, SIP and SS7.
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Fonality Training is Very Engaging
September 10, 2007
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Be sure to be at these Fonality trixbox training sessions around the world for your certification.
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Make Money Selling VoIP
September 10, 2007
The VAR is Dead and Partner is Born
In a session titled how to make Money selling VoIP Robert Messer spoke today about how resellers need to evolve to become successful. Robert who works for ABP Technology a distributor of communications solutions mentioned resellers who embrace innovation are most successful. He says you must partner with your customers.
To be a reseller is the wrong paradigm he mentions. The most successful resellers reposition themselves as technology partners – not resellers. He says you need to offer services as well as products. You need maintenance contracts and to find ways to become part of the company you are selling to. As SMBs cannot afford many technology workers you can make money helping companies who don’t have huge technology staffs.
He went on to say you should define yourself as an IP communication specialist – focusing on open-standard based solutions. He says there are devices which allow a company to have resilient internet service relying on DSL and cable. If you approach a company with an innovative solution such as this he says you become a technology partner.
Next up was Don Gant from Iwatsu who started his presentation by asking the audience what is important to them in business. Making money and retaining employees were a few of the answers. He asked what is important to the customer and the audience agreed that customers have the same desires.
Don asked a member of the audience why he purchased the car he drives. The response was the van did what he wanted at the right price point. It was a Kia by the way. Don said that in this case if the dealer gave him a great deal on a pink VW convertible he would have likely declined the offer.
The point? The product has to be the right one for the customer.
Don went on to read some statistics on employees working from home and how this trend is continuing. He also mentioned studies show the work at home employees are more productive and bring in more revenue than their counterparts in the office.
“UC provides customers with the ability to be in contact” was a pertinent quote Don made and he went on to say the cell phone has to be part of a UC solution and the desktop must be extended onto the smartphone with embedded software and presence.
He wrapped up by saying we need to consult with customers to help them grow their companies, make money and allow employees to be more productive.
Brit Vickner of Interactive Intelligence talked about how products could eat into margins as they require frequent service calls. In datacom he says occasionally resellers may put in a telecom system with limited prep work and this doesn’t work well in telecom.
Brit mentioned telecom vendors do a great job with coordination – the service provider, call flows and more. You must build proper expectations he says. “You must have a process” he exclaimed. Brit continued, “You can always plug in products and technology into the process.”
The number one thing is that the customer adopts your position he says. We need to sell solutions and get the end users to use them as well.
Products need to be flexible and open he mentioned. “More open standards is the key.” This allows you to evolve he mentions.
Brit went on to say you want an SMB play and an upmarket play. He also mentions you need to stay away from commodity products.
In the Q&A session the theme once again revolved around partnering and not reselling with all panelists agreeing. As a moderator I would have preferred more dissent to spice things up but when you are right you are right and the panelists all knew it. It seems the reseller is dead and the partner is born.
If you missed this session come to future ITEXPOs to stay up to date on making money selling VoIP/unified communications.
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Apple, Google and ITEXPO
September 10, 2007
I was up pretty early today and had a chance to take in lots of news while listening to CNBC, Bloomberg, reading Barons and any website I could get my hands on. Perhaps the biggest news in the telecom space today comes from Apple (disclosure I own Apple share) who announced today they sold 1,000,000 iPhones. That is quite a big number for such a short amount of time. In addition they will likely bid on the 700 MHz auction which CNBC commentators will tell you allows them to bypass AT&T.
What they don’t say is how complicated and time consuming it would be to develop a nationwide wireless network. Not that this can’t be done of course and perhaps an acquisition of Alltel would help.
This got me thinking about how Apple and Google seem to have their interests aligned more and more each day.
I wonder if there will be a more formal alignment of interests between Google and Apple or will we see the companies become competitive. We all know (ok a bit presumptuous but my blog readers are always a step ahead ;) ) Google is rumored to be coming out with a Gphone soon.
I get the feeling we will see some major news soon about how the two companies have aligned their strategies. Google insiders are likely aware they aren’t able to out-Apple Apple so there is a chance they will never launch their phone. Instead, Google will likely pay Apple and have their apps loaded on the iPhone and design a suite of iPhone ready apps.
I am ITEXPO today and getting ready for the Reseller Solutions Day. I look forward to speaking to the many resellers and others in the room.
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PerformanceEdge
September 10, 2007
For many companies with thousands of call center agents the concept of optimizing contact center performance is akin to optimizing the US government. In either case you must ask yourself how you know when you are truly optimized and the job is done.
If you pressed me, I would admit that optimizing a government is the more difficult task so in this article we will focus on optimizing the former.
In many call centers there are silos of automation with manual processes between them. These manual processes consisting of hand assembled MS Word or Excel Documents slow things down and are akin to Bondo on a race car. Sure, from the outside the car looks great but if you look below the surface you begin to understand that structurally the car is far from perfect.
You can imagine how happy I was to learn Aspect Software is committing tremendous resources to tackling the performance optimization problem and they have just launched a major initiative called PerformanceEdge which has the potential to truly revolutionize the contact center space.
The company is actually a melting pot of best-of-breed technologies such as inbound, outbound, customer service, workforce optimization and more. The number of acquisitions the company has executed on in the past years is staggering and Aspect Software has further distinguished itself by holding onto virtually all of its top management over the course of these many years. There are hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of years of contact center management experience at the helm of this organization.
Coincidentally after I wrote the first draft of this article while at the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in Los Angeles, CA I happened to pick up a copy of the LA Times and on the front page of the business section was an article detailing the invention of the ACD which was accomplished by Rockwell International. As mentioned in the article, many years later the call center division of this company became part of Aspect Software through an acquisition.
In a recent conversation with Aspect executives Candace Berman, Robert Kelly and Mike Sheridan I got to understand why this performance optimization suite was launched. The company has been analyzing contact centers quite closely as of late and they’ve noticed as transaction volumes increase there is a severe lack of forecasting and planning ability. In addition, reporting lags due to disparate systems never designed to work seamlessly as a cohesive whole.
Multiple call centers make the problem incrementally worse at best and exponentially worse depending on what systems reside in said centers.
The above problems are perhaps summed up best by saying today’s large contact centers are not able to fully support business processes. Because of this inability, top management in most organizations do not really understand or appreciate how important call centers are to their company. The above-referenced LA Times article reaches a similar conclusion. In my opinion true productivity begins when contact centers evolve to truly allow businesses to harness their full potential.
Many contact centers are viewed as necessary costs. However, if they can live up to their full potential they can be used more granularly and intelligently as they become strategic assets.
In order to achieve this lofty ambition PerformanceEdge synchronizes the complete breadth of customer service, collections, sales and telemarketing business processes with centralized management and reporting across various applications and sites.
The software subsequently delivers unified administration, reporting and workflows providing application navigation, simplified agent administration, single user log on, unified historical and real-time reporting and synchronized intraday operation and data sharing.
The goal of course is to make it easy for contact center managers to consider everything and act immediately -- resulting in better operational efficiencies and agent effectiveness. This in turn allows companies to control costs, enhance service levels and align performance to support strategic goals. As mentioned above, this can be quite granular as business goals can be translated to agent levels.
In case you are sold already and aren’t going to finish reading the article, yes – PerformanceEdge is available today and it works with any ACD or integration technology.
If you are still scratching your head it may be time to delve a bit deeper into what the solution entails. Some of the capabilities of the PerformanceEdge suite are as follows:
• Workforce Management - enables organizations to plan and manage the performance of inbound, blended and outbound staffing resources.
• Performance Management - measures, analyzes and communicates performance results to continuously improve business processes and ensure they are aligned with business goals
• Quality Management - records, evaluates and analyzes agent interactions and captures real-time customer feedback to deliver insights into business issues and agent performance
• Campaign Management - optimizes outbound and blended campaign strategies and increase productive contacts by pinpointing best time-to-call.
• Coaching and eLearning - provides needs-based coaching capabilities, as well as e-learning management and content authoring tools
• Speech Analytics – automatically scrutinizes and reports on content, context, purpose and outcome of every recorded customer interaction as part of the quality monitoring process
PerformanceEdge is being rolled out by Aspect Software as a separate entity under the Aspect umbrella? Why? There are two reasons in my opinion. The first is the solution works with a number of other company’s solutions so the potential to partner with these other companies becomes greater if they aren’t partnering with their direct competitor -- Aspect. The second reason is a performance optimization solution will likely command a good premium as a separate publicly traded company or acquisition target if this is the route Aspect Software chooses to take in the future.
Getting back to the product itself, a real-world example of how it works is imagining an alert which is triggered by workflow which can initiate an agent coaching session which is set up between the supervisor and agent. Results and hopefully improvement is further tracked and analyzed. Subsequent reporting then migrates up through the enterprise.
According to the company, this eliminates places to hide and lets you see the better agents and supervisors and perhaps more importantly the worse ones.
Obviously this product rollout is a significant undertaking and is some of the biggest news in the entire contact center market. For the first time in a number of years we are witnessing a true breakthrough in contact center technology.
Getting back to my initial question… Your contact center is optimized when it is able to rapidly respond to organizational needs and can seamlessly be integrated into business processes. Perhaps optimizing a call center is easier than I originally thought so in my next article I will explore how to do the same for our government. :)
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