Making Contact

Interactive Intelligence's 'Interactions 2011' Attracts Record Attendance

Wed, 25 May 2011 22:09:43 -0500

I just wrapped up Day Two of Interactive Intelligence's annual user's forum, Interactions 2011, and I must say this event keeps getting better every year -- and I've covered it now three years in a row.

This year's User's Forum reportedly attracted a record crowd of nearly 700 attendees -- that's double from last year's event which attracted about 350. I think one reason attendance keeps going up is because the quality of the sessions keeps improving every year plus there are other ways that Interactive Intelligence demonstrates its commitment to its customers through this educational and entertaining event.

Besides being an ideal launching pad for the introduction of new products, the three-day event offers in-depth educational sessions designed to help Interactive Intelligence customers make better and more effective use of the company’s products, including its flagship all-software, all-IP contact center platform, Customer Interaction Center -- version 4.0 of which is due out next month. It also provides users with networking opportunities, so that they can learn from each other -- as well as the opportunity to talk with Interactive’s top software developers, support engineers, product management team and technical sales consultants. It also gives attendee's a chance to provide feedback directly to Interactive Intelligence about its products and support -- and this is a company that really listens to its customers.

Because Interactive Intelligence has widened its offerings as a contact center solutions provider in the past two years, with the acquisitions of accounts receivable management solutions provider Latitude Software and insurance solutions provider Acrosoft, the User Forum is also becoming more diverse in nature, not just in terms of the the make-up of the sessions being offered but also the professionals its attracts. For example the Forum now features sessions geared specifically for companies operating in the Accounts Receivable Management (debt collections) and Insurance industries, which means some of the sessions tend to be more industry-focused. That’s not to say there aren’t lots of "general" sessions geared for companies operating in a wide range of industries.

Today I did a mix of covering sessions and conducting live interviews with Interactive Intelligence officials, partners and customers – however I did not get to cover as many sessions as I would have liked, due to the fact that the fierce storms and tornadoes in the mid-west completely messed up my travel and caused me to miss almost all of the first day of the show. (I was supposed to arrive Monday night in time for the show on Tuesday -- but I got stuck in Detroit on a layover due to my flight to Indy being cancelled. I spent the night in Detroit and tried to catch an early flight out on Tuesday, but unfortunately that flight was severely delayed and I did not arrive in Indy until around 2 p.m. -- total bummer because the show opener tends to be ones of the best parts of the show! My heart goes out though to those individuals and families who have suffered tremdnous and unspeakable losses in communities such as Joplin and other towns impacted by the recent rash of tornadoes)

I plan to publish several articles about the event over the next day or two but for right now I have to get some sleep because I'm about to keel over!!!

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Contact Center Market Update 2010

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 10:28:48 -0500

This is the continuation of my live blog from Interactive Intelligence's Annual Global Partner Conference, currently underway in San Antonio, Texas.

This morning I'm attending a session about the state of the contact center industry, presented by analyst Sheila McGee Smith.

The fear that people have is "viral" -- if something goes viral what do I do?

She points to a viral video United Smashed My Guitars -- famous country musician's instruments were smashed while he was flying on United Airlines.

The point is, this video went viral and is still receiving a ton of hits a year later in 2010.

She discusses Cisco Quad, its new social media platform -- they have now brought this into the contact center through a new "customer collaboration platform" It's a contact center version of the enterprise edition.

The product, however, won't be available until 2011.

She says Cisco has a demo online "but they still don't have a product."

"What is being done here is no different than what Buzzeant can do."

Genesys' new G8 platform also promises social media integration -- the goal is that they want the "entire stream of communications" can be tracked and known to the agent when a customer calls in -- in other words, knowing what they wrote on Facebook before they even call in.

She points out that Genesys, which is owned by Alcatel-Lucent, is no longer a company brand, but rather a product brand. The two companies are now merged -- they now share sales and marketing and the people who sold Genesys technology are now selling ALU technology as well.

As far as social monitoring goes, Genesys wants to be able to take any social media stream and get that to the agents using the Genesys platform. "How they are doing that specifically, don't know."

Avaya is also getting into social media monitoring. Their solution, however, is "going to be simply called a gateway."

"They are not specific - no partner - no Cisco Quad - nothing to really hang your hat on," McGee Smith says.

She says there are a lot contact center vendors out there that are getting into the social networking integration that still haven't gone multichannel -- they have no integration with email or web chat -- so how are they going to do it? A lot of companies are saying they're going to do it -- just so they can say they are doing it.

Buzzient however provides tight integration with CIC. You can implement is quickly and easily.

She asks, rhetorically, is social media integration "similar to what email routing was in 1999? Expert routing in 2008? Could be..."

But there's no doubt that it's coming... and customers are ready to embrace it.

Leveraging the Best of Contact Center

She says last year BPA was the big topic. Interactive is "moving slowly and cautiously" on this initiative, she says. "It takes time to build this."

She compares the BPA products of the competing vendors, including Genesys and Avaya, to Interactive's Interaction Process Automation.

Companies seeing success with Genesys' BPA solution include telstra, Kaplan university, FirstEnergy, Travelers, ITERGO and Vodafone.

Avaya Application Enablement Framework has the potential to become a great BPA play (enables custom applications) -- ACE, she says, "could become Avaya's answer."

Next she moves on to the cloud trend. "Hosting is looking very good" she says.

Genesys partners with telcos to host its applications in the cloud. There's a slew of hosted providers who can help any contact center vendor bring their applications out into the cloud, but thing is, that means the vendor doesn't have control over the hardware/software, the computing environment. Plus there might be third party vendors in the picture. For example, Cisco's cloud computing environment is made possible through partitioning software offered by third party vendor VOSS. (HUCS: Carrier Class Architecture). The point is, you can't assume that major vendors aren't reliant on third party solutions.

inContact started off as a carrier so it has that advantage going for it. But it doesn't offer the unique local control model that Interactive Intelligence offers.

She says avaya's Elite customers, if they want email integration, for example, 20 seats of email, all they do is simply bolt Aura onto the platform in order to deliver the new features and functionality. Avaya has spent a lot of time marketing its solutions but again, a lot of them simply aren't GA yet.

For example, they don't have integrated dialer...

Cisco's challenges include complexity and the number of disparate OEM components.

Genesys' big challenge is that it is now merged with ALU's enterprise business, as of January 2010. "It's still an unknown if they can pull that off."

And Interactive's big challenge: Taking advantage of international opportunity.

]]> Tags: Related tags: contact center, social media, third party, media integration, getting social, genesys

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A Review of Interactive Intelligence's CaaS Offering

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:21:32 -0500

This is the continuation of my live blog coming from Interactive Intelligence's Partner Conference in San Antonio:

Roe Jones, Product Manager for Interactive Intelligence, presents on the company's new Communications as a Service (CaaS) offering.

He goes over what CaaS is -- and what it isn't. It isn't traditional "hosted" as per the traditional ASP model, which required client side software, this is a pure web-based model. They've taken their robust CIC platform and totally rewritten it in .NET to make it fully web-based and highly scalable.

They're already seeing strong uptake for this new offering -- not just from existing customers but particularly from new ones. Interactive's CaaS revenue increased 59 percent in 2009 and most of this was from new business.

The trend continues: They got one CaaS order for more than $1 million and three for more than $250,000 in 1Q 2010.

Jones says they're CaaS offering offers a broad set of mature applications The SIP based offering is now being used by more than 3,500 customers.

The unique local contral capabilities of this offering allows them to maintain full control of their phone lines senstive data and adminisatrative changes.

Also unique about this offering is that each customer runs on a dedicated virtualized server. This allows for superior security, up time and disaster recovery through virtualization.

Also unique to the service is the fact that they can quickly and easily transition a customer to an on-premises system -- they just simply take that virtualized server and bring it over to the customer's premises.

They use Savvis for colocation. Interactive installs, monitors and maintains its own hardware, they simply use Savvis for data center locations and interconnection. Data Centers are in the UK, Brazil, Germany and throughout the US.

Each customer's system lives on a Hyper-V virtual machine with dedicated CPU and disk drives.

This CaaS offering comes in three basic models, however interactive provides extreeme flexibility in terms of deploymeny options. The three models include:

--Local Control VoIP
--Remote Control VoIP
--Remote Control TDM

With the latter two, calls are terminated in the data center.

Local control uses telco trunks and keeps voice and data on premises.

They use MPLS network for connection between data center and customer. this eliminates the need to send voice traffic to and from the data center. The MPLS requirements are therefore minimalized.

Call recording details can be stored either in the data center or on site.

Customers get all the benefits of SaaS offering but they get to keep local control.

The CaaS service bundles all of the core contact center applications Interactive offers, including IP-PBX, ACD, IVR, WFM, messaging, outbound dialing, call/screen recording, surveys, Web services and more.

Unlike other vendors offering all-in-one systems, these are all interactive's applications -- they don't partner with any other vendors to cobble together a suite of offerings.

The Web based administrative interface allows the end user to perform common move, add, drop and change tasks.

They also offer a CaaS Customer Portal which gives control over service announcements, billing summaries/detail and to access specific applications.

Interactive offers CaaS online training passport to every customer that subscribes. No CIC certifications are required.

Pricing involves a one time up-front set up fees and monthly recurring fees.

Charges are dependent on length of contract, number of agents, named user or concurrent, functionality requirements, choosen deployment model (hardware costs, MPLS service fees, telco usage fees, etc.), complexity of implementation (PSO services).

Example: A 100 "named" agent center under a 24 motnh contract costs about $94 per agent. If you add multichannel ACD, screen pop, and interaction recorder it works out to be about $129 per agent.

In Q4 they will add agent-less dialer. In addition they will be expanding the number of data centers through 2011, including automated fail-over between colocated facilities.

They will also add more features in the attendant including adding SSL security for remote data query, profile specific rights, read only mode, etc.

They will also being adding the new Web 4.0 administrator to the CaaS service offering.

CaaS vs. Premise: How they differ

The folliwng is currently not avilable in CaaS (mainly due to limitations with virtual machines):

Handler customization
Speech recognition
Interaction Multi-site
Interaction Director
IPA
e-FAQ
MSFT OCS and Lotus Sametime Integration
SRTP & TLS
Native Interaction Mobile Clients

Jones, however, emphasizes that these features and capabilities WILL be offered in due time...

]]> Tags: Related tags: local control, interactive intelligence, virtualized server, remote control, interactive offers, offering

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Interactive Intelligence to Unveil CIC Version 4.0 at Partner Event

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 08:49:35 -0500

Hi I'm reporting live from the 2010 Interactive Intelligence Global Partner Conference in San Antonio, which is about to Kick Off shortly.

The company, which makes contact center, business process automation and enterprise unified communications solutions, is expected to announce the next version of its Customer Interaction Center (CIC) platform, the common platform upon which all of its applications are built.

I'll be updating this blog post periodically as we move through the event, which is scheduled to begin at 8:15 a.m. CT with a presentation from Chief Marketing Officer Joe Staples, followed by the unveiling of CIC Version 4.0 introduced by company founder and CEO Don Brown.

According to the program brochure, the next version of CIC "pushes scalability to a new level -- opening up even larger opportunities; introduces a new .NET Supervisor -- improving administration; adds a new .NET Reporting interface and cradle-to-grave audit trail; reaches the goal of moving all media processing onto the Interaction Media server;" and more.

Joe Staples

Says this year's conference has more than 400 attendees

This year they are doing something different : Streaming live to colleagues, Not everyone could come so they opened this up to select partners.

For the "social media moguls, they have made tweaks to the program...

They've also created a Twitter feed for the show, where people can post and share comments.

This year's show includes six tracks, 84 sessions.

He discusses Interactive's recent acquisition of debt collections solutions provider Latitude Software -- there will be a special session dedicated to covering Latatiude's solutions and how they will be integrated with CIC.

Other cool sessions include:

--The Successful Multichannel Contact Center
--Communications-as-a-Service Product Overview
--Successfully Selling into the Enterprise with CIC
--Introduction to the Web portal

All presentations this year are being recorded so that its not just the PPT slides.

To "bribe" attendees to submit feedback forms, they offering Apple TV set-top box. Staples admits that during past events "very few forms were turned in." They will do a random drawing of one form to select the winner.

Attendees will attend a special awards reception dinner at Knibbe Ranch this evening -- buses will take attendees off-site. A mechanical bull will be featured at this event.

The event also features a Technology Fair with 17 different vendors exhibiting. This will also feature opportunity for attendees to win "a number of high tech gadgets."

Staples says it takes them about 6 months to put the event together, and they really want attendee feedback, so he encourages everyone to submit comments. This is how they build out next year's conference.

Staples takes poll of attendees: "How long have you been in this industry?"

He says no longer how long you've been in it, "you're still a baby in this industry." Because the industry actually goes back decades and decades. Plays an amusing video presentation:

Contact centers began 4,000 years ago: Archeologists uncover stone cubicles -- messages were carved into stone and then hurled into the city center. Later they used carrier pigeons.

Then came the telegraph. Early telemarketers used the telegraph to sell and market their products. In those early days "everyone wanted to be a telemarketer."

Cold calling started in 1922.

Soon the novelty of the call center started to fade. Customers started to complain and with the invention of sarcasm in 1968, customers began to become verbally abusive.

Hilarious video showing the full "evolution" of the contact center industry.

Dr. Don Brown takes over to introduce CIC 4.0:

Brown says they will be offering a "ton of demos" showing off the new version during the show.

He asks how many attendees used version 1.0 and version 1.2. Only a handful remember these early versions which were very bare bones by comparison to later versions -- no auto attendant, etc.

Today, the system sports all the most advanced call center applications, features and capabilities, including IVR, ACD, outbound, web chat, email routing, quality monitoring, WFM, surveys, screen pop, voicemail in email inbox, fax in email inbox, desktop faxing, desktop video, IM, conferencing, Web conferencing, IP-PBX, security, remote access, presence, directory and more.

"We're really excited about 4.0," Brown says. He points out that it now represents nearly 10 million lines of code, up from 5 million lines of code in 3.0 and 2 million lines of code in 2.0.

Breaking with the past: "We're dropping a lot of the old stuff, we know that's uncomfortable for people sometimes, but sometimes you just have to cut the cord in order to move forward."

The new version will only run on Windows 2008 Server R2.

It will also run on most versions of Windows 7 -- and Interaction Client will continue to run on Windows XP.

The new version will offer:

--Better reliability by getting rid of third party code
--Better scalability to handle the growing number of large customers
--Better reporting and supervision
--Better Web and email capabilities
--Bullet proof the recording, some customers in europe are doing massive amounts of recording and complaining that you can't search fast enough

"The biggest thing we did in version 4.0 is we moved the processing to the application server -- in 4.0 the CIC server doesn't have agent key at all. No more waiting for agent key to initialize upon start up. It did this "because it was thinking it ran on boards." Basically, CIC "becomes a pure application server." It no longer needs to handle the actual call processing.

The system will now be comprised of three main boxes: CIC Server; Media Server (handles processing); Conference Server. However, "those can be virtual machines in one box," Brown says.

He says in upcoming 5.0, conferencing will be integrated in with the media server. He says this new architecture will not only improve reliability, it will also make it easier to monitor and troubleshoot.

Word spotting for speech analytics (Interaction Analyzer) will now be integrated with the main platform. It can handle word-spotting in real time: This is real time speech analytics. This will enable call center managers to intervene on calls as alerts pop up in real time. However he is careful to refer to this as "word-spotting." He says having this capability integrated in will give them a "huge competitive advantage." Best of all this capability is easy to set up and use and requires no additional hardware or software.

They're also adding support for new languages, including Canadian French.

The new version also includes a redesign of Interaction Recorder. This revamped version allows you to set it so that certain segments of calls arenot recorded (such as agent intro script). This way you're not recording redundant content over and over and creating too much recorded data to be archived. A manager can select which parts of the call to record -- including the IVR interaction. Users also have greater control over where the recordings are stored/archived. There's also a new query interface that allows for simpler and faster search of recordings. This is accomplished through in-memory cache. Requires an additional server to cache all of the information about the recordings. This "in-memory" server allows for very fast retrieval of recording data. ("To make our Turkish customers more happy.")

CIC 4.0 also includes improvements to the Web client, including:
Column config in directories; Time in status info, HTML support, Outlook integration, outbound email, threaded discussions, rewritten chat client and more. All of these improvements are made "with the agent in mind," Brown said.

The new version also includes improved reporting and supervision.

(At this point he 's just whipping through the slides...)

Interaction ID
Site ID
Number of times in queue
Number of ties in conference
Etc.

Overall the platform provides for much more detailed reporting on both the agent side and customer side.

Interaction supervisor and alert server are now rewritten in .NET.

Improved administration means specific managers only get the permissions that they need -- they don't see the information they don't need.

Also improvements in terms of cross-licensing and PCI compliance.

"We think that 4.0 is going to be the best contact center automation suite anywhere out there," Brown says. He says it will serve as the "new standard for architectural elegance and functional range," and expects to win a software architecture award for this new version.

He adds that they've focused on "decreasing cost to implement and support, for both GA and SUs."

Next segment is focused on Interactive's relatively new Communications as a Service (CaaS) offering.

Interactive Intelligence VP of Sales, N. America, Paul Weber presents:

Cloud computing is the buzz, he says. A lot of the time, when clients are looking to go to contract, they wait until the last minute to decide whether to go the hosted vs. on-premises route.

He says the new CaaS offering gives them a chance to compete in the hot cloud computing environment. He discusses how it impacts Interactive's business model, as well as those of its partners: CaaS provides steady and predictable revenue stream through a subscription model. He says with these new cloud-based offerings, a company can launch a contact center "that doesn't look like a contact center" to its customers. The flexibility opens up many new opportunities to change the contact center model -- it actually allows for experimentation in customer service, support and sales and thus gives customers to ability to innovate with new and hybrid models.

A recent survey of CIOs and IT leaders shows that 54 percent are considering moving their communication applications to the cloud within the next 12 months.

He says CaaS grew from 5% of the market in North America to 25% this year alone.

Capex is tight and IT deadlines are delayed due to lack of resources. This is what is driving this market.

CEO's want to know how cloud applications help them reduce headcount or at least avoid having to hire more people.

By-pass corporate standards and IT back-logs.

Mgt. lacks confidence in thier ability to manage and maintain their systems.

Local control eases fears associated with cloud-based contact center. Security, carrier relationship and fear of a bad marriage are now resolved.

He says CaaS gives ININ customers a "true competitive advantage."

It helps them to eliminate the competition.

Premise-based competition is getting desperate. They're giving their solutions away wirth the hope of recouping the loss later on.

Cisco, for example, "hides the cc in future phases to avoid weakness." They're pushing it back in phases.

"You have a choice to have... an all-in-one software-based solution," with CIC 4.0 he says.

He says other vendors can't match ININ's "purpose built" software which has been 15 years in development.

He says in his view ININ has 1-4 years to establish itself as a leader in this space.

Local control helps get them past the CaaS "gatekeepers."

They can quickly convert on-premise to CaaS and vice versa because they're really both the same version.

"The competition is not going to sit still -- we know we need to hit this thing quick," Weber says.

"We know we have a truly strategic story for the business," he says, explaining that the beauty of thier system is that customers can turn apps "on" and "off" as needed -- they can take an a la cart approach to deployment and it's fast and simple.

Pipelines are at an all time high -- although some customers are slow to sign. But they're confident they will get the business for their CaaS offering. Some are putting it off due to a lack of IT resources, he says.

He says the cloud is a new market for ININ, but he says it is "our sweet spot," in terms of its existing client base.

PSO revenue, he says, is "strong and predictable."

Best of all for ININ's partners, "the support burden is minimal."

Resellers will have to provide Level 1 support for these new customers, however this can easily be outourced, he says.

Inclusion of departmental solutions are yielding six digit contracts, he tells the group of resellers and technology partners.

He says they're beating other cloud providers in terms of implementation time, including longtime SaaS players such as CosmoCom. He speaks of one implementation that took only 200 hours.

He says a 250 seat CaaS deal can net $280,000 in margin over initital five year contract. That's $300,000 in PSO and monthly MAC revenue.

A premises deal, on other hand, nets $490,000 ($147,0000) with comparable PSO, plus maintenance. However the reseller doesn't get that money up-front.

ININ pays on the terms of the contract. The benefits are lower support burden, no cost over-runs, more net new customers.

He says major corporations are considering cloud-based options and at this point in the game, small companies with limited needs are less likely to buy in. Trying to sell on premises to small companies is "a waste of time" at this point, he says.

This new CaaS model drives recurring revenue with an opportunity to sell on-prem systems after the customer has a chance to try out the software.

This gives resellers the opportunity to design their businesses "for speed" and get more new customers.

Overall this gives interactive partners more flexibility to sell either a CaaS or on-prem solution, based on each prospect's unique needs.

Joe Staples returns to the stage and asks how many in the audience are in sales. About half the audience raises their hands. He asks what the greatest challenge is in terms of selling the brand: One sales guy says many prospects respond by asking "Interactive who?" indicating that the brand name still is not that well-known.

So how is Interactive building its brand?

Staples provides a "staged dialog" with a "faux" customer wherein the "prospect" is looking for a new communications platform to streamline his business operations. Staples shows how Interactive comes up on Google search on page one for numerous terms including "call center software" and "VoIP communications solutions." He also points out how the company was recently positioned in the Visionaries' Quadrant in Gartner's Magic Quadrant report for contact center software providers.

Staples points out that there more than 60 representatives from various analyst firms at the event -- so the firm is well known by, and continuously working with, the analyst community.

The "sales pitch" continues -- this is all about how strong Interactive's brand presence is -- it's mostly focused on Interactive's strong presence on the Web, at trade shows, etc. Staples says Interactive is now participating in more than 40 different trade shows.

This year Interactive had more than 3,300 press articles published to the Web about its offerings (including many on TMCnet).

Time to get real with all of this: There is a lot of activity around building our brand -- they don't run TV ads on prime time TV, nor do they do high profile print campaigns, "but we are gaining presence with that prime time buyer." He says it's time to get more of this information out there through their partner community.

Any ideas that partners have for building brand exposure are welcomed, Staples said.

--BREAK--

Alan Percy, AudioCodes, presents. Provides overview of AudioCodes product suite.

UC with TDM Carriers: UC experience is limited to within the enterprise.

SIP Trunking facilitates UC outside of the enterprise -- provides opportunity to push UC infrastructure out to customers, partners. New channels of communication can be integrated on a common shared platform. This also provides for improved communication and collaboration with partners/affiliates. Also allows for much easier sharing of communications applications -- both inside and outside of the enterprise.

The future of UC therefore is federation of networks. Through peering, organizations can bypass service providers and cut communications costs.

The challenge is that the SBCs must now communicate or federate securely with all these different organizations. And there are many challenges here, not the least of which is interoperability and lack of standardization.

He provides a case study: Triton.

They use CIC platform -- however they needed to expand. they were using just two AudioCodes SBCs. But their toll charges remained high.

They need to expand and add trunk lines.

They added two Mediant 1000 SBCs to the infrastructure to connect with their two service providers. The enterprise network doesn "see an SBC, it just sees a gateway," which makes it simpler to integrate and deploy new services.

They load balance using two SBCs per service provider -- this has significantly increased capacity and scalability.

They have a new campaign wherein if a partner brings them a good case study which can be used by marketing, the person who brings it to them will win a new Apple iPad.

---

Tim Sanders, former Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo! and author, presents on "Harnessing Great Relationships:"

Speaks of "emotional talent."

When he was at Yahoo they had what was "The Closing Team" -- they were experts at that is called "emotional engagement."

He says resellers and partners need to be "emotionally smart." Professionals need to engage in a more intelligent, yet emotional way. Reading books is the key to changing the way you think, the way you engage with people.

C-level execs only read 5-6 book s a year: He provides a list of 6 book s that everyone in the room would benefit from reading:

Re-work

Trust Agents

Doing Both (Cisco book)

Delivering Happiness

Information Masters

Customer Capitalism (out of print but avilable on eBay)

"If you read a good book about your industry it will drastically improve your knowledge base" and allow you to connect with customers on a more emotional level, he says.

"Books make great swag -- if you want give something great to a client, give them a book that will change their life -- their way of doing things."

He predicts that premises based solutions will soon come to be viewed as very "un-green" and that companies will witness increasing criticism if they deploy on-premises systems. In addition the government will start ramping up its incentives to get companies to go "green" through deployment of cloud-based solutions. Not only will the government start offering incentives, it may even implement punitive measures for companies that only want to stick with on-premises systems.

He says a recent study reveals that sales people who are emotionally connected to the customer get 40 percent more -- mainly because they get "inside information" that helps them drive more sales.

Sales people also need to "Stop taking notes so often and start reading faces," he says. He says recent research shows that all human emotion breaks down into seven basic categories.

He shows how to detect true emotion based on the recent research -- shows seven photos of people's faces and reveals how certain facial expressions reveal whether someone is truly happy or angry based on their facial features. He says that this new research and new way of detecting true emotion has statistical accuracy.

"Feelings are facts," he says, therefore it is critical to pay attention to them -- they are more important than the delivery of the information.

He says it isn't a bad thing to say "I'm sorry" because it allows the individual to quickly move on...

By developing a sincere interest in your prospects, you'll get them to be more interested in you within two months than they'll be interested in you within a year.

He shows an approach to connecting emotionally with prospects he calls "The 5x5 Exercise with Tim Sanders." One the left is a list of five your own personal passions. On the right is a list of your most frequent work contacts.

He says that when the economy goes south, more suits start showing up at meetings, as they are looking for ways to hold down costs and retain customers. The problem is that they tend to slow down the sales process, mainly because they don't understand the process, nor do they respond with the same sense of urgency.

He talks about the importance email etiquette.

1. Stomp out "Reply to All" and "show your age" -- the more emails you send, "the less you're in" -- in other words, once you start getting to many emails, that's when you start losing the big picture.
2. Break the email thread with a phone call. The way people react on the phone is often the opposite of how they react via email.
3. Keep is short, light, and purely transactional. Emails that are too long typically are not read. Don't use email to convey emotions... we hide behind our laptops and send messages to people that we're afraid to say to their face.

Bottom line: Email is NOT the way to connect emotionally to clients and prospects.

]]> Tags: Related tags: contact center, cloud based, interactive intelligence, media server, million lines, customers

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The Value of Agent Supervisor Portals in Resolving Scheduling Disputes

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:44:36 -0500

My wife works in the restaurant business and the other day she brought up a scheduling scenario that made me further realize the value of workforce management software -- and in particular agent-supervisor portals -- not only for the restaurant business but also for the call center.

What happened was this:

Waitress A needed a Monday night off from work so she asked Waitress B to take her shift for her. Waitress B volunteered. It was a verbal agreement done with verbal supervisor approval on premises and the scheduling change was reflected in the (printed) schedule posted on the kitchen wall.

But on the Tuesday night after Waitress B worked the shift, she announced to Waitress A: "Now you're going to work my Friday night shift in return!"

Waitress A was stunned: She had already made plans to see her young daughter's school recital that evening.

When Waitress A said she could not work the Friday shift, Waitress B replied: "Too bad - you said you'd swap shifts with me. You're working it."

Unfortunately management didn't fully understand the situation and sided with Waitress B - but the point is this: Had there been a piece of software acting as the "mediator" for this "transaction" there would have been in infallible audit trail that would have protected Waitress A from an unfair management decision.

It's important to note that Waitress A did not AGREE to take waitress B's Friday shift in exchange, when the verbal agreement took place. The date and time of the shift that was to be swapped was left open ended.

Had the two waitresses been required to use a Web-based online supervisor portal, integrated with workforce management software, to swap, bid on, or cancel shifts, Waitress A would have been required to indicate which shift she would work in exchange for Waitress B and there would be no dispute in terms of which two shifts had been swapped.

The important thing with these agent-supervisor (or employee-supervisor) portals is that they have to be extremely user friendly. After all, restaurants (and even call centers) have employees with all different levels of computer skills and it's important to use a portal that everyone can use easily.

There are numerous workforce management software providers out there offering Web-based agent supervisor portals. One that stands out with an exceptionally easy-to-use yet fully-functional agent supervisor portal is WFM software provider Monet Software. Monet revamped its Monet WFM Live software last year to make it fully Web-based and the company also offers a slick agent supervisor portal, called MonetAnywhere, that allows agents to swap, bid on and bid out of shifts with ease, often without requiring supervisor approval. Agents can communicate with their supervisors through this portal - but perhaps more importantly they communicate with the entire team, thus allowing for faster resolution of scheduling conflicts. Best of all it provides an accurate audit trail of all swaps, bid-outs and cancellations to provide data that can be used in evaluating employee behavior.

TMCnet doesn't really cover any of the WFM vendors operating in the restaurant space but boy can I see a lot of parallels in terms of how the two industries can benefit from WFM.

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On Pocket Knives, Baristas and Passion

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:54:50 -0500

One of the things I noticed during Interactive Intelligence's Interactions '10 user's conference in Indianapolis last week is the high level of passion the company's employees have for its products.

At every session I attended - whether it was about the company's newly-updated communications-as-a-service (CaaS) offering; or its flagship platform, Customer Interaction Center (CIC); or its new business process automation product, Interaction Process Automation (IPA); or its hardware offerings (yes, Interactive makes hardware!), including its new Interaction SIP Station, the presenter was enthusiastic and, for lack of better term, "passionate."

During one session I attended -- I believe it was "AcroSoft Insurance User Focus" (AcroSoft, which Interactive Intelligence acquired last year, makes a content management system geared for insurance companies which is now integrated with the CIC platform) -- the attendees started discussing in detail how they were having occasional trouble carrying a particular operation (I think involving the transfer of data from one system to another) due to some integration issue - and the level of interest and helpful input from session presenter Chuck Wilson, who now heads up Interactive Intelligence's new Insurance Services Group, which is run out of AcroSoft's headquarters in Columbia, North Carolina, was phenomenal in that he really dug into the problem with his own questions and showed a genuine concern in wanting to get the issue resolved.

By the way this year's user's conference included a new Insurance track consisting of about eight sessions, most of which were focused on AcroSoft's solutions (which, to be honest I'm still not that familiar with). While I was able to easily follow along with the call center, customer self-service and "communications-side" of things during these sessions, there were times when they dove into back office side of insurance operations and I found myself a little bewildered. Let's just say it's a very process-driven industry with a lot of little rules and regulations on the way you have to do things -- which makes Interactive Intelligence's contact center, business process automation and insurance software ideal for this industry.

Anyway, back to the topic of passion. During the opening presentation of the conference, Interactive Intelligence founder, president and CEO Dr. Don Brown related a story about how one day a fellow employee in upper management wanted to speak with him about CIC, yet Brown said he was "too busy" and proceeded to go to a local Starbuck's for a cup of coffee.

The employee followed Brown to the Starbucks, stormed out of her car and confronted him in the parking lot. "This is what's so important?" she yelled at him. Upon which Brown took out his pocket knife, unfolded the blade, and told the employee, "there's a barista in there who's been talking smack about CIC ... and I was going to go in there and kill him." Naturally, the employee was rather taken aback. "Yeah, now who's the one who's passionate about CIC?" Brown said.

Of course, none of it ever really happened. Maybe the story was a little "over the top" but I think Brown made his point: Interactive Intelligence's employees possess an "over the top" attitude when it comes to the company's products - and it showed throughout the entire conference - both during the sessions and in between.

(FYI I'm posting this late because I've been completely buried ever since I returned. I plan to blog more about my experience at Interactions '10 so stay tuned...)

]]> Tags: Related tags: interactive intelligence, process automation, business process, interactive, brown, intelligence

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Passage of Caller ID Spoofing Bill May Raise Issues for Call Centers

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:04:15 -0500

Last week I wrote about a recent customer survey performed by caller ID management company DipFees.com which reveals the importance of having accurate CNAM caller ID for outbound call centers.

DipFees claims that it is common for outbound call centers to be unaware of which caller ID is being displayed when they carry out their campaigns and customer support calls.

Personally I've heard of instances where they forget to update the outbound caller ID, so it displays the wrong one. Or worse yet it displays no number at all.

This lowers connection rates, as call recipients -- with their own caller ID -- are less likely to pick up a call from an unfamiliar name and number.

Well here's something new to place an even stronger emphasis on the need for accurate caller ID: Yesterday TMCnet reported that the House of Representatives has passed an amendment to the Telecommunications Act prohibiting the use of caller ID spoofing software, which allows callers to change the number and name that is displayed to one other than their own.

This new rule could have serious ramifications for the call center industry because by stating that callers cannot "misrepresent" it is implied that the caller ID they use must be accurate.
In essence what outbound call centers use to control the ID displayed on a recipient's phone is the same software used for caller ID spoofing: They have control over the ID that is displayed on the recipient's phone (or TV).

So if they make a mistake and "misrepresent," I would assume that they could be cited (fined?), however, I'm not sure yet how this law will be enforced or if it will even have any teeth.

Which raises a whole other topic - how will they catch the people who "spoof" their calls - and what will their punishment be? And whose job will that be anyway?

]]> Tags: Related tags: caller, outbound, displayed, centers, calls, accurate

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(Sharon on Jun 16, 2010 5:54 PM)

I have never heard this issues before. As what I have noticed, calling outbound has a lot more concerns and policy rules issues than that of an inbound calls. Anyway, this raises my interest.

IBM, Assurant Team on Call Center Analytics Solution

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 11:46:05 -0500

IBM and insurance management solutions provider Assurant Solutions recently announced their new Real-Time Analytics Matching Platform (RAMP), which uses advanced analytics to match a caller with the "optimal CSR" in real-time.

As per an article by TMCnet's Susan Campbell, "RAMP relies on techniques invented and patented by Assurant to combine data about individual customers with each contact center agent's specific skills, expertise and past performance. IBM Global Business Services consultants then designed a 'matching-engine' to leverage this combination of customer insight, agent profiles and real-time analytics. The result is an 'individual-level' decisioning and assignment of calls not available in most contact center applications."

Think about that for a minute: "'individual-level' decisioning." Or "agent-customer "matchmaking" if you will.

The purpose of this solution is to "match" customers to agents who are the most familiar with their cases, or profiles - which in some cases, depending on the size of the center, will be the same agent.

This has always struck me as ironic -- the fact that these centers are employing advanced call routing ("skills based routing") and analytics solutions that cost a fortune and complicate their systems - but in the end the goal is simply to connect customers to the same agent they spoke to last time.

So if the industry has figured out that customers want to speak with the same agent they spoke with last time, why not just provide customers with a direct number to the agent they should be dealing with - and skip all that other expensive intelligent call routing stuff? (I say this in jest, of course.)

I find it amusing and ironic that the software vendors have developed intelligent call routing solutions that "decide" on behalf of customers to connect them to the same agent they spoke with last time. Sort of like a giant whacky machine with a million moving parts that takes up an entire kitchen and carries out a dozen impressive operations, but in the end all it does is drop an egg into boiling water.

Of course I'm not so naive as to not see the purpose - I realize that obviously you can't have the same agents available to customers 24/7. Plus there's the usual problem of agent attrition to consider. It's just that when it comes to call center automation, sometimes it seems the systems used to carry out certain functions are in fact many times more complex than the functions themselves...]]> Tags: Related tags: agent spoke, contact center, individual level, level decisioning, agent, customers

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Call Center Industry Appears to be Rebounding

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 10:46:36 -0500

As I mentioned in one of my earlier blog posts, TMCnet does not know of any reliable or accurate measure of the size or growth rate of the call center industry. With so many companies operating so many call centers in so many locations all over the globe - plus the fact that they do not need to disclose the size of their call center operations, with regard to the number of seats or even call volume - it's really an almost impossible industry to measure. Several of the leading market research firms do a good job of trying to measure the industry based on available data and their own research efforts, but the results of such studies sometimes have to be taken with a grain of salt.

For the past several months we've seen several market research reports which predict that the call center industry will continue to see significant growth over the next several years - this regardless of the recession and the ever-growing trend toward customer-self-service and automation.

I've always viewed these reports somewhat skeptically - but today when searching "call center" on Google News I was impressed with the number of companies that are currently hiring for their call centers. For example, Sprint is currently looking to hire 125 workers for its call center in Sacremento and another 100 for its call center in Orlando; United Healthcare recently added 175 jobs to its recently relocated Maryland Heights, Mo. Call center; and call center outsourcing giant Convergys is looking to add 110 jobs at its Appleton, Wis., call center. Maybe these recent industry reports were more on the mark than I initially thought (so easy to be pessimistic in this current economic environment). And these are just a few of the many "we're hiring" reports I've seen in recent weeks.

This is great news for the vendors that sell call center software and solutions, as companies will likely ramp up their investment in technologies that improve the customer experience and hold down operating costs. Another way to measure the growth of the industry is to look at the sales of call center software and systems. If the economy rebounds and consumer confidence levels return to what they were a few years ago, this, combined with the desire to improve operations will likely drive robust growth in the call center and customer support software markets for months to come...

]]> Tags: Related tags: center industry, center software, market research, center, industry, several

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Call Center Agents Stand Ready as the Catalogs Come Flooding In

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:12:35 -0500

We've been getting flooded with catalogs at my house during the past couple of weeks. It seems like some merchants are doing a little more prospecting this year: Although I didn't take an official count, I would say we definitely received more catalogs so far this year than we did in 2008, which is surprising.

Every time I get a catalog in the mail, I think about the call center agents that are somewhere out there in the proverbial call center services "cloud" (I use that term because let's face it, with today's virtualized call centers, it might as well be a "cloud," as far as the consumer is concerned, since they don't know where the agent is located), all fired up a ready to take a flood of calls.

I also think about how those agents fit in with the long chain of events that makes up every merchant transaction: The manufacturing of the products; the sourcing of the products; the merchandising; the development of marketing campaigns, both around the brand and the products; the advertising; the mailing of the catalogs and building of Web sites and new Web pages; the handling of orders in the call center and the rest of the fulfillment process - it's all a rather intricate and fascinating process, the way consumers buy all this "stuff" every holiday season.

I also think about call center managers pacing wildly up and down the aisles as the clock ticks down -- as the agents sit idly, waiting for contacts to come in. This is the point where it becomes like a game of "cat and mouse" between the merchant and the customer - a game the merchant wins when the mouse is "caught," "cross-selled" and "upselled," the interaction is completed, the transaction is closed, and the wrap-up is, well, "wrapped up."

On the other hand, if the holiday season turns out to be better than these merchants expected, and they already cut their call center staffing to the bone, there will be customer service hell to pay on both ends of the wire.

By the way, the topic of whether or not the call center industry is ready to handle an unexpected spike in volume due to the start of an economic rebound this holiday season was explored during day one of the Frost & Sullivan Customer Contact Philippines summit 2009, being held Nov. 25-26 in Manila. During the event, regional thought leaders convene and discuss the challenges that the contact center industry faces in delivering exceptional customer experience whilst reducing costs.

The overall consensus at the event, according to a release, is that as economic conditions begin to improve "the contact center industry will need to increase its focus on customer acquisition and delivering exceptional customer experience with people, processes and technology."

"The recession shifted the focus in the contact center industry towards efficiency such as cost reduction and optimizing resources," said Shivanu Shukla, industry manager, ICT practice at Frost & Sullivan, in the release. "As the economy begins to revive, efficiency will continue to be a driving factor; however focus on effectiveness will return and re-assign importance on customer satisfaction, customer acquisition and revenue generation activities The Asian contact center industry is expected to see steady growth driven by increased investments by enterprises on beefing up their customer service infrastructure, as well as increased levels of outsourcing expected in 2010."

Regional thought leaders at the summit included representatives from Thomson Reuters, SAP, Genesys Labs, NICE, DSM Manila LLC, Hong Kong Call Center Association, Western Union Financial Services, Gulf Bank of Kuwait, e-LOAN Division of Banco Popular, Business Processing Association of Philippines (BPAP) and Salesforce.com, amongst Frost & Sullivan senior analysts.

For more information, check out the release.

]]> Tags: Related tags: center industry, contact center, holiday season, frost sullivan, regional thought, center

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Salesforce Brings Social Networking to the Workplace

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:27:56 -0500

Salesforce has introduced a new social networking platform for the workplace called Chatter. The idea is to have sales teams use social networking for communication and collaboration - and to give company management a new way to monitor employee activity.

Explaining how he got the idea for this first-of-its-kind business application during a speech at Dreamforce this week, Salesforce.com Chief Executive Marc Benioff said: "I know more about these strangers on Facebook than I do about my own employees and what they're working on. I know when my friends went to the movies, but not when my VP of sales visited our top customer."

Due out in February, Chatter is a Web-based business collaboration tool that takes draws on the features and functionality of social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. The solution, which works with Salesforce's cloud-based CRM software, is used to display "profiles" of employees and posts about projects they're working on or the customers they've visited.

This seems like a cool idea and could go a long way to make the workplace more appealing to Millennials who are already accustomed to social networking and using alternate channels of communication. It also will no doubt help organizations further reduce their communications costs.

The thing is, though, is that I'm not so sure it will be all that "efficient," as there are "manual processes" involved -- and by this I mean the amount of time it takes to craft, type and post messages. This doesn't exactly fit in with the trend toward automation of business processes that has been prevalent as of late: It actually could create more work.

I frequently hear people say "I don't have time to do social networking," or they complain that they are spending way too much time doing it, and it obviously can be a very time consuming activity. You have to remember that not everyone is able to express themselves all that well in writing, in as few words as possible -- as we've seen with email -- and some people are just plain terrible communicators to begin with.

For that reason I can imagine company management ending up with a load of content that varies in quality -- and perhaps even accuracy -- from one end of the spectrum to the other.

So if someone is good at their job but a terrible communicator using social networking tools, what does that mean in the context of bringing it into the workplace? Will companies start firing employees for their inability to communicate properly, and in timely fashion, using the social networking medium? For making what might be deemd "inapparopriate" posts?

And what about this from the user's perspective? Certainly, using social networking at work will require a different tone and overall approach compared to personal social networking -- so employees will have to learn to "shift" between the two types. (As an absurd aside, can you imagine if an employee, in a drunken stupor one night, mistakenly posted a personal message to the company social networking site, instead of his personal Facebook account?)

Social networking seems like it would be an unreliable business tool, due to the subjectivity of it -- the posts are short and "Tweet" and looser in style than email -- the bias expressed in the posts and the potential for misinterpretation of the information, etc. (How does one detect sarcasm?)

Also, I'm failing to understand how making employees submit posts about where they are and what they are doing all day long will help companies keep better track of employee performance any better than any other Web-based CRM or communications solution out there...when you open the door to social netowrking you have to be willing to take the bad with the good.

]]> Tags: Related tags: social networking, using social, company management, social, networking, employees

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March of the Interoperability Announcements

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:23:10 -0500

In addition to covering call and contact center I also cover telecom, including hardware, software and services.

Lately I've noticed a slew of interoperability announcements coming from the major IP PBX vendors -- especially Avaya and Toshiba -- a lot of them SIP Trunking interoperability announcements, but also some product interoperability announcements as well.

There are a lot of ITSPs out there competing in the SIP Trunking space right now. They bring a separate Internet connection into your facility and, there you go -- a dedicated IP connection to any end point you want, PSTN, Internet, mobile. It's fast and easy to deploy and brings cost savings and other benefits immediately.

But fast deployment also means companies can switch their service more easily - and this is where the interoperability announcements are key for the service providers. The service providers know no one is going to rip and replace their PBX just to be able to use a service that is "certified interoperable" -- and the vendors know you don't drive customer satisfaction in today's world by locking customers into proprietary systems that don't interoperate with a wide range of services. So, giving customers the freedom to choose from a range of "certified interoperable" solutions, fosters adoption, and gives them peace of mind.

On the other hand, everyone knows that most products and services are only interoperable "to a degree." By saying their products and services are interoperable, really what most vendors and service providers are saying is that they are "interoperable in terms of the testing we did," but not necessarily all-inclusively of every network scenario out there.

In the case of PBX/SIP Trunking it's arguably easier to achieve (and proclaim) true interoperability compared to other software -- but organizations still have to consider interoperability with other systems such as ACD, IVR, CRM or even back office systems they might want to hold onto. Fortunately SIP has helped facilitate standardization and interoperability of various communications systems and I can still imagine a day when systems are standardized to the point that interoperability won't be an issue at all.

Here are just a handful of the recent interoperability announcements we've covered on TMCnet...

http://ipcommunications.tmcnet.com/topics/sip-trunking/articles/67938-smoothstone-sip-trunking-now-certified-interoperable-with-avaya.htm

http://sip-trunking.tmcnet.com/topics/security/articles/66403-sonicwall-utm-ipsec-vpn-solutions-certified-interoperable-with.htm

http://sip-trunking.tmcnet.com/topics/enterprise-voip/articles/66141-mm-internets-sip-services-interoperable-with-toshibas-strata.htm

http://sip-trunking.tmcnet.com/topics/enterprise-voip/articles/65611-toshibas-strata-cix-voip-systems-now-certified-interoperable.htm

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From IVR to Online Banking

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:52:30 -0500

Until a few weeks ago I was a holdout on making the switch to online banking. Call me paranoid, but having covered network technology (including, to a degree, the challenges of network security) for the past several years I was always sort of concerned that my computer would one day get infected with some key logging malware and someone would end up hacking into my accounts.

But recently I switched banks and ended up switching from IVR/ATM-based banking to all-online banking. I guess that's mainly because my new bank pushed me in that direction (I'm sure my new bank offers telephone banking but I never did see the toll free number on any of the materials I received in the mail). Plus, the improvements in online banking security in the past couple of years helped ease some of my concerns.

I have to say I'm quite satisfied with my online banking experience thus far. For one thing, I have greater control over my finances than I did using the telephone based system - plus it's nice to be able to view my finances in graphic form (as opposed to plain audio). Being able to see the numbers on screen seems to help me make decisions and complete tasks faster (for example I can see the balances of all my accounts on one screen).

The other thing I've noticed is that making the switch has altered my behavior somewhat. For example, when I was doing all my banking on the phone, I had a tendency to call in to my bank a lot more to do things like check my balance. Like most people, my finances are pretty tight, so I had a tendency to nervously call in to see if, for example, a certain check had cleared yet or if the bank had charged me a late fee or something. I'll admit that sometimes I made these calls while I was at work (at an average call length of about 60 seconds).

But now that I've switched to online banking, I feel more confident about my finances and I don't feel the need to check as often as I did before. In effect, I'm saying making the switch has brought about a change in my behavior. Another thing I forgot to mention is that I no longer need to use the ATM machine as often. When I was doing my banking using the phone, I would usually do my transfers using the ATM machine because doing it using the IVR always seemed cumbersome and time-consuming. So, basically I was using the ATM machine as that graphical interface I now get from online banking. Except now I can do it at home, instead of going to the bank.

The thing I wonder about is the impact self-service banking has had on the call center industry. I'm sure the banking industry still accounts for a huge percentage of the call center industry - but I'm wondering how much it has shrunk as a result of the advent of self-service (and here I include IVR, ATM and online banking), because, let's face it, no industry has made greater strides in the area of self service than banking. I haven't seen any studies in recent years that provide a definitive measurement of the impact over the long run: For example, how many call center agents did the U.S. banking industry employ in 1980? 1990? 2000? 2009? I think it would be fascinating to see those numbers. It would be even more fascinating to see it broken down by the impact from the migration to specific technologies, i.e. ATM (which was introduced in the 1980s), IVR-based telephone banking (which was introduced in the late 1980s, early 1990s) and online banking (introduced in the late 1990s early 2000s).

If anyone out there can point me to such a study I'd really appreciate it ...

]]> Tags: Related tags: online banking, making switch, center industry, service banking, banking introduced, banking

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Is Wiretapping Really an Effective Way to Combat Terrorism?

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:51:37 -0500

NICE Systems today announced that it has won a "mega security contract" from a government agency, the first phase of which is expected to generate more than $55 million over the next two to three years. The government agency will be implementing NICE's NiceTrack technology, which is used for "lawful intercept," which is the PC way of saying "wiretapping."

I have followed the Clinton wiretapping law since it was first passed in 1994, all the way through to the May 2007 deadline for all telecoms companies to comply with CALEA (the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) -- as well as the subsequent expansion of the law to include all broadband internet communications. In fact I even wrote a bunch of articles about SS8 Networks and other vendors offering CALEA compliance solutions in 2006 and 2007 for TMCnet. I don't pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I probably know a little more about it than the average person.

But there's one thing about the law that I still don't get (and I know I'm not alone): Are terrorists or anyone else engaged in illegal activity actually going to say what it is that they're going to do over the telephone - or say anything that even hints at it? I mean, from what I understand, terrorists are far more likely to use some alternative form of communication that is "un-tappable" if they're planning some major event. Heck, they could even do it right over the phone simply by substituting common words or phrases in English that, when re-interpreted, could have a completely different meaning - a "code" if you will - such as "I'm going grocery shopping today at 12:34 p.m. I'm going to buy 1 gallon of milk and a half dozen eggs," and that could be all it takes to give other terrorists in a cell all the basic information the need (such as date, time, place) for carrying out an attack.

I would even take that statement one step further by arguing that even today's advanced speech analytics software, with all its fancy "emotion detection" and "stress detection," is ineffective because, hey, let's face it, the bad guys know about this stuff too. I've read that the government already has major contracts in place with Nuance, Verint and other software makers specializing in speech analytics, with some people presenting conspiracy theories that this software is being used across the networks of all the major telecoms players.

I guess what I'm saying is, why is our government spending millions if not billions of taxpayer dollars on technology that simply has not proven itself as a crime fighting tool? And if it has resulted in some success, why is there no substantive evidence to that end?

To back up my point, check out this article on the San Francisco Chronicle's website (SFGate) from July referring to recent report from the federal government documenting the effectiveness of its wiretapping program. According to the article, "Most intelligence officials interviewed 'had difficulty citing specific instances' when the National Security Agency's wiretapping program contributed to successes against terrorists."

While the government report concluded that the program obtained information that "had value in some counterterrorism investigations, it generally played a limited role in the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts," the article states.

And, as I mentioned before, what about alternative, peer-to-peer technologies that are practically "untappable," such as Skype? It seems to me that all of these wiretapping solutions in the end have only one effect, and that is to force the "bad guys" to use alternative forms of communication.

]]> Tags: Related tags: speech analytics, government agency, wiretapping program, wiretapping, government, going

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TelCoa Releases Top Ten Reasons to Have Employees Work from Home

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:57:37 -0500

TMCnet's Brendan Read today covered the news that The Telework Coalition (TelCoa), a Washington, D.C. based telework education and advocacy organization, has released a list of top ten reasons to have employees work from home.

I think the list is fine -- and overall I agree with its points. But for each of the points it raises I also see some challenges that could hinder the growth and adoption of teleworking solutions.

Just for the heck of it, I'll go through the list and offer my two cents for each of the points:

For the Employer and the Economy:

1. Improve the ability to recruit and retain skilled labor for enhanced productivity, creativity, and higher quality work from anywhere in the U.S.

I'm still not entirely convinced this is true. For one thing, just because there are qualified applicants for positions who live far from your offices (and are therefore unable to work on-site) it does not necessarily mean all these applicants want work-at-home jobs. Yes, it's true that you've broken down the geographic factors that inhibit recruitment, but saying your labor pool is now "everyone who is qualified" regardless of where they live is a misnomer, because not everyone who is qualified necessarily wants to work from home. Also, with a majority of "work-at-home" offers out there being scams, it's sometimes difficult to get good applicants to believe that the job you're offering is legit.

2. Provide the necessary competitive advantage and the ability to win in an increasingly regionalized/globalized economy by repatriating many of the hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been sent offshore

Frankly, I don't get this point. Won't companies still have to pay U.S. workers at competitive rates, even though they work at home? If workers in the Philippines work at lower rates, then why not have them as your teleworkers? When it comes to the economics of labor, I don't see how teleworking and "repatriation" are related.

3. Reduce real estate, facilities, and other overhead expenses

Okay this point I agree with completely - and it's so self-evident, how could I not? But it's only a positive thing for the employers, not the employees: If companies aren't paying for the space, then the teleworker is. For example, if you are required to have a separate office for your work-at-home job, then you are paying taxes (yes, I know you can get a tax break, but you're not fully exempt), homeowner's insurance, on the square footage, not to mention utilities such as heat and electricity. This is where teleworking becomes a sweet deal for organizations - they don't have to pay to operate as much facility, instead, they pass this cost onto the teleworker, often without additional compensation.

For the Employee:

4. Increase work/life balance, become self reliant, reduce stress, realize the opportunity to participate in local activities, and further one's education

I'm not sure this is really true. Just because you work at home doesn't necessarily mean your job will be any less stressful. Nor does it necessarily mean you'll have more time to do other things - that's really more a function of how long your commute is, as opposed to your workload. I guess if you have a long commute, it's definitely an advantage. Also, in most positions, if you come to an agreement with your employer to reduce your workload, you typically get paid less, and if you drop below 35 hours a week you might be denied benefits.

5. Retain a larger percentage of earnings for a higher quality of life

I'd like to see some statistics to back this up. From what I understand, most teleworkers get paid less than their counterparts who work in the office (can you name company that pays them the same or more?). And a lot of the time they don't get company benefits such as health insurance, which means the individual has to pay for it at higher, non-group rates. The main thing teleworkers save money on is transportation costs. Maybe your lunches are a little cheaper, too, since you can make them at home. I think it all comes out in the wash.

6. Provide hope and economic opportunity, especially in hard-hit rural areas for all workers and expand these opportunities to include:

(a) Military-service disabled veterans and others with disabilities

(b) Older workers who desire to remain in or need to reenter the workforce due to reduced retirement funds caused by the current economic conditions, and for part-time employment reducing reliance on costly publically funded benefit programs

I agree with this point fully. I think teleworking is a great solution for companies looking to recruit in rural areas. The big question is, will you find the talent you need in Northern Montana?

For the Environment and within Communities:

7. Lower carbon footprints, greenhouse gas emissions, and improved air quality

Again, this is a good point and I agree with it fully. But teleworking will only reduce air pollution if we can get a significant portion of the population to work from home. One or two percent probably won't make that much of a difference.

8. Reduce dependence on foreign energy, especially petroleum products

Also a good point - but the debate over where we buy oil from, and whether we should, is kind of a separate topic.

9. Have fewer traffic accidents, less congestion, and reduce the need for maintaining costly transportation infrastructures

Also a good point - and very closely related to #7.

10. Decrease the impact from disruptive occurrences. These range from terrorist attacks, natural incidents such as severe weather conditions, pandemics, transit strikes, and bridge collapses to everyday situations such as family needs, traffic congestion, and car trouble, through the use of a widely dispersed workforce.

I understand the concept of, and importance of, business continuity - and in general I agree with this point - but here is something else to think about: If your workforce a spread out everywhere, you might actually be increasing the risk of certain workers not being able to work. For example, you could have three agents who live on the South Carolina coast, and when a hurricane hits, you lose those three workers for the day. But if your headquarters was in Colorado, and you kept all your workers "on site," then you would never incur the risk of losing those three teleworkers in S.C., right? So just the same way there is risk of keeping "all your eggs in one basket," there is also a risk that one of the above-mentioned disasters will impact your workforce to some degree, if it is more geographically spread out. Then you have the challenge of reallocating resources, which is never as easy as they say it is.

Like I said, I think these are all great points -- and I know where this report is coming from. But the report fails to address two of the biggest factors that are inhibiting the adoption and growth of teleworking solutions: The ability to monitor employee productivity and network security. (Sorry, I'll have to save those two topics for future posts ... ).

I wish TelCoa would publish a similar report, only this time identifying the top ten challenges to making teleworking more viable, and how these challenges can be overcome.

]]> Tags: Related tags: higher quality, everyone qualified, rural areas, teleworking solutions, reasons employees, point

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Comments on this Entry:

(PaymentGuru on Aug 5, 2009 6:08 AM)

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