By Susan Campbell
Humans are an increasingly mobile species, relying on technology to keep them connected to people, information, processes and more. While continued mobile technology innovation is a key in meeting the needs of a rapidly changing world, consumers are now demanding more than just technology – they want a new conversation experience. This experience is focused not solely on technology, but instead on improving the content and context of human interactions.
A recent Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) article in the company’s Enriching Communications business e-zine entitled, Needed: A New Conversation Experience, the focus was on the importance of human interactions, stressing that the new conversation experience needed to be more personal, secure, social and mobile. It detailed how network intelligence will enable the new conversation experience and as well as how open innovation helps to enhance the experience, while also encouraging service uptake and loyalty for service providers (SPs).
The new conversation experience is provided through the unified experience across all screens, devices, applications and networks. People want to easily connect, share and optimize social interaction opportunities when, where and how it fits into their schedule and location. They don’t want to think about the technology – it just needs to work. Fortunately for SPs, users are willing to pay for this.
The need to create a new conversation experience was driven by challenges inherent in traditional technologies. Users have often been frustrated:
- When trying to figure out which application, device or address book combination should be used at a particular time
- Remembering how they last communicated with a particular individual to pick up on the conversation thread
- Sifting through messages on different platforms to find the right information; and trying to share across applications that lack compatibility.
There is a demand for network intelligence that transforms application and content value chains to eliminate these frustrations. The objective is to enable the new conversation experience by eliminating the complications. More is not always better, and users can improve the overall experience when services and capabilities are simplified to harmonize.
Put simply, the new conversation experience will simplify and harmonize communications as it effectively ties together networks, screens, devices and applications to provide communications that are more social, personal, secure and mobile. This approach eliminates the struggling and juggling, ensuring that conversations are not stranded as they work seamlessly across ACP and service provider services.
The new conversation experience ensures that mobile messaging conversations can be sent to anyone, even if they’re operating on Apple iMessage or Google Talk. Plus, a single application from an SP can extend the social conversations from any pervasive social networking site. Anyone operating any device can leverage excellent video calling experiences, and legacy SMS services will work with new IM services.
By leveraging new technologies, SPs can deliver this new conversation experience by enabling users to connect, share and organization their conversations across all networks, applications, devices and screens. They can eliminate communications islands through provider collaboration, and can enhance the overall experience through new partnerships and business models with ACPs and thereby drive relevance within the application and content value chain.
The bottom line is the bottom line, i.e., not only happier users, but increased revenue to support strategic goals for long-term sustainability and profitability.
