Next Generation Communications - A New Conversation Experience Archives

A New Conversation Experience: Alcatel-Lucent's 4G Consumer Communications Solution

2012-05-14T14:15:32Z

Beecher Tuttle

Subscriber demand for more innovative, bandwidth-hungry services has driven most every service provider to build a 4G LTE network capable of providing greater capacity, reduced latency and improved pricing. But to unlock the power of a 4G LTE investment – and to continue to deliver revenue-generating voice and messaging services – carriers must look to embrace Voice over LTE (VoLTE), a core component for a new set of rich media and collaboration services that also enables operators to deliver voice without having to rely on legacy 2G/3G networks.

In short, VoLTE helps service providers capitalize on their new 4G investments. VoLTE enables operators to offload legacy infrastructure and to deliver data simultaneously with crisp HD voice. By blending mobile voice with video, converged IP messaging, the web and social networking, service providers can create new revenue-generating communication services that differentiate them from competitors. The technology is also proven to harmonize conversations across disparate providers, devices and apps.

But perhaps more than anything, VoLTE provides operators with the flexibility to respond to ever-changing technologies, market conditions and user demands. The competitive freedoms of VoLTE allow operators to experiment with and deliver new communication features for broad markets and even strategic industries like mobile healthcare.

VoLTE also provides an avenue for operators to partner with application developers to deliver the best user experience at the lowest cost per bit, solidifying their position in the value chain.

"Regardless of where technology, regulation and competition take the industry in the coming years, VoLTE operators’ investment enables them to act decisively," say Alcatel-Lucent, a leading provider of VoLTE technologies.

Voice

In addition to providing a pathway for new converged services, VoLTE acts as a business necessity for delivering voice services via 4G networks, rather than continuing to deliver voice and messaging over legacy 2G/3G networks – an interim solution that doesn't take advantage of the power of LTE.

VoLTE is the long-term industry-designated solution for delivering voice and SMS messaging – two revenue-generating services that have stringent requirements that all-IP mobile networks can't meet.

Unlike temporary solutions such as circuit switched fallback (CSFB) and simultaneous voice and LTE (SV-LTE), which can't enable all-IP communication services like video calls or WebRTC, VoLTE tightly links the voice application to the LTE network, assuring the best subscriber experience in terms of performance, reliability, interoperability and global roaming.

With VoLTE, operators can provide new revenue-generating services such as video-communications and converged IP messaging while still delivering key mobile features like global roaming, global interoperability and a global ecosystem of smartphones and tablets, says Alcatel.

How does VoLTE optimize LTE investments?

Unlike 2G and 3G networks, VoLTE provides seamless IP connectivity between a subscriber’s devices and the Packet Data Networks (PDNs), resulting in improved spectral efficiency, higher bandwidth, reduced latency and Quality of Service (QoS) for new and legacy communication services.

The VoLTE application provides industry-leading reliability for conversational voice, real-time gaming, IMS signaling, and buffered and live streaming video. Other service differentiators include:

Graceful handover of in-progress voice calls from VoLTE (packet) to 2G/3G (circuit)
Emergency calling (for example, a subscriber’s call for help to police)
Intelligent Network (IN) service migration
Short message service (SMS) over IP
IMS centralized services

These features give application developers reason to partner with service providers and gain a share of their revenue. For more technical information on how VoLTE enables these functions, check out Alcatel Lucent's most recent addition to its white paper library, Voice Over LTE: The New Mobile Voice.

Path to VoLTE

Enablers like Alcatel-Lucent acknowledge that the path to VoLTE is a serious undertaking that relies heavily on the readiness of an operator's 4G LTE network as well as their competitive situation.

"The VoLTE operator must have purchased 4G LTE spectrum that covers critical markets, and they must have deployed or have a firm plan to deploy 4G LTE’s radios, mobile backhaul, packet core and so on," says Alcatel. "The VoLTE deployment is comparably small when compared to the rest of 4G LTE, yet it too must be done well in order to assure subscribers’ service and win their business."

Before deploying VoLTE, service providers must first consider:

IN Services: Operators must develop a plan to migrate their IN services from legacy networks to 4G infrastructures. For more information on this topic, check out the IN Services Migration white paper from Alcatel.
Consistent roaming: Without standards, business agreements and interconnections being finalized, operators need to employ an interim roaming strategy. The most optimum path available is the circuit switched copycat method, which relies on Local Breakout (LBO) to expeditiously route voice traffic.
Voice call continuity: The majority of operators use SR-VCC or eSR-VCC. Click on this Alcatel white paper for more information.
Device ecosystem: With the help of early VoLTE adopters, Alcatel-Lucent has been testing and preparing for the launch of VoLTE-capable devices.

The Alcatel-Lucent advantage

As described above, VoLTE deployments hold tremendous value for service providers that rely on 4G LTE infrastructures to drive their business into the future. But to take full advantage of VoLTE, operators must first analyze their current competitive situation and assess their technical assets to ensure an efficient and cost-effective deployment.

Service providers need a partner with the technical expertise to help them with a smooth execution, especially considering commercial VoLTE rollouts are only just beginning. Alcatel-Lucent and its 4G Consumer Communications solution have been at the heart of most every major VoLTE trial, assuring next-gen voice, video and messaging services with the highest level of performance, reliability and service interoperability.

The graphic below illustrates Alcatel-Lucent’s end-to-end approach to LTE.

Alcatel-Lucent's New Conversion Experience enables operators to deliver:

A better user experience: Mobile subscribers can enjoy video, voice and messaging using any combination of device, screen and network.

Connected communities: By harmonizing communications across telecom and web-based networks. Users can easily contact friends and family over social networks. And, through WebRTC, operators can extend their services to anyone with a web browser.

Open for innovation: The solution has easy to use, open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to attract application developers with additional features that inspire and accelerate new conversation services and collaboration.

Click here to learn more about Alcatel-Lucent's "New Conversion Experience." And, for additional information, check out the following Alcatel-Lucent white papers:

No 'One-Size-Fits-All' Path to Improving the Customer Experience

2012-04-23T14:18:07Z

By Erin Harrison

In this day in age, no matter what business you are in, the customer is king.

As we touched on last week (and commands further attention), European telecom operators are not cutting it when it comes to delivering a stellar – or even an adequate – customer experience. This weakened Quality of Experience (QoE) tendency is forcing tech-savvy consumers to side with the company that is most responsive to their communications needs and not necessarily the one that offers a specific kind of service.

Typically consumers base their requirements on the strength, speed and coverage of their network, the depth and breadth of their product and services portfolio and, least of all, price. But this is the case no longer.

A recent study conducted in EMEA by European Communications – the results of which appear in a recent special edition, “Customer Experience” – found overwhelmingly that telecom operators are losing their edge when it comes to QoE. Alarmingly, only17 percent of operators say they have a 360-degree view of their customers.

Most important, in a subsequent interview with Ben Geller, senior director of marketing at Alcatel-Lucent, he said the study reveals that the main differentiator between telecom operators these days is found not in the services offered but the customer experience overall.

“The real differentiator [between companies] has ultimately become the customer experience offered,” said Geller. “The days of customer acquisition are largely gone. Markets are pretty much saturated and essentially, the strategy has become one that is not based on grabbing market share, but rather, on retaining market share and getting more value out of the customers that you already have.”

That means even if even if network service is consistently reliable, a bad experience or interaction can have major impact, including lost revenue from the customers that switch to another operator, which lowers customer lifetime value (CLV) and the sets forth an inability to monetize service portfolios.

In fact, more than 70 percent of consumers are willing to spend 10 percent or more with businesses that exceed their expectations, but when customers are dissatisfied, their likelihood of churning increases by a factor of 10, according to statistics from Alcatel-Lucent.

In line with the findings and the need to take a more holistic view, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) offers Motive Customer Experience Management solutions that can help service providers make a good impression by getting it right the first time.

Using Motive CXM solutions, service providers can:

Improve the order to activation ratio
Reduce the number of calls that come through to the help desk
Reduce average handle time and increase first call resolutions for tech support inquires
Reduce the number of no-defect-found device returns

Those service providers with good QoE are able to reduce their support costs and ultimately improve their bottom line. However, it is imperative to keep in mind there is no one-size-fits-all solution or prescribed path to improve QoE, Geller noted.

“Every provider has their own unique set of problems they are trying to solve,” he said. “Some [operators] are going to want to start with better monetizing the assets that they have…others might want to be able to minimize the number of incoming calls for tech support, while others, still, will have no idea where they want to start.”

Telecom Operators Need to Improve Leadership, Customer Experience Management

2012-04-17T16:27:07Z

By Erin Harrison

We won’t sugarcoat it: European telecom operators are not reaching their full market potential due to a lack of leadership and customer visibility. In fact, just 12 percent of C-suite executives are leading the customer experience agenda at major operators, according to a new survey conducted by European Communications—the results of which appear in a recent special edition, “Customer Experience.”

Of concern, no one is leading a customer experience effort in 8 percent of operators. In a majority of cases, (41 percent) individual managers are taking it upon themselves, while for 39 percent of respondents, a dedicated customer experience manager has been put in charge.

While the findings cast a negative shadow on the customer experience focus by European service providers (SPs), the study’s results should be motivation for the SPs’ IT decision makers who want to turnaround their customer experience efforts and become more profitable.

A lack of coherent leadership naturally feeds down to a fragmented implementation of strategy. Although a majority of operators (45 percent) said customer experience is treated as an integral part of everything their organization does across all business units, that means a majority does not.

“A well-established customer experience strategy should be treated as an integral part of the entire organization,” said Michael Opitz, director at management consultancy Arthur D. Little who conducted the survey.

Two interesting graphics from the survey are of note: In the first one, respondents were asked if they had a 360-degree view of their customers. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, the answer was that most did not or did not know.

In the second one, those surveyed were asked to define what attributes they felt should be included in a holistic view. As can be noted from the list, much of the information that would be necessary for a holistic approach to creating a better customer experience currently resides in databases that typically do not interact with each other. This highlights an area of opportunity where the effective use of “Big Data” could yield significant benefits. These include better internal insights into operations as well as identification of customer contact areas that need to be improved so that experiences are optimized.

As we all know, a significant part of transforming the customer experience is making a good first impression. In line with the findings and the need to take a more holistic view, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) offers Motive Customer Experience Management solutions that can help service providers make a good impression by getting it right the first time.

ALU’s solutions can help create successful network, device, application and service set-up and activation, and also helps fuel marketing campaigns. In addition, these services boost first call resolution and cut average handle time for technical support and service management inquires – such efficiencies help service providers stand out and succeed.

While operators are slightly more optimistic about the performance of their own company when compared to the telecoms industry as a whole, according to the EC survey, overwhelmingly operators said they regarded network congestion and other quality of service issues as the biggest source of poor customer experience.

Using Motive CXM solutions from Alcatel-Lucent, service providers can:

Improve the order to activation ratio
Reduce the number of calls that come through to the help desk
Reduce average handle time and increase first call resolutions for tech support inquires
Reduce the number of no-defect-found device returns

As consumers continue to gravitate toward more complex devices and services, which are connected to fixed line and mobile networks, the effort to deliver a consistent, quality customer experience is multiplying costs for communications service providers. Simplifying customer interactions helps service providers improve quality of experience (QoE) and build stronger, longer-lasting and more profitable customer relationships.

While the European Communications survey shed a bright light on the deficiencies of Europe’s SPs, the reality is that similar studies in the past few years by a number of respected firms have come to the same conclusion globally. In one of the interesting ironies of our times those who are foundational players in enabling others to use Big Data and analytics to gain competitive edge as woefully behind culturally and technologically themselves in do so. In fact, many of the studies have also concluded that telecom SP failure to leverage the insights they have into a transformation of the way in which their customers experience their products, people and processes is leaving a huge competitive opportunity for OTTs and other third parties to fill the breach.

This is a crucial operations area. It is a survey, indeed an entire issue of the publication, that commands attention.

A Holistic Approach is Necessary for Quality Customer Experiences

2012-04-09T17:45:37Z

By Mae Kowalke

For the hotly competitive world of mobile communications service providers, it’s no longer enough simply to provide fast, reliable connections for a variety of devices at competitive rates.

A recent article in the Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) e-zine Enriching Communications titled, “Taking Care of the Customer Experience,” co-authored by ALU’s Ben Geller, Senior Director of Marketing and Oliver Krahn, Customer Experience Transformation Growth Program Leader, on this subject is worth a read. They explain how, “Service providers are learning that they cannot differentiate with devices, services or pricing.” This is clearly a dramatic change from the past.

If the old practices are not the optimal path to success it leads to an interesting question, what really does differentiate a service provider anymore? As you probably have guessed from the title of this blog and the ALU article, the answer is providing an outstanding customer experience based on a holistic approach.

Geller and Krahn believe a large part of creating such experiences involved making things easy. This means easy in the customer’s eyes. They believe there are four main elements to viewing an experience through the eyes of a customer:

Services and devices are simple to start using right away
Network connectivity is always available when it’s needed
Devices and applications work the way they’re supposed to
Problems will be quickly identified and resolved

At the end of the day, service providers are both the creators of the customer experience as well as the enablers for others. This puts significant pressure on them to consistently provide a good quality of experience (QoE) regardless of the type of customer, or their location and to do so according to their expectations, needs and contractual relationships. What it means is the ability to manage these anywhere customers and to use analytics to gain insights into how to constantly improve the (QoE) and their value to the service provider as can be done with ALU's Motive Customer Experience Solutions portfolio. This includes careful attention to the speed and quality of response when problems occur which is a priority for retaining customer loyalty.

The good news is that providers have many assets that support an outstanding customer experience. It’s just a matter of appropriately leveraging those assets.

As Geller and Krahn note, “They own robust, secure and scalable networks that can support an array of services…They have access to innovative devices with open platforms that support application innovation. In short, they have all the components required to deliver a market-leading customer experience.” Indeed, these tools include such things as the ability to optimize bandwidth without sacrificing performance through such capabilities as mobile smartloading, and giving third-parties and internal developers the ability to use open APIs to create new revenue-generating applications and services

The last item about open APIs is crucial for success going forward, especially when combined with the insights gained from leveraging the information generated by customer services management tools. As the authors explain, creative partnerships are important and making sure everybody in the ecosystem is in a position to ensure the end customer has a compelling experience is key. “Service providers with robust infrastructures, networks, billing systems and help desks can essentially become service providers to application and content providers (ACPs),” Geller and Krahn point out. “Collaboration with ACPs can drive innovation in the application space, generate new revenue and influence the customer experience.”

They also explain that part of making things easy for customers means recognizing there is no one-size-fits-all approach or procedure for delivering an outstanding customer experience. New thinking, new strategies and new priorities, applied in customized ways, are critical. They emphasize that, “Every service provider plots its own path to transformation, often starting with a desire to address a specific pain point or opportunity…The right starting point and goals are essential.”

Some strategies service providers are using for managing the customer experience include:

Multi-channel customer care: to ensure the same quality of information and experience across all channels (phone, web, e-mail, IM, etc.).
Analytics: to measure how likely customers are to recommend service to others.
Maximizing network capacity yield: shifting usage patterns and rewarding customers for using the network during off-peak periods.

As with so many aspects of accommodating the dynamics of a changing world where the pace of everything is speeding up, and challenges can arise from almost anywhere at any time, Geller and Krahn present a powerful case as to why a holistic approach to the creation, substance and growth of quality customer experiences rest on service providers knocking down their operationally silos and embracing a holistic approach that is QoE-centric.

It is difficult to argue with their conclusion that, “To compete in the long term, executives must find ways to align departments and ensure that every person in the service provider organization is focused on delivering the best possible customer experience.” What this means is according to them is, “Extending consistency, universality and intuitiveness across every customer contact channel including call centers, web portals, IVRs and retail stores.”

Finally, it should be noted that this idea of a holistic approach must be viewed in the context of understanding that creating an end-user (the front end of the value-chain) quality customer experience can be considered the output of creating quality customer experiences for the back-end as well. Holism means making business processes and practices, and the people who use them more efficient and effective by empowering them with information from across the enterprise. This is not theory. It is best practice.

Demand for Connected Services Drives Need for Customer Experience Solutions

2012-04-02T13:06:40Z

By Erin Harrison

Demand for broadband services is growing at an explosive pace as consumers look for richer and more personalized connected customer experiences. But service providers’ fast and reliable networks can’t win over every customer. In addition, competition from new brands is making it tougher to differentiate with devices, services and pricing. In short, to stay competitive, service providers (SPs) have an imperative to cater to the needs of the market that goes beyond traditional approaches.

While consumers are aware that new technologies can bring added complexity, they also expect their devices and services to keep bringing them simpler and more compelling experiences. Based on these trends, SPs need new differentiators to remain competitive. To stand out and deliver market leading customer experiences, SPs need to make their offers easier to buy, easier to use with more user-friendly options for payment.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive portfolio of solutions offers a four-pronged approach for SPs to step up their games:

Motive CX Management is focused on getting new devices, applications and services up and running quickly, by simplifying their introduction on the network, managing upgrades and service modifications, and providing a consistent, low-hassle experience for customers.
Motive CX Analytics provides monitoring tools that track the performance of the devices, applications and services running on the network. These tools, which leverage unique algorithms developed by Bell Labs, provide key insights and dashboards that infer overall customer experience and allow for detailed customer experience insights.
Motive CX Optimization empowers SPs to provide customers with the best service experience possible while making better use of network capacity. Using historical data about customers, devices, applications and the network, SPs can examine trends, experiences and usage patterns – segmented by types of users – and take accurate and proactive actions with yield management and loyalty.
Motive CX Consulting consists of a dedicated team that – using a patent-pending methodology – identifies unique opportunities to improve the wide range of customer experience touch points within a service provider organization.

The portfolio, as seen below, is comprehensive in terms of dealing with all aspects of SP operations that need to be engaged to creating optimal customer experiences in regard to the granularity of the prongs.

Source: Alcatel-Lucent Motive

At the end of the day, SP ability to improve the customer experience is about engendering more immersive and enriching engagements. In fact, Alcatel-Lucent contends that with Motive Customer Experience Solutions SPs can increase profitability by:

Simplifying customer interactions
Improving business performance using customer insights
Enhancing loyalty and profitability
Improving the customer experience

With commoditization fast becoming the norm in many service markets, and alternatives only a click away, it is becoming increasingly clear that customer experience management may be the most important competitive differentiator in the future. SPs understand this and are aware that having the right tools in place to accurately measure and manage their relationships with customers will be critical to their success.

Together We Can Go Far: Alcatel-Lucent's ng Connect Program Drives Innovation for New Communications Technology Concepts

2012-03-19T17:40:39Z

By Mae Kowalke

Thanks to significant advances in broadband communication technology in the past few years, people from many industries and disciplines are coming up with some pretty innovative ways to work, play and do business. These often-disparate innovations represent growing opportunity for even greater changes, and greater rewards, if devices, applications and infrastructures were more effectively brought together.

With that vision in mind, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) founded the ng Connect Program, intended to create an end-to-end ecosystem for rapidly delivering next generation services and applications, by combining the resources of industry, business and academic leaders. Enterprises, consumers and service providers all stand to benefit.

The ng Connect Program rightly claims that, “The opportunity is unprecedented. “ It has eight main goals:

Bring together companies that would not otherwise be linked to drive innovation
Blur the lines between wireline and wireless broadband user experiences
Foster concepts for innovative applications and devices
Integrate and validate new service concepts
Deliver new services, revenue models and applications to enterprises and service providers
Enable deployment of simple, innovative applications and services for consumers
Improve time to market for new concepts
Address key issues around early adoption of LTE and other broadband technologies

Connectivity, ALU points out, is rapidly converging in ways transformative to business, daily life, entertainment, and other areas. Individual companies, however, do not have the resources or expertise to rapidly deploy innovative services, create profitable new business models, or remove barriers to mass adoption.

The ng Connect Program addresses five main areas that represent barriers to success: innovation, connectivity and distribution, digital media management and QoS, applications and service integration, and business models and cases.

Addressing these barriers to success requires driving top line revenues, increasing competitive advantages, lowering OPEX, reducing churn, leveraging assets across networks, creating new business models, accelerating time to market, and speeding up resolution of standards and regulatory issues.

The ng Connect Program is driving innovation through three main elements:

Innovative Ecosystem – community of pioneering organizations and individuals
Innovative Environment – physical and virtual innovation spaces and leading edge tools and techniques
Concept Development – help for service providers to agilely create, evaluate and validate service concepts

The programs summarized below exemplify how various technologies and services are being brought together in innovative ways through ng Connect.

Acquisition – interactive mobile game that allows users to check in at physical locations, own locations virtually and rent out space to friends for a small fee.
Avatrainer – a fitness experience build on Microsoft Kinect, using personal avatars for virtual group setting workouts.
Connected Classroom – application that allows students to locate classes on a campus map and locate friends in real-time, and educators to provide lesson plans and collaborate with other teachers.
Connected Service Vehicle – suite of cloud-based services for commercial vehicles using tablet-to-care linkages, speech recognition for secure login, high definition video surveillance, and other applications.
Connected Shopper - combines online and in-store shopping through tools like QR codes and 3D kiosks.
Fan Cam – allows spectators and fans in sports venues to live-stream the view from their seat to editors who can then select from the content to display on the big screen.
GameTime Media Table – network-connected table for retail and hospitality environments, giving customers a chance to try-before-they-buy.
Next Gen TV – interactive TV experience for video calling, e-health services, home power monitoring using RFID, and other tools.
Striker – public safety vehicle with built-in communications platform featuring push-to-talk radio, iPad integration, high definition video over LTE, and other capabilities.
TeleConsult – healthcare application that allows consumers to ‘visit’ healthcare professionals using video conferencing, Bluetooth, and text apps.
Virtual Concierge – LTE-connected digital platform for 2-way video interaction, easily deployable in airports, hotels and other locations.

Want to be part of helping create the future? Participation in the ng Connect program is a way to explore how working together with other innovators is the path to accelerate your progress on the road to success.

Cloud-Based Video Provides New Immersive Communications Capabilities

2012-03-13T16:38:29Z

By Erin Harrison

Today’s end user is looking for a richer conversation experience when using a variety of network-connected devices.

For example, new technologies are emerging that allow people to use any video-enabled device to enter a shared virtual space, and discuss and share information in a way that is almost like being together in the same physical space. As a result, these advances in video communications have provided a new opportunity for service providers to bring interactive video conversations to any device, from anywhere.

According to an article in Alcatel-Lucent’s Enriching Communications, Immersive Communications: A New Video Conversation Experience, with these new technologies users will no longer be limited to the confines of telepresence rooms to experience an immersive conversation at long distance. They will be able to experience this at work, at home and on the move – holding video meetings and sharing documents over PCs, tablets and smartphones.

Immersive communications includes both verbal and non-verbal communication such as gestures, body language, posture, facial expression and eye contact, which are necessary for remote participants to engage in honest, genuine and emotional conversations.

While videoconferencing has brought communications to another level, it hasn’t lived up to expectations since current video collaboration systems are often expensive, restrictive, complex and non-intuitive. The experience isn’t as rich or engaging as it is in related media, such as TV, movies and video games.

With immersive group video enterprises can adopt more flexible work models and distributed teams can engage in more creative and truly interactive video conversations, both scheduled and ad hoc.

Because immersive communications rely so heavily on the network, service providers are in the ideal position to take advantage of the new revenue opportunities it brings. SPs can leverage their networks, using the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) architectural framework to deliver real-time immersive group video services with consistently high Quality of Service (QoS).

They can also offer immersive communications as a hosted cloud service. In fact, many are already moving to distributed cloud architectures that are ideal for hosted and virtualized video services.

Those service providers that get involved early in the game will set themselves apart from the competition, giving them the greatest opportunity to capture and develop a large and loyal customer base for the immersive communications experience.

Getting More Apps and Services to More People Faster --Creating the Competitive Edge

2012-03-02T16:43:34Z

By Susan J. Campbell

The demand for innovative applications continues to grow, putting increased pressure on mobile service providers (SPs) to deliver more apps and services to people faster than the competition. To create and sustain a competitive edge, service providers must invest in faster and more flexible service deployment. At the same time, clear focus must be placed on open innovation to accelerate service development to enable the agility needed to optimize key opportunities in retail and wholesale.

A recent Alcatel-Lucent Enriching Communications article, Accelerate Communication Service Development explored the importance of the competitive edge and how mobile service providers can focus on their strengths to achieve the level of agility, innovation and flexibility necessary to effectively compete. The fact that service providers deliver solutions that work across devices and the boundaries of different networks is a key strength that can be monetized in sustainable and profitable ways.

Many of today’s new mobility-centric applications do not allow the user to connect with another application. Both communicating parties must be using the same app or even the same device. This limits the opportunity for the user and the developer. That creates opportunity for SPs to insert themselves into the mix. They can position themselves as the focal point of an evolving ecosystem that offers customers new capabilities and experiences and themselves the ability to leverage new capabilities like IMS to change the conversation experience for all involved.

The fact is that mobile service providers already have critical functionality in their networks, for global roaming and interoperability. They also offer strong billing, provisioning and support relationships with customers. With proper collaboration with developers and other third parties this can translate into an ecosystem that can widen competitive gaps and create new opportunities to accelerate service development based on such tools as the Alcatel-Lucent Converged Telephony Server.

It isn’t enough to simply communicate, however. Service providers today need to get ahead of the other players by extending their strengths and forming new communications around such things as Web 2.0 capabilities, multimedia instant messaging, social networking and video interactions (streamed and real-time.) They literally need to open their networks to the new era where applications enablement is the fuel that generates customer interest, stickiness, loyalty and profits.

As mentioned, Alcatel-Lucent believes a true competitive edge can come from implementation of an IMS network that offers the service provider a standards-based platform that allows for the reinvention of communications across mobile, fixed and the Web. It won’t be enough, however, to simply offer video, voice and messaging services. Providers seeking that edge must constantly experiment and focus on innovation to keep a step ahead of the competition.

The bottom line is the bottom line. SPs that adopt an open innovation strategy grounded in application enablement will combine the value of its network intelligence with Web innovation. This level of service agility will enable them to quickly add new capabilities and platforms, as well as develop an application ecosystem that bridges the gap between voice, video and Web, and fixed and mobile. It is the way to accelerate the creation of a competitive edge.

Opt-In Mobile Marketing Strategy: 6 Tips for Success

2012-02-27T15:14:50Z

By Susan J. Campbell

As consumers, we are constantly on the go with a mobile device of some kind in our hand providing directions, connection with a colleague or access to the data we need to close the big deal. The same device guides our social lives as we’ve come to rely on smart devices to manage our activities, content and connections. For brands, this provides the perfect opportunity to develop an Opt-In Mobile Marketing Strategy.

A recent blog by Mihai Vlad of Alcatel-Lucent’s Optism unit entitled, Thinking Human: Six Steps for Building a Successful Opt-In Mobile Marketing Strategy, highlights the opportunity that exists with the proliferation of the mobile phone as the must-have device. By developing an Opt-In Mobile Marketing Strategy, mobile operators, marketers and their brands can ask permission before engaging with consumers. In doing so, it provides unprecedented access to the consumer’s attention and the opportunity to build trust.

Simply implementing an Opt-In Mobile Marketing Strategy is not the guaranteed road to success, however. Companies must have a clear plan in place that gains attention, builds trust and drives engagement. Here, we’ll take a look at what Optism believes are six important steps for building the right Opt-In Mobile Marketing Strategy.

Be Transparent – if you aren’t clear on what you expect from the consumer and what you will provide if they opt-in, they will likely click right through to the next offering. Be upfront and honest and don’t forget to be clear that they can opt out at any time. Once you have their attention, focus on what they like – ask questions and do something with the answers.

Leave the Bribes to the Politicians – remember that an incentive is not the same thing as a bribe. It’s OK to offer value to opt-in, but that value needs to be delivered on a consistent basis. Provide information on great deals, offer coupons and notice of special events. If you offer a great prize or content entry for joining, your opt-out numbers will soar. Go for long-term value and search out those consumers that are truly interested in your service or product.

Leave the Jargon to the Lawyers – if I can’t understand your offer in the first few words, you’ve already wasted my time. Use clear language in your Opt-In Mobile Marketing Strategy by using the same approach you would when talking with friends. Avoid the use of marketing speak and clever turns of a phrase – mobile users want quick and to the point or they’re on to the next thing.

K.I.S.S. – you know you’re supposed to keep it simple stupid, but you forgot in the quest for impressing your audience. You don’t need to collect everything you need in one exchange – consumers will push back if you try. Think of your Opt-In Mobile Marketing Strategy like dating – you can’t propose marriage on the first date if you hope for date number two.

Are you Ready for This – even with the best intentions integrated into your strategy, consumers will still surprise you by acting outside of your expectations. Be ready for anything, even if your focus groups portray a particular picture. The ability to make changes quickly when things don’t go according to plan will set you apart from your competitors and put you in a better place strategically for gaining insight and increasing your ROI.

Keep it Local – remember that permission-based mobile marketing is about reaching out to an individual and engaging at a personal level. No universal rules exist that apply to all people in all cultures all the time. Learn local customs, preferences and habits if you hope to make a direct connection with that consumer.

You truly only have a limited amount of time to successfully engage the consumer in your Opt-In Mobile Marketing Strategy, so you have to get it right the first time. What the six tips show is that being honest, open, straightforward and consistent is the way to engage customers. In the online world the phrase, “you do not get a second chance to make a first impression,” is critical to understand when designing and launching a new service. That said, following the six tips should put you well on your way to success.

Rich Communications Suite -- SP Tool to Monetize the New Social Conversation Experience

2012-01-30T21:13:43Z

By Mae Kowalke

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, service providers (SPs) are staying one step ahead by finding new and innovative ways monetize their offerings. For providers who recognize and leverage it effectively, the emerging new social conversation experience arising from the pervasive adaption and use of social media is proving to be a valuable tool in this endeavor.

Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) has been busy developing solutions for fixed and mobile SPs to help them leverage the evolution of social media. On the mobility side, much of this development has been focused on two technical projects—Rich Communication Suite (RCS) and RCS-enhanced (RCS-e)—led by the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA).

In a recent white paper, “Building a Social Conversation Experience with RCS and RCS-E,” Alcatel-Lucent researchers explain that RCS (developed in 2008) is intended to: “Leverage the global interoperability and ubiquity of existing voice services and Short Message Services (SMSs) and enrich them with Internet-type features more in line with user demand.”

As of early 2011, when the more compact iteration of the capability RCS-e was launched, the RCS Group had more than 100 members, including service providers, device manufacturers, and infrastructure and software vendors. Alcatel-Lucent is among them.

The RCS standard, as the white paper notes, has three key attributes:

Social Presence – makes social interactions more frequent, easy and vivid
Multi-device – defines mechanisms for aggregating presence information across multiple devices
Service Capability – lets users easily discover which services they can use with their friends

Since it was first developed, trials of RCS services were conducted by many service providers, including two 2010 nationwide tests in Spain and France. ALU has been involved with all the trials gleaning valuable insights about the new social conversation and what tools will most effectively give providers a leg up when developing services users demand.

The researchers stated that, “Users have a strong interest in Instant Messaging capabilities, mainly because IM corresponds to service already offered to them through other means.” It is thus not surprising that they further found, “Accordingly, for them, integration with social networks is logical.”

Because RCS is technically complex, some providers in the development group created a simplified version: RCS-e.

“RCS-e aims to provide assured services by delivering a simplified extension to voice and text, enabling subscribers to send IMs, video chat, and image/video share and transfer/exchange files in real time,” ALU’s authors state.

RCS-e has three key attributes, using the power of RCS to offer streamlined improvements:

Chat Services: If both parties in a chat session are online at the same time, the social conversation is treated as regular IM. If one of the people is not online, the service stores the message and sends it when the second person logs on.
File Transfers: Defined either as standalone or as combined with voice or IM chat sessions.
Video Streaming: Using the “see what I see” paradigm.

The goal of RCS-e is to increase subscriber adoption of SMS services, using enhanced service activation, user discovery, service capabilities, and delivery assurance.

“With such assured services, there is no need to suspend one service or to bring up a new client and reestablish communications,” the authors say. In fact, the white paper concludes that, “This strategy attempts to replicate the success of SMS with a rich set of new services by providing the same mobile ubiquity and service assurance as SMS.”

The rapid global user adoption of IM, chat and texting of all sorts including he extraordinary ascension of Twitter has proven there is an insatiable demand for non-voice communications. In fact, it is a demand that is constantly seeking new conversation experiences that enrich social interaction. The good news, as ALU and those working on the development and rollout of RCS and RCS-e have discovered, is that improving the social conversation through these tools is a desirable means for SPs to not only captivate customers but also to monetize/profit from what can be a central role in evolving social media ecosystems.

It Takes a Village to Deliver Rich Communications

2012-01-23T01:21:56Z

By Erin Harrison

As service providers (SPs) shift to all IP-networks, users expect features to become standardized. This gives SPs an opportunity to provide their customers a new conversation experience.

A recent Alcatel-Lucent Enriching Communications article, “RCS Success Requires Community-based Ecosystem,” highlighted how the market for Rich Communications Services (RCS) has changed based on two developments that have converged — accelerating deployment of wired and wireless end-to-end IP networks and the rapid rollout and adoption of rich communications applications and services.

The article says this convergence creates the ideal environment for the deployment of RCS-based services that offer subscribers a new conversation experience.

As noted, the first trend is the fact that service providers are rapidly moving to all-IP networks, especially with the heated race around the world in the mobility space to deploy 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) and IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem)-based IP communications. In fact, a major benefit of the growing international footprint of 4G LTE is as a designed and preferred fixed wireless and mobile infrastructure for advanced RCS services such as unified messaging, video sharing and enriched voice, according to Alcatel-Lucent.

The other developing trend is that rich communications types of services are already appearing from application and content providers (ACPs) such as Google, Facebook and Skype. “Features are becoming standard, such as presence and video calling, as well as instant messaging (IM) and voice over IP (VoIP) to others on the same ACP network,” the article said.

For service providers to get started on this mission of delivering RCS, 4G LTE is necessary but not sufficient. They do need to have an IMS architecture to deliver innovative services with the proper quality of service (QoS) that ensure a quality user experience. That said, in order for rich communications to fully see their potential, global interoperability will need to occur. However, as the article states, that won’t happen until at least some service providers in some areas of the world start launching these services.

To help facilitate the market, given that interoperability will be a key determinant for success, Alcatel-Lucent recommends that service providers embrace a community-based model that will leverage IMS as their communications core.

“As a group, service providers must evolve their infrastructure to an open model where select network capabilities are available and easily accessible by application developers through secure web services application programming interfaces (APIs),” according to the article. It further states that service providers in essence are creating a virtuous circle of success. By enabling, and acting as the foundation of robust and open ecosystems, more developers will be attracted to work with the SPs. This will in turn drive more innovation that leverages the expanded reach of 4G LTE and IMS-based networks.

The industry is still early in the learning curve of ecosystem development for rich communications services. One thing is clear, service providers will need to focus not only on the technical aspects of RCS, but also on building and fostering communities around the capabilities that RCS provides. Indeed, whether it is called a community or an ecosystem, reality is if easy-to-use, reliable, secure and high-performance rich communications services are to proliferate, it is going to take a lot of different interests with a variety of skills to maximize the possibilities.

Living Video: A New Conversation Experience

2012-01-17T15:38:45Z

By Erin Harrison

One of the reasons video is so pervasive today is because of the personal dynamic it brings to conversations and meetings, creating higher-level interactions. Just like a face-to-face conversation, video brings subtleties and other nuances that cannot be communicated in an email or text.

A recent article in Alcatel-Lucent’s Enriching Communications, Living Video Conversations Go Mainstream, details how “living video” gives service providers opportunities to deliver a compelling new conversation experience. It says mobile networks, devices and people are ready for enriched video conversations, and service providers’ are in a position to deliver them.

Ready, set and go

The authors point out that three converging factors are proof that service providers and users are ready for a new conversation experience via video over not just wired and fixed wireless networks but mobile ones as well.

Networks are ready: While not yet ubiquitously available but rapidly becoming so around the world, fixed and wireless networks can deliver the big bandwidth, low latency and high quality of service (QoS) needed for mobile video conversations.

Devices are ready: Virtually every smartphone can display video with increasingly good quality including HD. The race to deploy 4G LTE wireless networks only increases the incentive for users to increase video streaming and communications.

Users are ready: They are more than ready. They are actively engaged. In July 2011 Skype announced that its video traffic averaged 50 percent, up 10 percent from December 2010. Simply put, people like the human element that video adds to their conversations.

Need more proof?

According to technology research firm Gartner, mobile video telephony increased by 11 percent at the expense of online video calling, which fell by 12 percent. The market has started moving towards mobile video calling due to better mobile broadband and friendlier user experiences.

Armed with this information, the challenge now for service providers is to keep pace with user expectations and continue to accelerate the improvement of today’s video experience.

This means deploying and leveraging technologies like 4G LTE and IMS to deliver a new conversation experience that helps them:

Enrich service offerings
Entice subscribers to higher service plans
Creatively generate new revenues with new business models
Reduce churn

Service providers that capitalize on their advantage in the market to improve on today’s video experience will be in the best position to deliver tomorrow’s living video experience.