Revolutionizing the User Experience

I am here in Orlando at the Nortel Technical Conference, hosted by John Roese, our CTO, and attended by 350 of Nortel's brightest technologists.

The theme of the conference is 'Revolutionizing the User Experience', and I'm not just talking about the UC client.

When a customer enters your store or branch, you probably have a 1 in 3 chance of closing the deal, but not so on the web, where you're down to 1 in a 100. What if you could establish a web presence that could dramatically improve this ratio, for example by extending your presence to the consumer's preferred social networking environment, or having the customer enter a 3D world where they can explore your offers and interact with other customers and your service agents?

Take another example. I have spoken of accelerating the business by eliminating human latency. This will be done by providing employees with the ability to initiate communications directly from within an application they are using, or having business processes reach out to employees and groups who are in the best position to expedite the decision. In both cases, the user experience can be significantly enhanced through context, which can include their role and what they need to know, what they are doing, and where they are.

As communications and IT converge in a software-centric world, communications enabled business processes and applications will significantly change the customer experience and increase enterprise productivity.

Nortel technologists are exploring these opportunities today.