April 2006 Archives

One of the most interesting news items from today appears on TMCnet's IVR Channel:

Angel.com and Skype Bring IVR Solutions to More Than 94 Million Skype Users Worldwide

Skype has been making important moves into the business market, and this partnership with Angel.com adds an exciting component. Angel.com's Site Builder provides an easy way to build voice applications, and now you will be able to add a sophisticated IVR system attached to your Skype account.

Here are some screen shots giving you an idea of the user experience for building Angel.com voice apps:

AB -- 4/27/06

 

Earlier today I had the opportunity to pick the brain of Peter Cummings, COO of Opera Solutions, a consulting firm specializing in rapid profit improvement. Company representatives had offered Opera's executives and senior management as sources in the areas of mergers and acquisitions, outsourcing and other global business trends.

I was interested in hearing Cummings' thoughts on the impact of recent telecom industry mergers, such as SBC-AT&T-BellSouth, Verizon-MCI and Lucent-Alcatel. I also asked him to comment on how companies can execute successful M&As.

Cummings says the SBC-AT&T merger especially "has changed the entire global picture" by bringing together a large base of communications customer. He feels that this consolidation will accelerate the development of fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) and mobile content offerings. "The huge customer base" resulting from the merger will create a "large barrier to entry," if the consolidated company can organize itself to reduce churn, hold onto its customers and extract maximum lifetime value from its customer relationships.

Cummings says the AT&T merger was a key motivating factor behind the recent Lucent-Alcatel announcement. He says this move results from "the whole question of size as it relates to bargaining power." These equipment suppliers needed to become larger to deal effectively with the larger merged service provider. A smaller company is at a disadvantage when trying to deal with a larger company. "A lot of M&As are related to the relationships in bargaining power," he says.

I asked Cummings to explain how Opera Solutions goes about helping companies execute more successful mergers. He says his company has developed skills that help it bring about "rapid profit enhancement in terms of providing very fast increase for a company within 24 months."

Investment Rationalization and Procurement Optimization

Cummings describes "investment rationalization" as the first area they work in with a client company. Opera helps management "look throughout the company at how they're spending their money and making capital expenditures across all entities." After mergers, "companies are often unwilling or unable to fully integrate the pieces of the business they have purchased." They end up with "all these different mismatched products and services."

"It's as if you had 20 different kinds of chicken noodle soup," says Cummings, invoking a simple illustration, "every one of them with a slightly different formula." Companies often permit such a situation to continue without standardizing processes and products, resulting in "tremendous internal complexity." A company can easily get burdened with large unnecessary costs because of lack of standardization around "items purchased, tasks done, stocks, inventory, the flows of products and services all through the distribution chain."

Applying Opera Solutions' expertise in investment rationalization, Cummings says, "We go in and do integrated complexity reduction that kicks out all these costs …. We have found almost astronomical savings," he maintains.

Opera Solutions also works with newly merged companies to help standardize purchasing across business units to take advantage of quantity purchasing, a process Cummings refers to as "procurement optimization." Companies realize savings by having "all divisions purchasing the same products together," standardizing "the items that go into making your products," incorporating "reusable parts" into processes, and similar measures that increase purchasing volume resulting in cost savings.

Customer Value Management

Hiring mathematicians and computer scientists from India, China and other sources, Opera Solutions has developed a global outsourced network of experts that is capable of applying advanced mathematics to develop customer behavior models for what Cummings calls "customer value management." Such models can help large companies understand their customers, their behavior and how they're segmented, so as to be able to design ways to retain them and extract maximum lifetime value from the relationships.

Up to now, Cummings says, telecommunications companies are experiencing 25 percent customer churn, a deadly cycle that can be overcome through the development and use of "advanced mathematical behavior models" that can help the company understand their customers and design ways to retain them.

"The company has plenty of data about me and can locate me within about four to five meters of where I am in Charlotte in the hotel where I'm staying," says Cummings. "They know I was in China last week, and in London and Paris. But they're not using that information. If they could understand me as a business traveler with particular needs, they could make a tremendous amount of money making sure I would never switch providers."

Opera Solutions is capable of helping its clients develop the mathematical models to analyze customer behavior and reduce customer churn.

Business Transformation Management

Opera Solutions also offers expertise in strategic business process outsourcing (BPO), helping companies identify "where you find the best fit to do certain tasks," says Cummings. "They can take out a tremendous amount of the costs by offshoring. They can get the skills they need and far more qualified people at much less cost, by taking entire parts of their operations offshore."

Perhaps the key takeaways for me in this discussion with Peter Cummings had to do with the importance of integration and reducing complexities in executing mergers and acquisitions. Cummings gives a glimpse into some of the methods and practices that can make that happen.
AB -- 4/27/06

TMCnet writer Cindy Waxer reported on Cloudmark's efforts to fight an insidious new variation on the phishing scam that uses a hard-to-trace VoIP phone number and IVR system to collect personal information from victims (see "Phishing Attacks Cast Shadow over VoIP"). Patrick Barnard also wrote about the story and added some good comments from his interview with Cloudmark's senior research scientist Adam O'Donnell (see "Cloudmark Detects - and Thwarts - New VoIP Phishing Threat Discovered on its Network").

I've been using Cloudmark's Microsoft Outlook add-in toolbar for a few years now (get the free trial here), and I can't imagine going over to any other solution. The magic thing about Cloudmark is the way it mixes in the human element to identify and block spam quickly. The system is based on peer-to-peer networking technology, so that as a Cloudmark user you are actually part of a network of users who are collectively flagging and blocking spam on each other's behalf.

Here's an image showing the toolbar:

When a spam appears in your inbox, you select it and click the "Block Spam" button. The spam moves into your spam folder and your "vote" on that spam goes out to the collective network to help flag that message as spam for all other users. But frankly, most of the time you won't even see the spam messages, because many other users have already flagged them and they will go automatically into your spam folder without any action on your part.

For more about the Cloudmark toolbar, see my previous entry, "My Favorite Anti-Spam System."

AB -- 4/25/06

 

CRM provider Office Interactive Inc. announced today a new integrated online collaboration suite designed for individuals and small teams. The suite's tools include document management, team email and messenger, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, links, XML and RSS feed integration, and discussions boards.

The New York City-based company, in business since 2004, is offering a free version with 100 MB of storage space and up to five invitations. Enhanced versions offer modules for sales, marketing, customer service, billing and expense, project management and human resources.

I'm happy to see that Office Interactive's web site has easily-accessible screen shots and demos so you can quickly get a feel for the user experience. Here's a screen shot showing the main user interface:

This seems like a good online collaboration suite, in some ways reminiscent of Groove and in other ways of Intranets.com, but with much-expanded capabilities and evidence of good back-end on-demand technology.

AB -- 4/20/06

Susan Campbell has a good article on TMCnet about the abuse suffered by agents working in call centers in India: see "Indian Call Center Agents Suffering Health Problems Due to Caller Abuse." According to a recent survey, Susan writes, "25 percent of call center agents identified hate calls as the main reason for workplace stress."

This calls to mind an article from David Sims from last year, "Call Center Workers Allowed to Hang Up." That article commented on a trend in Indian call centers toward giving agents more options in dealing with abusive callers. David quoted one Indian software industry expert who said, "Indians are by nature courteous towards foreigners, but there can be too much of a good thing and companies increasingly provide assertiveness training. If people felt in the past they had to be polite in the face of brazen rudeness, now they say, 'I don't think I do.'"

An article directed at call center agents in India, "How to handle abusive BPO customers," gives 10 tips from call center trainer Nasha Fitter of Fitter Solutions:

1. Learn to count to 10.
2. Speak calmly.
3. Politely ask the caller to speak slowly and clearly and to lower his voice.
4. Put the caller on hold for a few seconds if you need to recover your composure.
5. Keep a picture that helps you to stay calm in front of you -- a peaceful scene or a photo of a loved one.
6. If a call continues to get worse, escalate it to your supervisor.
7. Ask the caller to refrain from using abusive language, if that's permitted.
8. De-stress after a rough phone call -- Fitter suggests yoga or breathing techniques.
9. "Press the mute button and swear back," while using "your sweetest tone" when actually speaking with the caller.
10. Talk with your supervisor or group leader after a stressful day with difficult callers.

AB -- 4/20/06

Maybe the idea of 'open source automobiles' is a bit of a stretch, but that's what occurred to me when I read an article today from Kyodo News International, "Toyota chief voices readiness to form alliance with other carmakers.'

What struck me as particularly interesting was a quote from Toyota Motor Corp. President Katsuaki Watanabe:

"It requires conducting mammoth capital outlays for automakers to innovate their technologies in the fields of the environment, safety and the telecommunications .... There is the adequate possibility that we will form various types of alliances with others, if an automaker faces difficulties in meeting these needs single-handedly."

That quote got me thinking about recent changes in thinking around intellectual property, enabled in part by the open source movement. In an open source project, you can potentially have developers and users from multiple competing companies collaborating on developing a foundational technology that will benefit all the players. What if similar thinking were to provoke automakers to collaborate on developing basic technologies in an open fashion, then building their own proprietary technologies on those platforms, similarly to the way Red Hat packages Linux, as an example? Just a thought.

This reminds me of the step IBM took last year in opening up 500 of its patents. IBM said at the time that its intention was to:

"... form the basis of an industry-wide 'patent commons' in which patents are used to establish a platform for further innovations in areas of broad interest to information technology developers and users....

"The patents included in this pledge relate to many aspects of software innovation. Several of the patents cover dynamic linking processes for operating systems. Another patent is valuable to file-export protocols. In total, the pledged patents cover a wide breadth, including patents on important interoperability features of operating systems and databases, as well as internet, user interface, and language processing technologies."

This kind of collaborative effort doesn't necessarily preclude companies' competing with one another in a market system.

AB -- 4/18/06

The Merchant Risk Council (MRC) is reporting that online fraud rates for merchants in its study are decreasing and are approaching the fraud rates experienced in "card-present" brick-and-mortar retail environments. The association does a yearly survey of online merchants and says fraud rates have been dropping although they are still a concern. 48% of the retailers surveyed said that their fraudulent chargeback rates were less than 0.1%.

Today's announcement from the council quotes co-chair Julie Fergerson commenting on one important security concern: "As fraud prevention tools gain widespread use, their effectiveness declines, and fraudsters are always looking for ways to 'beat the system.'"

The survey found that the use of Address Verification Systems (AVS) rose from 70% to 83% since 2001 but their effectiveness at preventing fraud actually declined from 70% to 25%. Card Verification Codes (CVC) also dropped in effectiveness, though not as dramatically. Use of CVC increased from 38% to 73% since 2001 but the effectiveness of this measure dropped from 49% to 31%.

This confirms the saying I've used in the past about security: 'We build a higher wall and the bad guys build a taller ladder.' Security is a process of continual escalation as data thieves develop greater sophistication.

AB -- 4/18/06

Yesterday, TMCnet's Anuradha Shukla wrote about LivePerson's new click-to-call product, LiveCall. I was excited to learn about this, as LivePerson has been providing online customer care services and products for many years and has built up an interesting package called Timpani, combining contact center, web-based service, knowledge-base, and sales and marketing support.

Upon trying a demo of the product, I was disappointed in one aspect from the perspective of user experience: The click-to-talk feature ... isn't really. I will explain shortly, but let me say that these folks have what looks like a great suite of tools based on their working in this space for a long time with an impressive list of customers. Below are some interesting screen shots that show something about the Timpani user experience.

Here's a view of the interface from the point of view of a customer care agent:

Here's an end-user view that shows an example of how a customer can enter into a web chat with a sales representative, linking from a web page:

And here's a view of the chat interface from the point of view of a sales representative conversing with a customer:

Now next is an end-user view of the click-to-talk feature LivePerson began promoting this week. This represents a valuable addition to LivePerson's offerings, but I do see a problem here in terms of user experience, and possibly in terms of marketing as well. Note the popup window with the button that says "Call Me Now!":

But note also that the text instructions say, "Please enter your information below, and an associate will call you right away." In reality, the user can't click to call an agent. The way it actually works is, I click and they call me -- on my landline.

This is an example of what interaction designers call "cognitive friction." When the user enters an interaction with the application, he forms a mental model of the application with assumptions about how it should work. When the actual application doesn't fit the user's mental model, it creates friction, resulting in user confusion, frustration and errors.

Here's the scenario in this case: The user is visiting web sites in front of his personal computer with his VoIP headset plugged in. He comes to a web site with wine for sale. He is interested in ordering the Dom Perignon, but has a question about it. He clicks on what he thinks is a click-to-call button, but which actually is a you-click-and-we-call-you-back button. When he gets to the pop-up window, he clicks the Call Me Now button. But rather than calling an agent now, it sends the user's phone number (if he entered it) to the agent, who calls the user back on his landline.

At some point in this process, many users would become confused, as this does not truly represent an end-to-end VoIP-enabled click-to-call process, which is what many users nowadays (and many, many more in the very near future) will expect.

That's not to say there's no value in LiveCall. It does add a beneficial capability, but doesn't go far enough. LivePerson says that they will eventually release an end-to-end solution.

Such an end-to-end solution is possible and doesn't necessarily require an intermediary softphone client such as Skype. One example is eStara's VoIP-based Click to Call product, which doesn't seem to require any download. Today I tested it and got through to an agent quite quickly.

Here's an end-user view showing what happens if you click the eStara Click-to-Call button. Note that this popup button does have a "Talk By Phone" button (the you-click-and-we-call type of function). But you also see a "Talk by PC" button:

Here's the dialer popup you get when you click eStara's "Talk by PC" button. It's an interesting interface, which I think might be Java-based:

The reason I'm going through this whole exercise is that it makes some important points about online customer service and about designing the user experience. Over the next couple of years, we are going to see voice capabilities increasingly integrated into the web user experience and e-commerce web sites. Web-based customer service is going to have to get voice-enabled, and companies are already rolling out the tools to make this happen.

At the same time, the companies building these tools need to employ interaction design methods and usability studies to make sure they are easy-to-use, both from the end-user (customer) perspective and from that of the customer care agent in the contact center.

AB -- 4/6/06

The other day the WiFi card in my PC picked up eight wireless networks within range around the courtyard of the condo complex where I live. "Wow, I'm living in a WiFi cloud!" I thought to myself. Most of the networks on my availability list were unsecured, which was no surprise to me -- I'm sure the other network owners around the courtyard suffer as much frustration and confusion as I do trying to keep a stable WiFi signal and get their computers and printers to keep talking to each other. More often than not, making the network secure just completely disables it.

So I was intrigued to learn about Sereniti, a company that provides a "smart" home networking service that includes a wireless G gateway device, security applications and 24/7 tech support for a reasonable monthly fee. The company is marketing its solution as a value-add offering for service providers. I thought it would be interesting to get some comments from Wade Callison, vice president for program management at Sereniti, about current trends in the service provider business and in the world of home networking. Wade responds to some questions in the exchange quoted below.

What would you say are the important trends for cable service and ISPs to take note of?

The most important trend is bundling, that is, the integration of other hardware and services in with basic service provision, as a way to increase revenues and reduce subscriber churn.  Delivering new value-added services on top of basic broadband service is essential for service providers to maintain customer loyalty and counter the constant price decreases for basic service.  (A comparable example receiving mainstream promotion is the bundling of DVR services with cable and DBS services.)

How can providers cope with or make the most of those trends?

Providers need to be looking at value-adds like serving content, remote 24/7 tech support, automatic backups and VoIP services, which make the basic broadband service little more than a commodity in the eyes of customers.

Your brief says that Sereniti is in the business of providing a solution for home wireless networking.  Can you say more about what your product does?  And how do you define your market?

Sereniti Inc. makes wireless home computer networking, security and technical support safe, easy and affordable.  Sereniti's network and PC support services combine hardware and software, security and parental controls software, an easy-to-use graphical user interface and 24/7 technical support.  It also includes $25,000 in identity theft protection insurance per household and $1,000 virus protection.  A unique feature of Sereniti's service is 80GB of network storage, for automatically backing up important files from PCs as well as digital media in the household, such as photos and music. 

Our channels include any service provider, whether they provide high-speed Internet access, or other services to consumers, such as technical support or security services.

What are the big challenges in the home wireless networking area, and what are the best strategies for handling those challenges?

The biggest challenges faced by most consumers are too much complexity and not knowing who to call for technical support.  The proliferation of digital devices in the home drives support incidents when consumers cannot intuitively make their gadgets connect to the Internet and work together.

Most people do not know how to set up and secure their wireless home network.  Others are limiting their usage because of fears of identity theft and inappropriate content finding its way into their childrens' in-boxes.  Right now, many service providers are missing the opportunity to provide a solution to their problems, passing up a chance to build real loyalty with customers and monetize the support burden they are nonetheless forced to shoulder.

Does Sereniti have any news coming up soon?  New products or services?

We will launch the next generation of our service, EasyCare 360, this spring.  It will include 80GB of network storage built into a smart home server, providing automatic wireless backup of all home computers on the system.

What's the most exciting thing about the market space you're working in?

Most ISPs are using the "homes with high speed access" metric as the measure of penetration.  To be sure, many homes with high speed access are not making good use of the available resources because of a lack of customer sophistication and fears about viruses, identity theft or online predators.  Adoption of iPods and digital cameras is nonetheless driving a "wave" of digital complexity in the home.  We are now achieving critical mass of devices and applications that will require the adoption of home networks.  Overcoming complexity remains an issue.  The market could be so much bigger for the firms that crack this problem - we think we have that solution, and we want to work with service providers bring it to their customers.

What do you think is the solution to some of the big technical challenges in the area of wireless networking, especially spectrum conflicts?

The frequency range used for Bluetooth and Wifi (802.11b and 802.11g wireless networking) are other in the 2.4 GHz band.  In addition, these channels are also used for such devices as wireless video cameras and cordless phones.  Spectrum conflicts are inevitable, but are mitigated by new technologies, such as Adaptive Frequency Hopping, which is designed to switch channels dynamically and reduce RF interference issues.  New specifications for these wireless standards will offer continual improvements to address this challenge.

Another technical challenge will be compatibility among the multiple flavors of wireless standards, but in time we can expect this will also be addressed by the adoption of new standards.

AB -- 4/4/06

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee has approved the Protecting Consumer Phone Records Act, which will now move to the Senate floor. This act would bolster protection of consumers' phone records, which are vulnerable to scamsters and private investigators who sometimes obtain them through ruses.

See the following TMCnet stories for more details on the new bill:

Senate panel approves phone-records privacy bill

Legislation targets pretexters and websites selling consumers' personal calling records.

And this article covers some lawsuits being pursued by telcos against pretexters: The company is in legal pursuit of a PI firm illegally obtaining confidential phone records.

I notice that the companies that are getting sued for pretexting seem to have removed mention of that service from their web sites, but if you search hard you can still find outfits advertising access to phone records. Here's an example I found today:

No, I'm not going to tell you the name of the company.

AB -- 4/4/06