Joe Outlaw’s Customer Contact Blog

April 10, 2007

Intervoice announced a new bundling of applications for customer contact at its analysts event this week.  The Intervoice Contact Portal is a fully-integrated customer contact application suite which includes:  Intervoice Voice Portal supporting speech self-service applications, Intervoice IP Contact Center, and Advanced Notification Gateway.  Intervoice is positioning the Intervoice Contact Portal as a “customer-focused cost reduction” customer contact solution.  Take note this strong cost emphasis is unique in the market and foreshadows Intervoice’s strategy as a relative newcomer to differentiate its contact center solutions. I almost hate to say it because it is so well-known, but the perennial customer contact challenge for enterprises is to balance the efficiency and effectiveness of its efforts.  Typically, a company’s balance point leans in one direction or the other (toward cost-containment or toward customer excellence/intimacy) and will move back and forth over time depending upon the economy and its customer-related strategies.  What doesn’t seem to be well-known based on the happy talk (all enterprises now view customers are vital and all employees’ top priority is delivering excellent customer experiences) from most contact center solutions vendors is that more than half of large enterprises do not view customer service or their contact centers as strategic to their businesses.  This is based on a multi-year global survey conducted annually by Dimension Data.

As a customer myself and as a long-time analyst of the customer contact industry  I am dismayed to think so many companies still view their service and support as the complaint department.  But, lecturing about what companies ought to do only goes so far.  Intervoice, for one, is addressing the reality of the requirements for efficient solutions and in good customer-focused fashion is delivering products and services accordingly.  The Intervoice Contact Portal is designed to provide enterprises with a strong self-service application front-end and an assisted (live agent) back-end with additional help (to reduce incoming contacts) from pro-active customer notification.  These capabilities are not unique to Intervoice solutions, but the appreciation of enterprises’ cost focus and its commitments to address them as its top priority certainly are.

April 9, 2008

I have tracked Intervoice and the IVR business since becoming an analyst in the early 90s.  I was reminded again this week at their analyst event why Intervoice has been a market leader for most of its almost 25-year history.  Intervoice really understands that self-service and other IVR-based customer contact applications begin and end with their business value.  Unlike many of the newcomers to the space they know it not about shiny new IVR boxes, speech recognition rates or VXML – it is about creating and supporting applications which deliver real business impact.  Intervoice has more than 200 highly experienced consultants and engineers who work with enterprises to first identify and map out their customer contact problems and opportunities, then help develop business cases, prioritize them, and determine which ones to act on – the ones which will deliver the most business value.  And this discovery process is not just a pre-sales tool.  Of the more than 150 discoveries conducted with enterprises in 2007 only about half turned into development projects.

The other high-touch high-value reason Intervoice has been so successful with enterprise customer contact applications is its services and support organization.  Just like the development group the services group is  made up of almost 200 highly experienced and dedicated engineers.  The majority of Intervoice’s customers view their applications as mission critical and are on Intervoices’ top-level 24/7 Premier customer service plan.  One testament to the quality and commitment of its support is that 98% of its customers renew their annual contracts.

Through market consolidations and the influx of many new competitors touting shiny new boxes Intervoice has kept is eye on the ball – its customer-focused application development and support remain its competitive edge and truly are the heart and soul of Intervoice’s enterprise business.

March 25, 2008 - VoiceCon Orlando, despite Allan Sulkin’s protests, has become The Wonderful World of Unified Communications.  Even the mainstream contact center vendors were all but downed out by the UC chorus.  I persevered and found several leading-edge customer contact vendors/solutions worth further investigation.  They are from OpenSpan, Acme Packet, VoSky, and Etelos.  

• Faster, lower-cost access to applications/customer data and much more: OpenSpan announced its OpenSpan Platform SOA Desktop Edition.  With OpenSpan’s technology enterprises can quickly build integrations between desktop-, legacy-, and Internet-based applications.  What is unique here is  OpenSpan’s practical approach to delivering web services functionality for existing business applications in support of customer contact.  Also, unique is the speed with which these integrations can be set up, all without changing the applications or creating a new web portal application.
• So What? - Providing excellent customer experiences across all of the channels of customer interaction has gone from the Holy Grail of customer contact to table stakes in the most competitive industries.  Being able to instantly access and use customer information stored in data bases and applications (often purpose-built for departmental requirements) across the enterprise has been a prohibitively complex and expensive challenge.

• Increased VoIP security and cost containment: Acme Packet announced a partnership with Genesys.  This is a natural fit since both Genesys and Acme Packet have targeted and been successful with large financial services companies.  As some of the leading-edge large banks have moved to IP contact centers they have recognized the need for session border controllers (SBCs) to support increased IP network security, support for contact center virtualization, and cost reductions from controlling session routing.  There are other SBC vendors, but Acme Packet is leading the way.
• So What? - As contact centers move to operate on IP networks and increasingly to support multimedia customer interactions, enterprises must ensure the security of those interactions.  And, there are many new areas of concern, one example is the potential for SIP-based communications to spread viruses in header attachments. Another potential vulverability is from Spam for Internet Telephony (SPIT) once many different VoIP networks are interconnected.  Protecting against these kinds of new security threats is just part of what SBCs can do for contact centers.

• Cost containment and contingency support: Vosky (pronounced VOski) announced a new Click-to-Call web application for use with its Exchange Skype gateways.  Using Vosky gateways to send and receive calls over the Skype IP network contact centers can lower their inbound and outbound telephony costs vs. using traditional service provider circuits.  Vosky gateways have also been used to support lower-cost contingency circuits for contact centers. 
• So What? - For the majority of large enterprise contact centers cost containment continues to be a critical requirement.

• Increased organizational speed and flexibility: Etelos and BT announced a partnership to offer BT services based on Etelos’ web application development tools which support the rapid development of communications-enabled applications.  Etelos offers both a Web 2.0 application development environment based open standards and the LAMP solution stack, and an optional hosting environment for those applications
• So What? - Rapid, low-cost development platforms and techniques, particularly those designed for the creation and support of on-demand customer contact applications, hold the promise for enterprises to create lower-cost, more flexible solutions for interacting with customers

March 10, 2008 - Announcement: Aspect Software plans to enhance its Unified IP and Performance Edge solutions to 1) interface smoothly with the leading Unified Communications solutions in the market, including those from Microsoft, and IBM, 2) to add unified communications functionality to support improved contact center agent performance, and 3) to extend contact center functionality to customer-facing enterprise users to improve their performance.  These enhancements will begin to become available in the next couple of releases of Aspect’s products, scheduled for later in 2008 and in 2009.

Analysis: Aspect Software, for all its marketing about being the largest company solely focused on contact centers and the contact center’s most innovative company, is again late to announce its plans for addressing the growing demand for unified communications solutions. Only Aspect knows the real reasons it was late to endorse IP for contact center solutions or why it is now lagging the market in its plans for UC support. However, from the outside it appears Aspect continues to struggle with its desire to be that leading-edge contact center vendor it talks about while it supports and clearly wants to retain its very large and conservative customer base. This is a customer base that bought highly reliable Aspect Communications and Rockwell ACDs years ago for mission-critical call centers. This is a customer base, justifiably nervous to do anything that might jeopardize its call centers’ operations, which told Aspect they did not feel comfortable moving to IP.

Despite the timing of the announcement and within its self-imposed bounds of providing only contact center solutions, Aspect has created excellent messaging for its UC plans. In addition, in this messaging Aspect makes the good case for contact centers as the place in the enterprise to start when considering business cases for unified communications. They are the only places in most organizations with the available performance metrics required to conduct a productivity improvement analysis.

February 20, 2008 - Aastra is buying Ericsson’s Enterprise Communications business primarily to add to its enterprise communications market share.  Each company currently has about a 4% market share and if all goes well for Aastra it will double its global market share and move up into the top three enterprise communications vendors in

But, while Ericsson has sold its Enterprise Communications business to Aastra no one can guarantee the loyalty of these customers.  It is now open season on Ericsson’s thousands of MD110 and its 850 plus Solidus eCare customers.  Aastra did not buy the rights to the Ericsson brand nor are the fates of the Solidus eCare or MXONE products clear at Aastra, who has its own contact center solutions and is building its own next-gen IP PBX.

Aastra will no doubt be on the short list for system upgrades for the soon-to-be former Ericsson enterprise customers, but so will Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, Genesys, and Interactive Intelligence.

January 2008 - As a customer contact industry analyst I spend my days researching, analyzing, and thinking about customer contact, well that — lowering my golf scores and whether global warming is real.  But, mostly I think about customer contact center applications, the companies who buy and use them, and the vendors who build and sell them.  So, no surprise, that is what this blog will be about.  I plan to write about what is happening in customer contact with special emphasis on the leading edges — what early-adopter companies are doing and the vendors/technologies they are working with. 

The Internet and other emerging/evolving technologies are empowering customers in ways which are unfolding daily — arming them with unprecedented amounts of information and numbers of choices.  Customers are increasingly driving the markets for goods and services.  This groundswell of customer empowerment will continue to profoundly impact how enterprises do business and interact with their prospects and customers.New customer contact technologies and the application of evolving technologies from other disciplines are bringing new challenges as well as opportunities for leading enterprises to stay ahead of their customer demands.  Among these are: dash boards and analytics, open source applications, SaaS delivery, social media and customer forums, support for mobility, Wikis, widgets, SOA, web services, video search, mash-ups, semantic web, speech analytics, security, customer experience management, communications enabled business process, agent process simplification, and much more.My objective for this blog is to enlighten and be provocative with a variety of market events analysis and my theories about how things ought to be.  Your comments and suggestions are welcome - feedback@outlawresearch.com