Moaz characterizes efforts to build a roadmap whereby CRM subsumes social initiatives as a “train wreck” and uses it as grounds to solicit calls from Gartner clients or prospects to discuss how a such a wide variety of descriptors can be mapped to the same concept. But the real challenge for enterprise marketers – sometimes called “The Brands” – is to strengthen the bonds between and among customers and prospects in order to provide better service, promote loyalty and build profits.

By contrast, current solutions that are based in CRM and social CRM capture and conduct analysis on a broad set of customer generated data and metadata. Companies think they are doing a better job of paying attention but, whether they admit it to themselves or not, they continue to use their resources to analyze activity, target messages and promotions and influence future activity. That’s not listening or engaging in a meaningful conversation.

VRM involves a totally different engagement model. “Users” (be they shoppers, searchers, mobile subscribers or “other”) initiate conversations with their selected vendors through a trusted resource or advocate. They can compare notes with other shoppers/customers and, while they may be loyal to a brand, they are more loyal to themselves and their peers. In the ideal, the power shifts to the shopper in ways that will disintermediate traditional channels (like the contact center) and influencers (meaning commercials and advertisements).

The train wreck is not the result of there being too many names for the social CRM phenomenon, it is that CRM and VRM are on a collision course whereby one side seeks to grant more power to buyers while the other seeks to retain nearly all the power by pretending to do a better job of listening.

Thus started discussions of the path from today’s decidedly unconversational CRM systems to more social CRM and ultimately user-controlled “Vendor Relationship Management”.

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Instead, eight months and a Skype IPO later, the “Call Phone” feature dramatizes the truly disruptive nature of Google’s telephony strategy. It’s no surprise at all that the service reached the million call milestone in less than 24 hours. That is just a fraction of the overall call volume on public networks and we all know how quickly people discover “free” ways to carry out communications that cost a nominal fee from alternative service providers (Directory Assistance served as the crash test dummy for the fee-to-free migration pattern).

If Gmail, Google Voice and Google Chat users stay true to form on the Google’s information freeway, we will see steady migration from alternative services like Skype Out and the numerous calling card services that charge pennies per minute. The steady improvement of the “Google App” on mobile phones and integration of Google’s library of applications with Android, Chrome and HTML5 program environments will further lower the barriers for users to stay inside Google while originating (within the confines of North America, at least).

Meanwhile, the steady improvement of voice control carries on, It makes the notion of free, mobile, speech-based search, find and communicate exclusively from Google (perhaps with an assist from Verizon Wireless) a formidable reality.

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This being a demo, your own experience may be different. As head engineer for the Voice Actions project at Google, Mike LeBeau is quite adept at using the services in ways that are designed to impress and amaze. But, this is not like Google Wave, where some of the most creative minds in collaborative computing and messaging invented and launched a platform to show the virtues of sharing on-screen information in real time with little attention to the actual user experience. This is a combination (I’d say “recombination”) of Google’s formidable speech recognition and dictation capabilities with Google Maps and various flavors of Google Search which, unlike Wave, takes a major focus on the user experience, especially for mobile phones.

The set of services has been seen as a direct competitive foray against the native, speech-enabled features on Apple’s iPhone (including the services that may spring from Apple’s acquisition of Siri), as well as the myriad of multi-platform applications from Nuance (Dragon), Vlingo, Promptu and even AT&T. Perhaps more ominously, Google seems to be making the statement that it plans to compete with a crop of fledgling speech-enabled service providers, like PhoneTell, a company that developed some nifty mashups of voice search and call handling on Android phones, in part because there has been less friction involved in invoking and gaining access to the speech processing and call processing features in the Andoid SDK.

It can be argued that the Colossus of Redmond beat Google to the punch a couple of weeks ago at SpeechTEK when Zig Serafin, general manager of the Speech Group at Microsoft, showcased a set of speech-enabled features for the Windows Phone 7 operating system. But Microsoft’s marketing efforts will be hampered by two major issues. One is the overall lack of traction around Windows Phone 7, which is one of several candidates for third place behind iPhone and Android in race for smarphone marketshare (with the largely non-voice-aware Blackberry is the same boat).

The other major impediment is Microsoft’s mixed message surrounding the “Natural User Interface.” Its attempt to leapfrog the pack involves adding “gestures,” exemplified by the full-body involvement of game-players using a feature called Kinect on the xBox. It seems like a leap of faith to think that gestures will make a difference with small screens and mobile devices. Seems like Apple’s multitouch and Nuance’s predictive texting or services like Swype for input make a lot more sense.

As for Nuance, like Promptu and Vlingo, it has offered voice input for Android for several years now. As noted above, its differentiator is destined to be accuracy (which is the clay feet of all applications in the real world where background noise and microphone quality have greater impact than core recognition software), ease-of-use, and an existing installed of happy users. From my perspective, Nuance’s potential trump card in this game (as noted above) is support of multiple modalities through applying several of the principles that support predictive texting across multiple means of input. We also believe that Nuance has something of a “most favored voice technology provider” for both Apple and Siri which could be an important factor in the battle for primacy among the top-tier smartphone providers (Apple versus a broad range of Android manufacturers).

When we look back on the summer of 2010, the launch of Voice Actions for Android will be seen as a signal event. It goes a long way toward re-establishing the spoken word as the natural input for a phone (duh!). That’s the benign part. On the darker side, Google once again shows that it is not neutral when it comes to claiming pre-emptive market share where it sees potential for growth. The result will be accelerated innovation in the name of competition.

Game on!

All this activity and creativity “in the cloud” comes at a time when we continue to hear about the classic backlog in enterprise IT departments. While executives from marketing or the contact center look for ways to support “social CRM” or “cross channel customer support,” the IT department has to grapple with what it considers first order concerns like network security, data integrity or compliance to a slew of strictures from SarBox to HIPAA to PCI.

The current situation sets up IT to be the “can’t do” entity in a “can do” era. This is why so much of the Web-based marketing and commerce activity happens “outside of” or some say “in spite of” enterprise IT. In the contact center domain, which is arguably where computers and communications systems first learned to talk to one another, “integration with back end systems” always takes longer than setting up a speech-enabled IVR and call routing system on the “front-end”.

Now that multi-channel (phone, Web, text, video) or cross-channel (Web-chat, IM-phone) contact centers are becoming more commonplace, IT departments are challenged to keep up to a much more dynamic and fast changing world. Latency is the villain for customers (who can’t stand to be put on hold), contact center managers (who, likewise, monitor average hold times, but also detest the time it takes for IT to support a new report or installation of a new agent “portal”) and departmental heads (who look for speed when getting activity reports to support their business objectives).

I argue that it’s time for enterprise IT departments to publish their own API’s. Actually, it would be better if they maintained their own private versions of Programmable Web. On its home page PW describes itself as “more than a directory and community, it’s programmable” adding that it provides application developers (who can be enterprise employees or third parties) with “a simple and structured way to access the powerful registry and repository capabilities of PW.” Just replace “PW” with “IT” and let the magic happen.

I’m an analyst and I don’t code. Much of what I describe may already be taking place. I know that the leading enterprise IT infrastructure providers (IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, SAP…) and the contact center infrastructure providers (Avaya, Genesys (Alcatel-Lucent), Cisco, Aspect, InIn…) have tools and “integrated development environments”) that look something like PW, but something’s missing. I think it’s the intent to support agile development that can be blessed by IT as it goes about it’s business of keeping core infrastructure elements secure and reliable.

Update: Programmable Web’s RSS feed posted this story about a steep increase in demand for IP folks familiar with mashups (and APIs)

And now, in this video Dena describes a use case whereby Scotiabank was able to deploy an outbound alert service based on Nuance’s Notification Hub, which was up-and-running in a matter of days and provides a service for which bank customers pay a premium.

Instead of “speech” the center of gravity has decidedly moved toward creating the optimal multimodal customer experience. Thus the idea of Avaya re-naming its long-standing “Voice Portal” the “Experience Portal” or Microsoft launching a company-wide marketing, development and packaging initiative around the idea of a “Natural User Interface” that includes speech but adds typing, texting, and “gestures” show that speech has a gigantic future – but it is as part of a combination of technologies brought to bear to solve the needs of end-users.

Past SpeechTEK’s were specific to speech. When we talked about standards, it was largely to make ASR recognizers and TTS synthesizers work and play well with one another. Likewise, analytics were “speech analytics” put into play to find the faults in spoken dialogues or root cause for abandoning an endless session inside an IVR. ADEs (Application Development Environments) governed “dialogue modules” or reusable code to create better speech-based interactions. You get the idea. Now, in the spirit of RC (Recombinant Communications) developers are retaining the best of their speech-based experience while leveraging their investment in the logic and workflow encased in their Web sites and mobile apps.

SpeechTEK made it evident that, while speech processing remains an important and necessary resource for today’s self-service and assisted service applications, we’re well beyond such a one-dimensional treatment of reality. User Experience is the rightful center of attention and the speech community has come around to recognize that it cannot address the full spectrum of user options by itself. That’s why most of the briefings we took at SpeechTEK addressed how vendors are addressing the demand for “cross-channel” and “multimodal” communications.

More details in next week’s advisory on “Automated Speech in the Multimodal World”. So many opportunities… So much time!

Targeting the growing ranks of iPhone and iPad users, PerSay has announced that its VocalPassword functionality has been modified to allow app developers to include voice authentication with “minimal resources.” By adding voice biometrics to traditional methods of authentication, including login IDs and passwords, the new capability enables a multi-factor authentication.

The additional layer of security can provide app users with a “sleek and innovate authentication experience,” says Almog Aley-Raz, CEO of PerSay in the press release. The company is touting the solution for applications such as mobile banking, social networks, payment services and membership clubs.

PerSay is not alone in developing a voice biometric solution for iPhone. VoiceSafe, created by Voice Trust, is an application to securely store personal information on an iPhone. As well, Palo Alto, CA-based SecuriMobile offers a platform to manage large deployments of voice biometric-enabled mobile phones with support for BlackBerry, iPhone, Android smartphones.

Until now, as DuVander explains, application developers could bring Twitter-based content into their user interface through search or by pasting in the stream itself. Think of the new service as a way to include Twitter-based content that can be tailored by a viewer’s interests and keys off the activities of a selected individual or group. Twitter provides some insights and guidelines (including use cases) for the API in this post. It is telling (in a good way) that the first guideline is to declare all information in a “protected” account as “non-publice” and therefore out-of-bounds for services that refer to the output of the streamed API.

Of special interest to customer care, social CRM and VRM professionals should be the additional metadata that is included in the API or “feed”. It has the potential to let users know when a Twitterer favorites a site, retweets a message, follows a new twitter or makes changes to a list. As I recently wrote, Programmable Web was purchased by Alcatel-Lucent, which is aggressively working to to integrate (mashup?) the customer interaction management resources of Genesys Labs with the rest of its Enterprise Software Group. With so much attention focused on bringing social media content into the customer care contact center workflow, an easy way to incorporate real-time streams should be much appreciated.