Microsoft’s quest for an acquiring company that will do justice to the legacy of Tellme Networks, referred to as its “interactive self-service assets” in this press release, has resulted in the formation of 24/7 Inc. The new company absorbs roughly 400 former Microsoft employees, along with a significant amount of intellectual property and an existing customer base. It will promote cloud-based “natural user interface” (NUI).

Microsoft will retain an equity interest in the new company, which expects to generate about $250 million in revenue. Microsoft will jointly fund R&D efforts around the company’s core differentiator, which it refers to as a cloud-based “Predictive Experience” platform resulting from combining the automated speech recognition and interactive voice response resources from primarily from Tellme, combined with the dynamic and predictive business logic developed both by Voxify (for leading edge customers like Avis Rent-a-Car and Continental Airlines) and 24/7 Customer (primarily to support predictive handling of Chat-based interactions with live agents).

The merger exposes the new competitive terrain for customer service. It is a world where accurate speech recognition is closely coupled with computing power and data processing “in the cloud.” In essence, the same architecture that makes the mobile voice assistant Siri such a popular feature on Apple’s latest iPhone is destined to drive customer expectation for successful voice-based interactions over mobile devices… in addition to high expectations for the same level of success over the Web, via chat, IM or basic form filling.

In addition to 24/7 Inc. (with Microsoft) the competitors in this newly exposed territory includes hosted customer care specialists who support both automated and live agent interactions, like Convergys, West Corporation, AT&T and Verizon Business. But it also makes it a necessity for hosted self-service specialists, including Angel.com, Voxeo, and Nuance to leverage interactions with CRM (customer relationship management), BPM (business process management) and e-commerce partners. It is a wide world of opportunity for the likes of Salesforce.com, Oracle, IBM and Amazon.com.

A Little Historical Background
When Microsoft acquired Tellme Networks in March 2007, company management had a pretty good idea of all the goodies in the hosted speech application provider’s portfolio. In its press announcement it called the company “a leading provider of voice services for everyday life, including nationwide directory assistance [DA], enterprise customer service and voice-enabled mobile search.” During the ensuing years the DA operations, which were offered on a wholesale basis to wireless and landline carriers, came under competitive pressure from “free” services, especially GOOG-411 from Google.

In both the mobile and enterprise customer care realm, Microsoft anticipated that it could leverage the “on-demand” nature of capabilities in Tellme’s cloud “to advance natural user interfaces across Microsoft products to benefit billions of customers worldwide.” By 2009, Tellme had become the basis of Bing Mobile – supporting natural-language mobile search and applications running in Tellme’s cloud (including some developed by Voxify) were showcasing impressive, conversational customer care for financial services companies (Amex), airlines (Continental and – soon – United), Avis Rent-a-Car and many others.

Microsoft’s Tellme platform has two roles to play in the world of mobile customer care. It is the platform that can ultimately support Siri-like, self-service interaction with a range of personal devices, including smartphones, feature phones, automobiles and auto electronics, videogames, TVs and other household appliances. It is also the speech recognition and language understanding engine that powers Bing Mobile to support search, Q&A, shopping and the like.

Xbox also features voice control, which like Siri will help popularize and “educate” consumers about how to interact with speech assistants/agents. Though not focused specifically on mobile customer care, Tellme remains a significant player in the hosted, speech-based self-service market. Its partnership with Voxify has yielded some impressive examples of mobile care apps and an impending merger that brings Tellme and Voxify under the umbrella of a newly chartered 24/7 Inc. will coalesce around mobile customer care.

[This is the first "guest post" from Mike Bergelson, former director of strategy of Cisco's enterprise collaboration business and co-founder and CEO of Audium Software. In the contact center, speech processing and customer care world, Mike's played an important role in defining tools of the trade and agents of change. Today, as a founding partner at the investment and management company, Serve Lab, Mike continues to focus his analytical lens on the social, mobile and practical elements of customer care.]

The spirit of the popular uprising – so much in the zeitgeist that Time Magazine named the Protester as its person of the year for 2011 – is, in its own way, also affecting customer service.

There’s certainly no shortage of technological revolution affecting the way organizations serve their customers. For example, much of the industry buzz in 2010 and 2011 revolved around the impact of social customer care (net: low volume, high brand impact) and the continued adoption of SaaS-based customer service (net: still gaining momentum but migration taking longer than most thought).

Looking forward, we will see product announcements, articles and analyst coverage galore around the impact of mobility on customer care as a growing majority of users seek assistance using their smart, connected phones and tablets.

A less obvious revolution has also been gaining momentum that may, in the long run, have a profound impact on customer care strategies.

For the first time, consumers are taking service into their own hands, applying the “over the top” strategies that we’ve seen threaten industries such as telecom (Skype, Google Voice), cable (Hulu, Roku, Boxee) and even book publishing (Lulu).

Building on years of pent up consumer frustration, a new class of organization has emerged, offering consumers a DIY solution to the pain that they often (rightly or wrongly) associate with calling toll free numbers.

It’s not news that many consumers simply want to talk to an agent when they call a service line. This is especially true today, given the rising number of self-service options available online. Of course phone self-service is, and will continue to be, a very useful offering; it can be frustrating, though, when speaking with an agent feels like the right answer to a particular problem.

The popular GetHuman initiative, created by Kayak CTO Paul English in 2005, was one of the first well-known services to provide consumers an end-run around frustrating aspects of customer service, in this case the IVR.

As you probably know, GetHuman provides shortcuts for getting to an agent for most major toll-free numbers. The site rocketed to 40,000 daily page views within a year of its launch. While this represents less than one tenth of one percent of the people calling for customer service each day, it clearly shows that the site touched a nerve.

Naturally, others followed suit. DialAHuman (2008) and Get2Human (2008) sprung up to provide similar live agent short-cut compendia.

Around the same time, a few companies started to attack a related consumer frustration – waiting on hold. Fonolo (2007), Lucy Phone (2009) and Fast Customer (2011) allow consumers to connect directly with agents by actually waiting on hold for them. In their case, they spoof IVRs by emulating user input and then connect callers when an agent comes on the line.

Evidently enterprise adoption of courtesy callback solutions from vendors such as Virtual Hold is taking too long.

At the leading edge of a new wave, Insidr (2011) attempts to connect consumers to people who have “worked in big companies and are willing to help when the company can’t or won’t.” They’re targeting the frustration associated with what sometimes feels like rigid policy enforcement and empowering by reducing information asymmetry (most consumers don’t know what companies are willing to do to retain them).

Interestingly, the average bounty paid by consumers for Insidr tips is around $8, roughly the cost to the enterprise of the call that might have just been averted. This is mostly a coincidence but shows that some consumers are actually willing to dig into their pockets to resolve service issues.

These are just three examples of organizations that have emerged to allow consumers to start to take matters into their own hands to reduce customer service frustrations.

It’s worth spending time revisiting each of these organizations a few years into their existence to see if they’re delivering on their consumer empowerment missions or have lost steam or shifted focus / tactics.

Additionally, we should consider how these services are changing the way enterprises think about serving their customers – are they shining a light on weaknesses and forcing a re-prioritization of investment decisions or are they largely being ignored or stone-walled?

Finally, we should explore ways in which the tactics employed by these companies could be leveraged inside large organizations to accomplish their goals.

Alas, these are subjects of future posts. Meanwhile, let me know what you think and, obviously, which other organizations and related “over the top” trends should be included here.

* I couldn’t resist using this title because it invokes a reasonable metaphor and, frankly, sounds pretty catchy. I certainly don’t intend to suggest that consumers’ frustrations with customer service are in any way correlated to the general outrage with financial inequality, etc., being protested by the OWS movement.

During the past 2 1/2 years, Fonolo has developed and refined a set of cloud-based contact center solutions designed to support more efficient conversations between individual customers and the firms with which they carry out business. During that time, the company has landed several large enterprises, including named accounts like the Australian telecoms company Optus, Royal Bank of Canada, Sirius Satellite Radio Canada and others. The selling points, as we noted in this post revolved around “reinventing” the contact center experience by delivering callers directly to an agent and providing that agent with sufficient context (caller’s identity, call history, purpose of call…) to lead to a more pleasant and successful transaction.

Today, under the headline “The End of Hold As We Know It”, Fonolo introduced a commercial offering that representing new packaging and pricing of its services. The starting point is a package that includes its “deep dialing,” Web access, mobile interface, virtual queuing and post-call survey offered for a monthly fee of $99 to serve up to 10 agents. A second package is designed to serve up to 40 for $399 per month. It adds the ability for customers to schedule a callback, manages “pre-call questions” (to assess the purpose of a call more accurately) and the addition of “multiple widgets” to be added to a company’s Web site to help customers initiate a conversation with the company. These offers define the “$10 per agent per month” pricing proposition that promises to be a disruptive force among cloud-based customer care contact center providers in the coming year.

Fonolo founder Shai Berger explains that, while the large accounts have been the primary focus of the company’s marketing, sales and product development efforts, it has long been aware of demand from small-to-medium sized companies looking to take advantage of the “virtual queuing” technology, at a minimum, and then add more features and functions at a reasonable price. It also encountered demand from individual departments or business units in large companies, who sought a low-cost way to provide their customers or clients with direct access to knowledgeable customer service agents or telephone sales reps.

The offer recognizes that small-to-medium businesses, as well as business branches or subsidiaries of large corporations, recognize the rich sets of resources that reside in various service clouds. Competitive factors have helped them overcome concerns over security and lack of control associated with cloud-based deployments. So has the ability to offer customers some features and functions (like virtual hold) that they would otherwise not be able to offer. The new Fonolo offer adds economy and simplicity by making an offer at a single monthly price that doesn’t vary by minutes of use, ports in service or number of transactions.

Taken together, the price, simplicity and certainty (lack of variability) stands to be very disruptive in the Conversational Commerce space.

The quiet period is over and the transaction is complete. A stand-alone entity called Genesys launches today with what it terms “100% focus on customer experience.” However that description is too generic to capture the areas where the new company can truly differentiate itself from other contact center infrastructure providers. As we noted back in October when Permira announced its agreement with Alcatel-Lucent, the transaction removes some of the messiness that arose as the parent company pursued its efforts to provide transport infrastructure and application platforms for communications carriers. That’s a far cry from developing, installing and supporting enterprise software to support multi-channel and multimodal conversations between companies and their prospects or customers.

While the past four-and-a-half months were technically a “quiet period,” Genesys does not appear to have lost any ground in the contact center marketplace and its product development staff and efforts appear to remain intact. In the coming months, we expect to see greater visibility assigned to multi-channel initiatives around Conversation Manager and intelligent workload distribution. These are two formidable elements to a platform that supports mobile customer care, while recognizing that the same individual may use a mobile device to conduct a search, browse a vendor Web site, start making a transaction, consult with “friends” on a social network and then decide to contact an agent in a contact center.

Making sure that a customer gets in touch with “the right agent” at the right time was never a first order concern of Alcatel-Lucent. The fact that one of ALU’s most impressive demos revolved around teleconferences conducted in virtual reality (which ALU calls “Immersive Communications“) shows that the parent put “gee whiz” gimmickry ahead of supporting enterprise customers’ efforts to help their prospects or customers complete desired tasks or transactions.

Without the burden of being immersed in Alcatel-Lucent, Genesys can now pursue completion of its own desired tasks and transactions.

The Opus Research report on Voice Biometric Best Practices is raising the profile of multifactor authentication for secure customer care, proof-of-life and password management. Join Pat Carroll, CEO of Validsoft, and Opus Research’s Dan Miller as they provide more details about increased interest from mobile subscribers, financial institutions and government agencies and share what they expect to see in the coming years.

Live Webcast: Voice Biometrics: Overcoming Barriers to Adoption

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Featured Research
As technology providers and system integrators around the world successfully bring their solutions to market, we’re identifying the product attributes, architectures and deployment strategies that define the best practices in layered, multi-factor and risk-based deployments of voice biometrics.

This Report made available courtesy of Validsoft. Contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net) to receive a copy

Click Here to View the Report Summary

At this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), amid new smartphones and tablets; connected TVs; automotive entertainment systems; and super-thin computers, speech processing providers were able to make the point that almost anything you can do with these new gadgets can be improved by adding voice to the user interface. Nuance Communications set the stage with with a series of announcements, including Dragon TV; Dragon Go! for Android-based mobile devices; voice control of UltraBooks(TM), the slim (think MacBook Air) laptops developed by the likes of ASUS, LG, Samsung and now Dell in conjunction with Intel; and for media access anywhere and everywhere, Nuance formed a 10-year alliance with GraceNote, Sony Corporations digital media management operation formerly known as the CDDB (for Compact Disk Data Base).

Dragon TV has an uncanny resemblance to Vlingo’s “Virtual Assistant for Smarter TV” described by TJ Leonard in this blog post. The post includes an embedded video demonstration that was first released in December 2011. TJ also notes that the acquisition of Vlingo by Nuance, which was announced in late December, is not likely to close until later in 2012. In the mean time, both Vlingo and Nuance will continue to promote their products. It’s all the more entertaining for CES attendees and all folks following the speech enabled electronics world.

Neither Nuance nor Vlingo are destined to be alone in their efforts to replace TV remotes with simple spoken instructions. As we noted in an earlier post, Microsoft has a number of initiatives around Kinect that are designed to bring all of the goodness enabled by xBox (games, streamed entertainment, Web navigation) under the control of a combination of voice and gestures.

Japanese Consumer Electronics giant Panasonic has a long-standing relationship with Novauris and will be reportedly rolling out voice controlled TVs later this year. The two companies reportedly co-developed embedded speech recognition software under the NovaLite brand for use by Panasonic directly, or under license to other TV and consumer electronic manufacturers.

Meanwhile, even in the absence of any efforts by Apple to provide tools or APIs for 3rd party developers, the Web is awash in demonstrations of “Siri hacks” designed to take control of household appliances and electronic devices. The video below (courtesy of Vimeo) is especially amusing because it shows the developer actually bolting a black box onto the back of a TV.

Siri Universal Remote from Todd Treece on Vimeo.

It doesn’t end with the TV and game console. As this article by Emma Woollacott in TG Daily points out, LG Electronics has packaged a whole suite of technology under its ThinQ brand to enable people to listen to spoken instructions and also provide verbal feedback, like when a washing machine is in need of a new bearing. It is by no means a new idea, either. This patent, issued to Panasonic (then called Matsushita) in 2006, describes a voice controlled “Home Agent Server” for taking command of household appliances. It references prior filings from Nokia, LG and ultimately AT&T, dating back to 2003.

So the pattern is in place. Embedded processors, high-speed wireless data links and server farms “in the cloud” are delivering on the long-promised vision of “Voice Control of Your Connected Life” in ways that are accurate and reliable and less subject to ridicule (although maintaining a sense of humor has been an important part of ongoing marketing efforts).

Featured Research
A remarkably high percentage number of C-level executives indicate their companies’ lack of a defined strategy to deal with all the “personal data” provided by customers and prospects through a multitude of channels. Yet they also tell us of their plans to incorporate that data into “understanding intent” and forging better communications links that promote loyalty, profitability and product refinement.

This Report made available courtesy of Empirix. Contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net) to receive a copy

For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).

Click Here to View the Report Summary

The investment community put some serious weight behind the underpinnings of Conversational Commerce when New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and SAP Ventures chipped in with original investors to double the outside capitalization of Lithium Technologies. Those past investors include Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Emergence Capital, Greenspring Associates, Shasta Ventures and Tenaya Capital. The company is already cash-flow positive, according to this report by Ryan Lawler at GigaOm. That means that investors see great (and global) potential for Lithium to achieve its strategic objective of helping its client companies to engage more effectively with their customers and prospects.

Lithium was a major presence at our Conversational Commerce Conference (C3) last February. Its executives and one of its customers (FICO) described the power of promoting conversations between (or among) employees in marketing, customer care or other departments and individuals with specific questions or issues that they need to resolve. At the time, we saw Lithium tackling issues that were largely internal for companies who had to sort out tensions between the Marketing Department (with “brand” and “message” top of mind) and Customer Care or Contact Center personnel who saw themselves often play the role of customer advocate.

Lithium bridges the gaps by creating a social communications platforms where customers, prospects and enterprise employees can join in forums to resolve the issues that originate directly from customers or prospects, rather than alpha bloggers or angry Twitterers. The additional investment (which brings Lithium’s total capitalization from outsiders to $101 million) will fuel new hiring and investment to enable global expansion. According to Lawler’s report, the company plans to double its 200 current employee count and expand its global reach beyond North America and Western Europe, targeting Asia and the Pacific Rim.

As the saying goes, “Money talks!” and Lithium’s message in the social business domain has been that “customers don’t want to ‘Friend’ you, they want to get something done.” Opus Research would add that it starts with a genuine conversation, not a someone railing or whining on Twitter or Facebook. Lithium recognized this fact from the beginning and it is being rewarded by investors who see the concept’s global potential.

We’ve received news from Indriya Innovations in Singapore that PT Bank Negara Indonesia (Persero) Tbk (BNI) in Jakarta, Indonesia has completed a pilot and moved to full implementation of a multifactor authentication system that employs voice biometrics for automated password reset.

The move marks a “first” in the Asian financial industry and marks a major step forward for voice biometrics, given that BNI is so well respected and is one of the largest banks in Indonesia. Its deployment validates our observation (reinforced by the the likes of IBM Research), that deployments of voice biometrics globally are accelerating.

BNI, which was founded in 1946, underwent a major rebranding and repositioning in 2004. It now employees 20,000 people and has offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and London, as well as an agency in New York. In the press release, company spokesperson M. Harsono, (IT Helpdesk & Command Center Group Head) explained that “resetting passwords have often posed challenges for our IT help desk.” He noted that company policy allows only “strong passwords” which consist of “a combination of alphabets, numbers and special characters.” The result is that “BNI users have often forgotten their passwords.”

Thousands of employees from around the country were calling the Help Desk to reset their passwords. This labor-intensive process has been alleviated by the new, Web-based, multifactor password reset application from Indriya Innovations. Requests from the Web portal give rise to an outbound call to one of the phones or IP-based devices that have been registered with the Help Desk. The multifactor solution integrates “something you have” (the phone device), with “something you know” (challenge questions and a series of numbers) and integrates the Nuance Vocal Password biometric engine.

The pilot and initial implementation supports Indonesia’s national language, Bahasa, for the convenience of domestic employees, thus affirming that voice-based authentication can support multiple languages. If adoption runs true to form (as described by IBM and others) password reset apps are the introduction of multifactor authentication that ultimately replaces passwords in a number of use cases, in banking, healthcare, government transfer payments and mobile commerce.
(Updated: Wednesday Jan 4, 2012 8:40 AM Pacific)