The novel aspect of the new approach is as follows: Targeting its installed based of 4,500 companies running its Customer Interaction Center platform, it provides a complete application development and distribution platform for mobile apps that can run on popular OSes (iOS, Android, Windows…), and conform to Facebook’s OS as well. But the code-base for the customer care apps – focusing on deep integration with CIC – will be developed and run on one centralized server using tools (resembling C#) which any competent mobile app developer will recognize and be able to use. The integration with CIC means that mobile customers, when they press a “click-to-call” button, will be able to see their status in queue, decide whether to stay “on hold,” schedule a call back, engage in a text chat, or take another action.

From the contact center operator’s perspective, calls (or chats) are initiated by customers from their smartphones and brought into an intelligent queuing system along with as much context as can be gleaned from direct input, capture of activity streams, location and other metadata. Integration with CIC also means that call center managers as well as executives from multiple departments and business units will be able to view reports based on the activities of their mobile subscribers. They can learn the mix of devices or OSes originating calls; detect when customers are opting out of their automated system, correlate activities with business success; and a host of other analytic results that can be tailored to meet an executive’s requirements.

When they use Interaction Mobilizer, application developers generate a light-weight app (and a set of rules) to go through the approval process of each “app store” or outlet. Once approved, it can remain static. Upgrades or the addition of new features, functions or “connections” are introduced at the platform level, where development, care and feeding of the mobile app is conducted. Mobile customers download the app once; upgrades happen transparently. This is a win-win approach that minimizes friction with the mobile customer and staff expenses for the enterprise customer.

Interactive Intelligence has taken an “end-to-end” approach to app development that augments its “all-in-one” approach to customer interaction management. More details on pricing and product attributes will be available when the service is generally available “in Q2 2012.” It will be delivered under license as on “on-premises” solution or as part of the Communications as a Service (CaaS) approach that InIn has been pursuing with CIC in the past three years, with the price derived from “unique mobile app connections per day.”

The company, which has 1,500 customers, is now rolling out the service to organizations of all sizes and in all industry sectors. VPI’s value proposition is to “do all the work” of setting up an agent. The start-up process takes 4-6 weeks and accounts for about 3-4 “person days” all told. That includes feeding it the live recordings, suggested scripts and other tuning information. Unlike a typical speech IVR system, VirtualSource does not use or require companies to maintain logic trees. Instead, VPI uses about 10-20 recorded conversations (preferably with successful outcomes) and augments it with information, rules and logic from training manuals, call-flow diagrams or interviews with contact center managers or supervisors. Performance should improve with time, as the system carries out more and more conversations.

VPI customers can run the virtual agents side-by-side with live customer service reps. Comparisons of the two can be used to tune the virtual agent or to determine which tasks should are most eligible for automated handling. Visit here (scroll down) to listen to sample conversations. At this point, the company uses a slightly robotic aspect to the voice rendering, which allows the virtual agent to adapt more rapidly to dynamic conversations.

The “brain” or “intelligence engine” integrates important cognitive functions including “short- and long-term memory, natural language understanding, reasoning, learning mechanisms, goal-directed behavior and meta-cognition.” It’s service cloud is PCI-compliant and Botz believes that companies will see value in using virtual agents to receive payment instructions securely (less prone to human error or theft.)

VPI bills on a per use basis at $0.25 per minute (including tuning) with a monthly minimum and a one-year term agreement.

Convergys gives the cloud-based offerings global scale, leveraging a network of 69 secure data centers and contact centers that span the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. It has long offered enterprise clients hosted or managed intelligent self-service, call routing to live agents, monitoring, analytics and “decisioning” or business process management. It already uses Cisco IP-telephony infrastructure as the backbone of its global network.

Spanlink has been one of the most innovative go-to-market partners for Cisco. As noted here in December 2010, Spanlink was one of the first integrators to bring Cisco’s SocialMiner resources for monitoring social networks to market.

Look for the partnership to give rise to some very compelling offers targeting companies with as few as 100 seats in their contact centers. In that respect, it represents an effort for both Cisco and Convergys benefit from Spanlink’s positioning among medium-sized companies. As this cohort adds self-service, social and mobile commerce options, they naturally look for deployment options that minimize capital expenditure and staffing costs associated with development, monitoring and supporting diverse applications. It is a marketplace where we expect to witness heated competition as traditional contact center, CRM and BPM infrastructure providers all introduce “cloud-based” options.

Over the years, VHT has offered four major solutions: Concierge – which informs callers of their expected wait time and lets them decide to hold or hang up and wait for a callback; Rendezvous – which enables the caller and company to coordinate and schedule a callback at a time that is convenient for the caller and feasible for the right agent; Rapport – which is an outbound, intelligent alert service that can support informative calls, reminders and updates.

The VHT platform has been integrated with large-scale implementations of call processing systems from Genesys, Avaya and Cisco and has been been a mainstay for financial services companies, healthcare providers, retailers, utilities and government agencies. However, last week’s briefing addressed a major repositioning as well as a rebranding. Noting that the company has supported multi-channel conversations for over eight years, with its WebConnect product, it is formally moving beyond virtual queuing of voice calls by packaging its platform as the VHT Conversation Bridge.

Acknowledging that “people just want to get things done,” VHT says it is concentrating on “completing the conversation” using the most appropriate channel at the time. Thus it can support a “callback on the Web” function for the screen-based generation.

In the mobile+”cloud” realm, there is a “mobile lane to the Conversation Bridge,” meaning that there are connectors (Web services interfaces) and SDKs to support iOS-based and Android devices. The company also offers tutorials for mobile developers to add the Conversation Bridge (displaying expected hold times and providing callback options to callers) with just “six lines of code” and minimal development time.

In addition to the premises-based solutions providers mentioned above, VHT has forged partnerships with a number of cloud-based, on-demand telecommunications services providers, including Verizon Business on its Next Generation Services Node (NGSN). We’ll be noting developments on the hosted front in future reports.

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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.

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.

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Acknowledging that the vast majority of its business comes through its indirect channel, Voxeo has beefed up its partner support resources in significant ways. It has committed real dollars to market development and joint marketing programs culminating in distributing sales leads, investing in training, and maintaining a pool of “Marketing Development Funds” (MDF) to underwrite co-marketing and demand generation efforts.

Likewise, its Developer Portal has been retooled to include marketing and sales support resources – collateral, case studies, sample proposals, demos, Webcasts and the like – to help shorten the sales cycle associated with increasingly complex multi-channel platform implementations. Just as important, its “Obsession Teams” of support technicians guarantee 20 minute response time to issues emanating from Certified and Global partners.

Voxeo is making a successful transition from a “geeky” techno-focussed company whose strict adherence to standards like VoiceXML and ccXML, as well as the layering on of development tools and multi-channel resources appealed to the adventurous appDev Nation. Now it has developed a compelling story around “The Triple Cloud” – a concept that leverages its long tenure cloud-based self-service resources, while amplifying the message that deployments can be on-premises, in-the-cloud or both.

Voxeo has confidence in its technology and recognizes that competing for enterprise dollars at this point is a marketing challenge. The competition includes old guard hosted service providers like West Interactive, Convergys and Microsoft/Tellme. But all contact infrastructure providers are adding cloud-based options. For example, Cisco today formally launched its Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Center. It has hooks into the Unified Customer Voice Portal (CVP), as well as social network monitoring and a modicum of multi-channel support. Genesys and Avaya have similar product lines and cloud-based roadmaps.

Cloud-based e-commerce and CRM specialists, an inchoate group that pits Salesforce.com and its partners against Amazon Web Services and its partners, as well every CRM platform provider that has a hosted flavor (think Pegasystems, Oracle/RightNow, Microsoft/Aspect, SAP….). To compete effectively in this environment, Voxeo is correct to put extra umph behind its partner support strategy. That makes Voxeo Connect the right initiative at the right time.

LiveOps has offered “white label versions of DataSquirt services to its clients for some time and held exclusive North American distribution rights since May of this year. The acquisition marks another step toward making CONTACT to market and integrate DataSquirt’s code and personnel into the LiveOps fold. This is consistent with the company’s policy of making sure all elements are both field-tested and “hardened” to operate well on the LiveOps platform.

Through acquisition, LiveOps is also adding over 60 mobile and multichannel clients. This, in turn, brings new use cases that make the “social/mobile/cloud” mantra more than just a series of buzz words, as well as case studies that show how well-recognized (and often conservative) outfits like ADT which made text messaging the preferred means to conduct “safety checks” with its guards; Amway, using the cloud to manage text and email messaging with its network of salespeople; and the Royal Mail Group (which operates the British Post Office) which added Twitter as a channel in and out of its contact centers.

But the acquisition is not primarily about adding new customers. LiveOps has already demonstrated the power of cloud-based resources to support a community of remote agents. They, in turn, have gained experience using social networks to maintain a sense of community and bolster morale among geographically-dispersed employees. These agents are likely to be more comfortable than their brick-and-mortar counterparts when communicating with customers and prospects – in addition to each other – using text, Tweets or email.

The growth of remote agents and the “fractional workforce” is a sign of the times. Our informal survey of contact center oursourcers shows that virtually every one of them is building more infrastructure to support growing communities of at home agents. With a history that dates back to 2000 (or 2002 when you consider the combination of LiveOps with CallCast’s platform) LiveOps was the first company to start tackling technological and social issues associated with building a business based on fostering the growth of work-at-home agent activities.

The acquisition of DataSquirt acknowledges that the integration of text messaging, social networks and email is a must to keep conversations growing on the platform.