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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.

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).

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Acknowledging that the vast majority of its business comes through 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.

In the contact center will continue to support Aurix’s existing customers and channel partners. It is a product that has proven its mettle in the classic context of deploying analytics on an existing corpus of stored voice files to support agent training and workforce optimization. It is also the root of delivering “relevant screen pops” based on the context of the call and “nuance detection” aimed at both agent and caller.

But that’s only the beginning. The acquisition was driven by the Emerging Technologies business unit, under VP Chris McGugan. He sees the Aurix core engine and IP as foundational technology that can be spliced into a variety of solutions across the entire enterprise. The same attributes that make it possible for the Aurix phonetic speech search engine to monitoring up to 100% of recorded calls makes it possible to do the sort of “near real-time” speech processing to tag the content of the streamed audio associated with video content or collaboration platforms. This, in turn, enables real-time identification, searching and audio mining.

Avaya’s new in-house approach to speech analytics turns it into the connective tissue that can help its enterprise customers connect the dots between other “Big Data” analytics initiatives. It’s no coincidence that only yesterday database and CRM giant Oracle purchased Endeca, a small New England-based company that specializes in analytics and pattern recognition across large repositories of both structured and unstructured data. The difference is that Endeca conducts its analysis of text and other content on the Web and e-commerce sites. Note the lack of speech analytics. In the world of multi-channel, multi-modal and real-time commerce, Avaya recognizes that treating content and meta-data that starts as spoken words may be more important than ever, and now it Avaya doesn’t have to look outside its Emerging Technologies group for what it considers to be the best-in-class technology. At the same time, the company brings a robust set of analytic tools into its mainstream product line and will add an important component to the quality of service that it delivers to its enterprise customers and, in turn, to their customers.

As a long-time follower of Genesys Labs, I regard it as good news both for employees of Genesys and their enterprise customers as a period of uncertainty approaches its end. Alcatel bought Genesys back in 1999, for the same $1.5 billion (not adjusted for inflation). Permira is a private equity firm, founded in London in 1985. It has built a portfolio of companies in a diverse set of businesses, including in chemicals, consumers, industrial products and services, technology, media, and telecommunications. It has a decidedly European focus and its average deal size is in the $650 million range, making the acquisition of Genesys (if it is at the $1.5 billion price) more than twice the size of its average purchase.

Based on reports, it looks like Permira succeeded in convincing ALU to keep the enterprise networking and equipment part of its Enterprise Division, meaning that the object of its purchase purely Genesys Labs. This makes sense because Genesys’ strength in the marketplace has been based on its software’s ability to support customer care operations in through its core contact center and customer interaction software and its interactive voice response systems (Genesys Voice Platform or GVP). Its innovative work in this area was never bolstered by the inclusion of enterprise wide area networks or wireless LAN technologies. Ironically, it would have benefitted more from tighter links with “core” ALU technology in public network infrastructure as key components of customer interaction moved into “The Cloud.”

The transaction, when completed, marks the end of uncertainty for Genesys and its customers. It brings much needed cash into ALU’s coffers so it can pursue its “high leverage network” approach to inspiring network operators to get more innovative. More importantly, we got the sense that enterprise customers were hesitating to commit to some of Genesys’ most forward-looking solutions to support, multi-channel, social and mobile engagements.

Genesys should be one of the top contenders for enterprise software and infrastructure to support conversational commerce and, for 9 of the 11+ years under Alcatel (then Alcatel-Lucent) it was able to stay at arm’s length from the parent company. Then, about two years ago, it was ceremoniously glommed into the Enterprise Software Division and its crown jewels were inlaid into a substratum of enterprise telecom gear. It wasn’t pretty (any longer).

Permira has successfully separated the wheat from the chaff here and has the grist that can be the basis for a tasty brew for social, mobile customer care. The question now is whether it is too late.

Fueled by maturing standards for Web services and a plethora of APIs and development tools to accelerate “mash-ups,” the move of enterprise computing, communications and storage infrastructure is only accelerating. In USAirway’s case, the move to the Nuance on Demand (NoD) cloud sped up deployment, helped avoid capital spending and moved much of the administrative expense to a third party. At the same time, it replaced a multiplicity of diverse platforms with a single solution.

According to a press statement, economic justification came, in part, from shortening call durations and increased mechanization rates for repeated calls. Yet it was all done as part of an effort to “homeshore” many of the contact center rep jobs that had found their way into other labor markets.

Natural Language Understanding played an important role in USAirway’s purchase decision. The IVR will speak in the voice of “Wally,” much as Amtrak has employed “Julie” and BellCanada invoked “Emily” to answer calls, elicit customer response and route callers to the correct resource (be it an “self-service” IVR or customer service rep. The speech enabled IVR and call steering app resides in the cloud, but it is closely integrated with the network that delivers calls to USAirway’s 1,800 reservation agents, part of the airline’s 6,000 unionized customer care and reservation agents.

Instantiating these conversational applications “in the cloud,” is a natural. As with old-guard CallPromptr service (from AT&T) or EVS (from then MCI, now Verizon Business) calls arrive at an IVR which can ascertain the caller’s identity from ANI (automatic number identification) and gauge as much of the context as possible in order to offer highly personalized service. It is akin to what the merged United Airlines (with Continental) will be implementing for its self-service line, relying on Voxify-developed applications running on Microsoft’s Tellme platform.

In its most recent quarterly filing, revenues for the first six months of its fiscal year (started September 1) were up nearly 16% to $2.8 billion when compared to the same period one year ago. However net losses ballooned by 50% (from $419 million to $612 million) during the same time; but that included a one-time charge of $246 million attributed to the “extinguishment” of some expensive debt. If the one-time charge were not included in the results, the company would have witnessed a 50% improvement in its net loss. Indeed its Operating Loss for the first six months of this fiscal year had been trimmed to a mere $86 million from $209 million in the prior year.

With long-term debt exceeding $6 billion and interest expense on track to reach $480 million (though it might be slightly reduced with the refinancing), the $1 billion IPO would be timely. But investors should get a better grip on what Avaya does for a living. Characterizing it as a company that “sells phones and other telecommunications gear to corporations,” as the WSJ reporters do, Is like damning with very faint praise. Almost as an afterthought, they add, “It also sells hardware and software used in the call centers that companies use to communicate with retail clients.” And then compound their criticism by saying that Avaya “is unlikely to drum up the same level of investor interest as today’s Internet darlings, and indeed a better proxy for the company might be Freescale Semiconductor Holdings, the private-equity-owned chip maker that had a lackluster market debut late last month.”

But Avaya is most definitely not a semiconductor maker. As enterprises retool their communications and computing infrastructures to take advantage of IP-based telephony and communications-enabled applications – not just in the contact center – but throughout the enterprise (including mobile devices), the company is one of a handful of companies with a broad portfolio of software to support communications, collaboration and electronic commerce. The 16% growth rate in Avaya’s revenues reflects the refresh that is going on in the marketplace; that said, as we all know, it is a domain where hardware has been transformed into a commodity and software is the battleground where Avaya is confronted by direct competition from Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Microsoft and IBM.

Dealogic data reports that the lead underwriters are Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. In addition Citigroup Inc., Barclays Capital and Credit Suisse Group are among the banks bringing the new securities to market. With these blue chip firms involved, the IPO deserves close attention.