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.

Accurate speech recognition combined with natural language processing: This gets to the heart of Conversational Commerce. Credit Apple’s Siri with bringing the speech enabled mobile assistant into prime time, but expect category leaders Google (just Google the word “Majel”) and Microsoft/Tellme to use their investment in speech processing technologies to leverage themselves into the mobile assistant realm. Collectively, they are making it more comfortable for people to carry out conversations with their smartphones (or tablets or TVs or cars).

Nuance will be a formidable competitor in this realm, working closely with IP and researchers from IBM. Nuance’s speech processing technology is deeply embedded in iOS-based devices (though the licensing terms and details on the integration are closely guarded). Therefore, Nuance is a direct beneficiary of Siri’s success. In the mean time, the company has effectively marketed its own platform for mobile dictation and speech input under the Dragon brand and has launched Dragon Go!, which demonstrates the value of deep integration with popular mobile destinations, including Yelp, OpenTable, Google, Bing, YouTube and a couple hundred others, based on context.

Vlingo is also formidable in this category. Aside from launching an all-out patent war in the U.S. courts, it has effectively differentiated itself as offering capabilities that neither Siri nor Nuance presently have. One of the most important is “hands-free” operation. Using the wake up words “Hey Vlingo” mobile subscribers can then enter commands and content to hear or originate text messages, conduct searches or get driving directions. These are compelling use cases and provide the mechanism for users to put their devices (running all their personal apps) under the control of their voice. Given its size, relative to the cohort of Google, Microsoft, Apple and even IBM (which is working directly with Nuance), it is unlikely that Vlingo will be acting alone. Regardless of who emerges as its benefactor or owner (device maker, mobile carrier, cloud computing provide…), Vlingo’s presence will be felt in the 2015 timeframe.

The Smartphone+Cloud paradigm: This is closely related to Apple and Siri because Siri is an app running “natively” on the iPhone 4S, but relying heavily on speech processing and computing resources in Apple’s cloud. As the retail price of smartphones continues to decline – especially with subsidies from wireless carriers – the adoption curve continues to get steeper and the population of wireless smartphone users gets more attractive. That’s why so many service providers and content providers are comfortable targeting smartphone users as a key customer base.

Common wisdom has it that, by 2015, platform fragmentation issues vis-a-vis smartphones will be largely behind us. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android will share leadership. Android will have the edge in terms of devices in service and Apple will have the more coherent strategy for monetization of content and service delivery. They will be joined by one or more companies that, today, are considered also-rans, most likely Microsoft’s Windows Phone (with a big assist from Nokia) and perhaps RIM Blackberry. In a perfect world, the “open source” version of HP’s WebOS will become the basis for innovative application development and delivery, but that is unlikely unless there’s a cloud-based entity with its eyes on the smartphone prize.

Incidentally, Amazon.com’s acquisition of Yap shows that it has its eye on speech enabling the mobile phone (not just the smartphone) crowd. This means that Salesforce.com, which watches the operations of Amazon Web Services (AWS) quite closely will emerge as an important player in the smartphone+cloud domain by 2015.

Spoken words recognized as information assets: Once you have people comfortable talking to their smartphones, you have a rich new set of utterances to go into a corpus of data to support better understanding. In the U.S., compliance with federal laws like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA requires companies to capture and store the content of phone conversations between and among employees, customers and prospects. To make the best of the situation, companies have been able to analyze, index and tag the content of these conversations to support business goals, often as part of WFO (work force optimization) programs in contact centers or to facilitate collaboration among geographically dispersed workgroups on a collaboration platform.

Customer care analytics specialists, like Nexidia, CallMiner, Verint and others have developed proprietary approaches to detect patterns, tag and analyze conversations. More recently a firm called HarQen was chartered specifically to treat spoken words as information assets. Its core product line, Symposia, captures and stores the audio from telephone calls and conference calls and allows participants or other listeners to tag or annotate conversations and share them with others. They have developed use cases for human resources to support interviews, performance reviews and the like. But the broader applications for company-wide and global deployments span a wide variety of collaboration efforts in sales, marketing, customer support or product development.

Today, speech analytics can be a complex and expensive proposition. In some cases it involves capture, transcription, tagging, analytics and reporting. In others it is pure pattern recognition, where the core technologies detect recurring utterances or find a set of predefined phrases (like detecting the hashtag “#FAIL” in a Tweet). By 2015, it will be routine to treat spoken words as just another set of unstructured data which can be put under an analytic lens in order to support specified objectives.

Advent of true “self” service: When you put these the above-mentioned technologies together, you have the foundation for smartphone-based services that are highly responsive to individual end-users. Ideally they can distinguish between background noise and spoken words, they can detect activate programs when a “wake-up word” is uttered, they can also distinguish between the voice of their owner and others and then bring pre-loaded preferences, account numbers, historical activities, loyalty programs and other personal data or PII (personally identifiable information) to bear on the task at hand.

Modern CRM and “social CRM” systems give the appearance of understanding intent, but it is largely the product of well-informed guess work, relying on data and metadata provided by customers or third-parties. By contrast, services that adhere to the “Smartphone+cloud paradigm can offer true “self-service.” For example, a smartphone app from French auto insurer Groupama (called “Groupama toujour la” or Groupama Always There) uses the iPhone’s screen as a visual display of agent queues and enables policyholders to indicate the purpose of the call and elect to stay on hold or schedule a call-back.

During the past few years, individual customers have been provided with tools to shorten the time it takes to get to a human when calling the companies with which they want to carry out business. Fonolo, Lucyphone and, more recently Hold Free are each taking different approaches to empowering phone-based customers. By 2015, we can foresee self-service more use cases and deployments that enable mobile subscribers to use their smartphones to take greater control of what personal data they would like to share, with whom they want to share it and their terms and conditions for how friends or the companies they are doing business with can make their info available to others.

Add a speech recognition and natural language understanding and you can see how an individual might say “I’m hungry” and have that two word utterance interpreted properly, and Siri-like results returned. Something like “The next available reservation at your favorite restaurant is at 6:30 PM. Should I make a reservation for you? Or would you like to invite someone else to join you?”

The technologies that are destined to survive and thrive are those that support highly personalized, conversational interactions that culminate in a transaction or other tangible result. This should be the prevailing definition of “self service.” In the near term, enterprises are spending billions of dollars on “Big Data,” business intelligence and analytics resources. Ironically, “Enterprise Mobility” is a close second based on research conducted by the likes of IBM. Our own research, to be published in January, shows that a majority of executives in large enterprises don’t have a defined strategy for managing all the data and metadata generated by mobile customers. When they do, they will also do a much better job of hearing and responding to their true wants, needs and preferences, as well as intent.

The customer care pendulum will swing away from the enterprise’s CRM system as a “customer interaction hub” to a more distributed system where individuals are at the center of their own self-service system.

Not too long ago, the problems associated with supporting mission critical communications functions could be knocked with an NOC (Networks Operations Center). That’s the futuristic control room that carriers like AT&T or Verizon or hosted services providers like West, Voxeo, Tellme, FirstData Voice and others would showcase to customers, clients, prospects or analysts on tours. On the front wall would be a map of the U.S. or World, usually with a multiplicity of status indicators. A spider’s web of green lines showed communications paths. Green, yellow or red dots showing network endpoints. Scrolling text would provide details on network status.

But these NOCs were customarily one dimensional. They showed “voice” traffic over fixed lines or “trunked up” traffic over fiber networks. That’s because service levels could be largely met by monitoring the performance of a limited number of network providers, primarily long-distance carriers. This is no longer so when communications between enterprises and individuals can originate from any number of devices and cross so many network boundaries. All an individual wants when communicating with a business is a reliable connection. There is little concern about or visibility into whether a link is analog, digital, switched, VoIP or a combination of all of the above. Nor can one predict whether the underlying medium is optical fiber or the airwaves, over-the-top or through the switches.

Almost two years ago, I penned an opinion piece called “Five 9’s Fuggedaboutit!” In it I suggested that the service provider world should get off its high-horse regarding reliability in order to let end-users define the level of performance that they find acceptable. I pointed out that Twitter users tolerate the “Fail Whale” and those folks who use voicemail-to-text transcription have grown accustomed to strange renderings of spoken words (they’ve even made it into a game).

In spite of my glib treatment of performance issues, “network assurance” is a discipline and business opportunity that Opus Research has tagged as “vital” in the IP-driven, multi-channel and multimodal world of self-service and customer care. West is dealing with it by acquiring a firm that has demonstrated high-reliability across multiple B2C (business to customer, like outbound alerts) and C2B (customer-to-Business, like inbound, toll-free) channels. We’ll be covering many more initiatives that address “service levels” in the era of Conversational Commerce in the coming year.

By September 2011, Face It was ready to come out from under the radar. Doing business as Hold-Free Networks, it experienced a highly successful launch at Demo Fall 2011. As CEO Lance Fried explained to us, the company followed a very structured launch cycle. We spent year one developing the software platform; year two launching the pilots and now, in year three, we’re live!” There are five pilots underway. They can’t be formally named yet but the company has been targeting airlines, insurance companies, financial institutions, technology companies and other companies whose high-volume contact centers are prone to putting inbound callers on hold or otherwise sending out the signal that “you’re call really isn’t that important to us.”

From Opus Research’s point of view, the application and platform offers significant elements of any large firm’s “mobile strategy” as well as initiatives to make customer care more conversational. It takes advantage of the data communications and processing features of a smartphone, tablet or other mobile devices to leverage the investment that firms have already made in information infrastructure that supports multi-channel contact centers which now embrace social media, inbound communications (toll-free, email, chat), outbound calling and social media. There are even plans to include biometric authentication (including voice biometrics) to provide strong authentication when a company needs assurance that the individual receiving an outbound call or alert is, indeed, the person whom the company intends to reach.

In addition to this advanced speaker verification, Hold-Free differentiates itself by providing a suite of services that major brands can offer that give greater degrees of control to their smartphone-toting clients. These include “intelligent call back,” giving a smartphone owner the ability to see when an agent or specialist will be available and scheduling a callback and “Secure Messaging” to deliver outbound messages or alerts according to an enterprise customer’s business rules.

Hold-Free’s offerings are “cloud-based.” Fees are charged based on usage on a “Software as a Service” basis. Sales efforts initially target large companies in North America. In addition to its selection for “launch” at Demo, Hold-Free earned the “Hottest in Show” award at the CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association) Enterprise & Applications Convention in San Diego last month.

This simple tactic seems almost self-evident as people discover how to use mobile apps or Web sites to get information from airlines, insurance companies, hotel chains, retailers and others. Indeed, there is not a business of any size that has not started to pursue a “mobile strategy” or at least put out their first app for the iPhone.

But the product planners at Genesys have observed that most mobile efforts are only beginning to incorporate all the knowledge and resources baked into the company’s customer service and contact center fabric. What’s more, only a handful have made it easier for customers to use their smartphones to “escalate” their issues by initiating or transferring their conversation to the right resource (be it an IVR, Web site or customer service agent) without leaving their app or having to re-establish their identity and the general purpose of context of the call.

From a functional point of view, Genesys wants corporate customers and developers to recognize three sets of best practices. The first on the list is “Contact Me” addresses the way that phone calls can be integrated in a smartphone app, including call initiation (click-to-call), that uses the smartphone app’s intelligence to deliver the context of the call or, if it makes more sense, detect the availability of an agent and schedule a callback.

Second set of best practices, “Connect Me,” address is the result of the integration of smartphone-based processing to leverage Genesys IWD (intelligent Workload Distribution) and Conversation Manager. Its purpose is to put mobile customers in touch with the right resource over their choice of communications modes: voice, text or Chat.

Genesys’ third set of best practices surround “Know Me.” This is where Genesys will help its customers take advantage of the smartphone’s ability to authenticate its owner and create the sort of trusted communications link required to deliver highly personalized customer service. Under the “Integrated Mobile Customer Care Apps” umbrella expect to see deep integration of Genesys 8 (the company’s core call routing and customer interaction manager), IWD, Conversation Manager and UC Connect.

Given the level of interest and preliminary effort that Opus Research is observing as companies build their “mobile strategies,” adoption of the Genesys approach could be quite fast. We’ve already seen precursor products at Groupama, the French insurance company. Leading firms in banking, travel, insurance and telecommunications will not be far behind as they move past their first mobile apps to this, more integrated, more empowering approach.

Emily Yellin, who moderated the Webcast, lays the foundation for an informative set of essays. One of her core observations is, “Companies are finally starting to realize that customer service creates unique opportunities to make their products and services better, their customers, happier, and their bottom lines healthier.” This is a very important first step toward creating the sort of engagement model that promotes better interactions between and among companies, their customers and their prospects.

The document has viewpoints from articulate representatives from several disciplines, spanning CRM, public relations, customer care and customer advocacy. It is well worth the read.

The survey results represent the most recent, but by no means the harshest, criticism of IVRs as platforms for customer care. As summarized in the press release, “On an ease-of-use scale, IVR systems scored lower than any of the other service options and was the only option perceived as difficult to use.” Perhaps as a result, only 15% of respondents chose IVRs as their preferred service option, making it the least preferred of all candidates.

The survey has led to substantive discussion of the quality of care across multiple channels and at various points in an individuals journey of discovery to support their efforts to find the companies they want to carry out business with and the products and services that deserve their loyalty. Another way to interpret the survey results is that IVRs, such as they are, are only suitable in about 15% of the instances where an individual seeks specific results. They may want a simple readout of an account balance, the status of a claim or details of a trip itinerary, or (ironically) they may want an organic way to discover and get routed to the right agent or assistant in a large business organization.

Dr. Christian Dugast, a veteran speech consultant with design experience at Philips, Nuance and VoiceObjects, pointed out in this very thoughtful blog post that the relative decline in popularity for IVR (and perhaps voice conversations in general) coincides with the rise of text and written input. He points out the obvious differences between voice-based and written communications but, more importantly, he notes that individuals have at least two “modes” of communications to carry out. In their primary mode, they want to impart emotion, be able to interrupt others and get a message across. It is more suitable to voice (but not necessarily IVR). In the secondary mode, they want to get results and reach an intended goal with the least friction. This is where support of written input counts, but so does the use of speech-enabled IVRs for intelligent routing of a call to the proper person or other resource in a company.

Voice or IVR may be preferred in only 15% of interactions between individuals and the companies with whom they carry out business. Yet, when you take into account the entire journey from search, through discovery, to consultation, to selection and finally to transaction completion and support, a (voice) phone call is involved in more than 85% of those relationships. Not surprisingly, these calls take place when the caller needs to vent, express emotion or conduct the sort of social engineering exercises that have worked in the past. If they have had a bad experience with IVRs (even speech enabled ones) at a time of high-stress and high-emotion, it is bound to be played out again, unless the system is tuned to recognize an issue quickly and move to resolve it either through automated resources or rapid delivery to an live agent with authority to resolve the problem.

The problem is seldom, if ever, one of technology, alone. As Dimension Data’s annual benchmark study revealed this year, top management has come to realize that providing a better user experience trumps “saving money” in the contact center – “60% of organizations said they placed more importance on the customer experience than cost reduction, with 41% reporting they recognized the value of providing customer choice via multiple self-service channels.”

The benchmarking study also reveals why the incidence of voice based communications has declined as a percentage of interactions. Contact centers have become “customer management centers” – a scary thought in the world of conversational commerce – “with 71% already handling Internet-based interactions, 14% managing SMS interactions, and 36% offering web chat.”

Chances in mix and frequency of interaction types are fundamental and irreversible. As voice-based interactions lose share to Web visits, text-messages and IM, it is more important than ever that the “voice channel” provide a pleasing (and successful) experience to results-oriented callers, irrespective of whether those interactions involve automated speech recognition, voice response or a simple pass-through to a live agent.

These innovations place contact center agents (both of the brick-and-mortar or “home agent” varieties) at the center of the conversations between companies and their customers at times that are crucial to promote a positive relationship. Today real-time, free-form world of customer interaction is slightly at odds with the locked down, structured world of workforce optimization (WFO) and key performance indicators that contact center managers have come to depend on.

Join me, John Hernandez of Cisco Systems, customer service strategy specialist Barry Dalton and journalist/author Emily Yellin as we delve into the issues shaping the social contact center.

Register here, and learn more about the topics we’ll be discussing as we describe the technologies that are already in service to promote better conversations between companies and their customers.

Yet this year, RightNow started laying the foundation for building a value proposition for technologies that provide good customer service. To wit: 85% of respondents said they would pay a premium over the standard price of goods or services in order to get better customer service. There are lots of other insights provided about the amplifying effect of customer forums, microblogs (Twitter) and Facebook sites. For a personal take on the impact of social media and its potential to tarnish or burnish a company’s brand, as well as thoughts on the impact on both customer care and marketing, have a look at this post on Greg Sterling’s Screenwerk blog.

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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