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.

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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.

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.

As illustrated in the thumbnail sketch that leads into this post, Service Force is a cloud-base instantiation of all of Salesforce.com’s resources optimized to support a company’s customer service reps. Chatter acts as one of the points of ingress, but there are others that can be custom built as a customer portal, a vehicle for displaying dynamic customer profiles, a resource for carrying out business intelligence and analytic functions as the foundation of customer care activities. In the spirit of RC, Teletech clients will be able to retain and leverage elements of their existing customer care infrastructure while contracting with Teletech to make sure that they can integrate activity from mobile devices or via social networks.

Working with Salesforce.com is not unexplored territory for Teletech. In August 2010 the company hosted software that comprised the infrastructure for a service called the Customer Interaction Cloud, which was jointly offered by Cisco and Salesforce.com. The BPO specialist has experience with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Jigsaw, Force.com and Database.com and is prepared to integrate these capabilities into its clients customer care fabric.

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.

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.

According to coverage in the Australian press Salmat, which handles over 100 million inbound and outbound calls each year on behalf of its clients, had “scoured the world” for a new solution provider. Its vendor selection started with 10 prospective winners but, in the end, was winnowed down to Avaya and one other (unnamed) candidate.

We’ll presume that Genesys, as incumbent platform provider, was considered as a candidate from the start. Indeed, it had shown an impressive array of enhancements to its core Customer Interaction Manager (CIM), including the introduction of a Conversation Manager to support “intelligent” handling of multi-channel and multi-modal interactions. Genesys also has a longer history of hosted implementations of CIM as well as the use of the Genesys Voice Portal (and its precursor VoiceGenie platform) for applications involving voice-based authentication.

The transition to a totally new platform is, to the best of our understanding, something of a rip-and-replace operation during which business continuity could be something of a challenge. This is especially true because Avaya, has had a love/hate relationship with “hosted” or “cloud-based” implementations. The move to IP-based implementations provided some initiatives toward hosted renditions of IP-based ACD and Contact Center resources. According to literature, both Telecom Italia and Sprint have offered hosted renditions of Avaya’s IP-based call processing resources.

However, to the best of our knowledge, Avaya has yet to bless or integrate voice biometric authentication into its IP-based Contact Center or its Experience Portal. By contrast, Salmat has made a point of differentiating itself by offering caller authentication as a service to financial institutions, healthcare providers, telecom service providers and government agencies in Australia and New Zealand. We’re anxious to see how smoothly the re-hosting takes place in the coming year. And we want to welcome Avaya into the community of voice biometrics-based solution providers.