The announcement attracted little attention primarily because Verizon business chose to market the service as a slight repositioning of the five-year old IP Web Center. As they explain, “Unlike the original offering, which requires IP connectivity, customer contact agents using Web Center Voice can use a wired or mobile phone or Internet-connected PC to place and receive calls across the public switched telephone network or the Internet (voice over IP).”

This announcement stands in stark contrast to AT&T’s aggressive marketing of Hosted Integrated Contact Services which we describe here. In fact, the link that is embedded in the press release goes to a landing page in the Verizon Business Web site that describes a full-range of “contact center solutions” with nary a mention of Web Center Voice. Entering the term “Web Center Voice” in a search box on the page yielded an equally generic description of the IP Web Center offering.

Web Center Voice is an example of Recombinant Telephony, but it has gone slightly awry. Communities of telephone application developers our building speech front ends for Amazon EC2, Microsoft’s Azure, SalesForce.com, Voxeo and others. We had expected more sizzle from Verizon Business for what has the potential to be a very meaty steak.

Today Voxeo revealed that the IMified platform is able to monitor Twitter “Tweets” for the mention of an enterprise’s brand, products or services and respond in kind. More likely, the Twitter-bots will detect when customers or prospects have questions, comments or purchase intents that can be addressed by live agents. If it is a partially formed query, the bots can elicit more detail before bringing the agent into the mix. For instance, if it spots a complaint about a flat-screen TV from a major manufacturer, it can ask the disgruntled customer to provide the model number and date of purchase before engaging a technician in what could be an expensive trouble-shooting exercise.

The beauty of Twitter, according to Dan York, Voxeo’s Director of Conversations, is that it has the potential to take the IVR (interactive voice response) unit out of the critical path and enable customers to define the way that they want to communicate with their vendors. It passively “listens” and then responds in kind.

It is early days for the new platform and Voxeo’s mission initially is to put tools in the hands of developers that enable them to add Twitter to the self-service mix. That means providing code to download, developer workshops and sample bots to illustrate the value of the new service. Use cases will follow and, given Twitter’s high profile of late, we expect there to be a lot of interest.

York sees the greatest value to gravitate toward national or global companies who are looking for ways to scale up efforts to monitor and respond to the fast-growing stream of Tweets. As he observes, “If we can answer the questions before they get to a human, we are providing better and more cost effective customer service.” Voxeo started with IVR and then added all the other media and provide ways for application developers to enable their clients to interact with customers in the manner that they choose.

In addition, IBM immediately became first-among-equals by leveraging their long-standing partnership into a marketing channel for the combination of UC-Connect and the SameTime-based “UC-squared” (unified communications and collaboration) marketing initiative by Big Blue. For IBM, it marks the fruition of long-standing plans to extend contact center utilities to knowledge workers through-out a business enterprise through the SameTime interface. Thus their desktops can display “screen pops” that enable them to preview key information about a call and the caller and, in effect, “bid” on whether to accept or reject it. They will also be able to read or write notes or update customer records without exiting their SameTime-based “portal”.

I’ll be writing more about the capabilities and tools integrated into UC Connect in a forthcoming advisory. It is a suite of software that has evolved to accommodate both the productivity concerns of contact center managers, and the privacy concerns of resident knowledge workers. Agents in more formal contact center workstations are able to view the status and skill set of anonymous experts or branch office workers. They can then click a button to contact the most appropriate person via a pre-selected mode of communications (chat, IM or phone). Rather than displaying available by name, the Genesys CIM platform abstracts these resources’ identities into skill sets and and current status. This prevents agents from becoming overly dependent upon any particular expert.

UC-Connect will be featured at the Genesys G-Force gathering in Barcelona, June 9-11.