1. So You Say You Can UC
Although every communications and professional services firm openly touts support of unified communications (UC), only three can deliver on the promise of true UC. Microsoft, emanating from its presence on nearly every desktop; IBM, from its position of strength in the connective fabric called middleware; and Cisco, leveraging its dominance of broadband IP-based routing and transport. Oracle has enormous potential to play in this area with strengths relating to its dominance of relational database management and CRM, but magnum leader Larry Ellison is skeptical of the whole UC concept … and he’s probably right.

Controversy swirls around whether the move to UC is driven by collaboration, momentum towards service oriented architectures or enabling business processes. Regardless of the underlying impetus, the real driving force behind UC, thus far, is the revenue it generates from professional services. In 2009, UC will be revealed as the “ERP of the new millennium” — an often ill-defined concept known for launching long-term projects that consume a high percentage of a firm’s IT budget.

2. Long Live Contextual Communications
While “UC for UC’s sake” is a bad idea, implementing UC-based solutions to suit the expressed and implicit needs of end-users is a different story.

The fuzzy promises surrounding UC drives investment in broadband IP-based networks, wireless infrastructure and increased processing power at the edge of each network. That makes it possible to gather and process more information about end-users than ever before as well as monitor, analyze and refine interactions more efficiently and affordably. The result will be implementations (such as Genesys’ “Intelligent Customer Front Door”- iCFD), interaction analytics, identity management and conversational speech greatly improving and extending the breadth and quality of the user experience over the phone.

3. Power to the People!
In 2009, the concept of “vendor relationship management” (VRM) will gain broader traction. The idea encompasses tools and services that enable an individual to exert control over terms and conditions that govern interactions with merchants and service providers. Its name is no accident. As one of its major developers observes, it is the result of “flipping” Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems so that individuals and firms can be on more equal terms while carrying out business.

In many ways the iCFD meets the goals of VRM quite elegantly. It creates a mechanism whereby a site visitor or caller is greeted by people or resources that already “know” much about their transaction history and can impute the purpose of the interaction quickly and efficiently.

4. Towards a Multi-Modal, Multi-Channel and Mobile Portals
It has become trite to say that firms profit by offering their customers and stake holders the best user experience possible. As such, a modern-day cottage industry for UI (user interface) designers and UX (user experience) specialists has been created. In 2009, in order to achieve the best user experience possible, the community is extending the well-understood and accepted aspects of a quality customer experience to multiple channels, including the Web, traditional phones and, more frequently, the growing population of wireless devices. This calls for coordination and context-aware use of email, text messaging and voice over the most appropriate channel.

5. Open Sourcing the Way to Cost-Effective, Quality Care
These times are destined to dictate affordable solutions to age-old problems for speech application development and customer care. As it is with applications servers and middleware (Apache), application development environments (Eclipse) and has migrated to desktop portals (AJAX), so will it be for business intelligence and reporting (Pentaho) and for office productivity (OpenOffice). In all cases, the objective is to set up a code base for developers and do-it-yourselfers to share and improve upon. As a result, solutions that could have cost tens or hundreds of thousands are brought to market for a tenth of the price. History shows that some of the difference can be invested in innovation and personalization.

6. PS: We Love You … (Professional Services, That Is)
This is both a curse and a blessing. Many solutions in Contextual Communications require significant customization before they can be fully deployed. On the good side, this creates revenue opportunities for the system integrators and solutions providers who rely on a good “time and materials” engagement to make their numbers. On the bad side, the situation often pits technology providers (who have done their best to deliver affordable products) against their channel partners in the battle for high margin services. The confusion that ensues with end-users and customers is not destined to abate after 2008.

7. Big Time Role Reversals: Small and All That
For technology providers, small businesses have always posed a problem when it comes to profitability. They tend to be extremely cost-conscious while, at the same time, very needful when it comes to customer care and technical support. Yet many large firms enter 2009 in the wake of major budget and staff cuts. They have become the needy, cost-conscious ones (even though they have already qualified for all the volume discounts on “commodity” software and servers).

In 2009, small to medium-sized firms are poised to leverage the new e-business infrastructure to their advantage. Just as Zappos, eBay and Amazon attained leadership positions in their respective businesses in the earlier part of this millennium, they were positioned to define the innovative ways to carry out e-business and establish a major presence on the Web long before their brick-and-mortar counterparts could catch up.

8. Somehow They Manage
Third-party managed service providers have a big role to play in the coming year. Opus Research has documented the heightened level of sophistication that businesses of all sizes are showing as they evaluate their options for providing speech-based self service and multi-model customer care. In a growing number of cases, they turn to providers of hosted, managed, or “on-demand” services to ease the transition to global, broadband IP-based networks and to avail themselves of the latest tools and technologies for developing, deploying, monitoring and refining applications over time.

9. It’s a Foreign Affair
In spite of frequent discussions of the “backlash” against offshore handling of customer care calls and interactions, a high percentage of interactions continue to be handled overseas. This is especially true as the end-users define chat, IM or email as their preferred mode of communication. Termination is basically transparent and a growing number of applications blur the line between “automated” versus “assisted” service. In 2009, human intervention and assistance will continue to be the norm when it comes to phone-based applications. Automated systems conduct call answering and triage, but very often it takes live agents to do the important disambiguation and transcription.

In the long run, large-scale applications require higher levels of automation to guarantee viability. But, in 2009, the near-term solution is to turn to agents in lower wage areas to carry out important service assurance functions.

10. Finally, Distributed Speech is a Reality
In 2009, with major assists from the giants of mobile, multimodal interactions (such as, alphabetically, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Nuance) wireless subscribers will benefit from elegant deployments of distributed speech processing. It took the advent of 3G wireless networks and “all-you-can-eat” data plans to make the idea practical, but many applications merely capture utterances on the handset and then digitize and transmit as data to large servers elsewhere on the network. This is at the route of more dynamic applications that support search, shopping, voicemail-to-text transcription and, yes, multi-modal, assisted services.

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