I’ve been playing around with Google Wave for a few weeks now. Now that Google has expanded its “Wave Preview” to include 100,000 users, it has gained visibility and attracted a number of noteworthy innovation. We’ve already noted an “Wave extension” from BT’s Ribbit that makes conference calling easy to initiate among a Wave community. But This YouTube video from SalesForce.com provides a glimpse into the future of customer care with a use case that involving technical support for a wireless subscriber.

For those of you who have not seen the Wave “home screen” before, the video gives you a glimpse. Warning: It involves learning a new set of terminology where interactions among “buddies”, “friends”, or “associates” are organized into “Waves” and each Wave is composed of a number of “blips.” In the SalesForce video, you see the Wave “home screen”. It resembles a Web-based email client but has several attributes of a social network, IM client and conferencing utility.

In the use case illustrated in the SalesForce.com demo, we’re looking at the home screen of a wireless customer seeking technical support by initiating a “Wave” with a ‘bot that is operated by the carrier. This is a glimpse of the future of Web-based, multi-modal self service, illustrating the benefits of tight integration between self-service logic and “cloud-based” CRM resources. Bear in mind that the business logic and “dialogues” generated by the system to support the “robot” could also be rendered as spoken words in an IVR, which is a capability that SalesForce.com has already demonstrated in conjunction with “voice-in-the-cloud” specialists like this offer from Angel.com.

Wave’s roll out is a signal moment in Recombinant Telephony. So far it has been received with very mixed reviews, with one luminary (Robert Scoble) calling it “the worst of email and IM rolled into one.” I disagree. While the “Preview” has a number of flaws — discovering new contacts and cool extensions is difficult, and it is hard to tell when you are actively engaged with a fellow collaborator — it has inspired a tremendous amount of creativity and will, over the next few years, prove valuable for collaborative communications, customer care and combinations of the two.

Categories: Articles

Tags: customer care, Recombinant Telephony, Collaboration, Google Wave