West Corporation’s pending acquisition of HyperCube brings to light a very important “ground truth” in the world of Conversational Commerce. Just as “accuracy” is crucial to speech recognition and natural language understanding, “reliability” is the foundation of network performance and, therefore, low-latency cloud-based or hybrid applications. HyperCube, whose specialty is variously described as “tandem switching,” “toll-free origination services”, and “neutral interconnection services” fills an important gap in the multichannel service delivery fabric. It is so important that West has determined that now is the time to take ownership of its facilities, functions and hire its personnel in the interest of staying ahead of its competition in providing hosted communications and network infrastructure solutions to manage or support critical communications functions.

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.

Categories: Articles

Tags: customer care, Contact Centers, hosted services, acquisitions, network operations, West Corporation