Greetings from Emeritus World. It’s been eleven months since I formally retired as Lead Analyst at Opus Research. I’ve been conforming to obligatory retiree stereotypes, including baking sourdough (and keeping my starter, Vim, alive), practicing piano, long walks with my wife, and, on most days, spending hours bringing my email inboxes down to “zero unread”.

What I haven’t been up to… and this has been a total surprise… is any long- or medium-form writing. My written output has been restricted to comments on social networks and text-message exchanges. Today, I’ve been moved to change that pattern by a news story shared with me by Ken Herron at Strolid, a New England-based specialist in Business Development Center (BDC) operations for automobile dealerships. It was issued in conjunction with Frontline Group, a contact center and business process outsourcing specialist based in Washington State.

The gist of the announcement is that the two companies have formed an alliance to showcase the power of an emerging standard for aggregating, transporting, and sharing conversation intelligence called [drum roll] vCons (short for “virtualized conversations”). The detailed specifications for vCons are in the late stages of draft form at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the group responsible for coordinating production of the international technical standards that brought us the Internet (http), VoIP (SIP), and file sharing (FTP), among others.

I don’t mention those standards lightly. It is my belief that vCons is the framework for handling conversation intelligence that Conversational Commerce has been waiting for because it recognizes the value of  the words that we humans say, text, or type while conversing with agents, IVR systems, AI models we use every day. It makes our words portable (across all the systems required to complete our tasks), persistent (even permanent if required for compliance or regulatory reasons), and protected (only shared if I want them to be).

Proven Value for Auto Dealerships

For those wondering why a contact center outsourcer would ally with a BDC specialist to support a government-sanctioned support line, the answer lies in the topography of the systems that support sales and customer management for automobile dealerships, as well as the “customer journey” associated with shopping for, purchasing, and servicing a car. Think of it as an ongoing conversation that takes place over time and span multiple channels, including web searches, text messaging, and email, as well as voice calls. Leads are shared across dealerships. Promises are made by sales people. Follow-ups are required spanning sales and service.

Things gets complicated unless there’s a distributed system that establishes and enforces the rules and protocols associated with capturing and sharing the conversations (in all forms), along with metadata (like customer preferences, timestamps, location, and customer ID). vCons is the emerging standard for capturing all these conversation data in a form that supports triggers (like calls to action by sales or service personnel), queries (like “provide a list of customers who are due for tire rotation”), and data management (like “please comply with Jane Doe’s request to be forgotten”).

These features and functions are deployed for Strolid’s clients and deployed as Strolid’s vConserver platform. They are also the basis for the highly detailed specifications being finalized for the IETF-endorsed standard. They are also the key elements embedded into the Frontline Connect contact center infrastructure to enable 211 agents, called “navigators”, as they field urgent requests from callers, refer them to the proper government agency or public utility, and then follow up to make sure that those agencies fulfilled their commitments.

211 Services: An Ideal Proving Ground

211 is highly-used cousin of other three digit services in the United States and parts of Canada. The 911 Emergency is probably the most recognized, providing direct connection to police and medical care dispatchers. Alternatives include 311 for “non-emergency calls” for government services, like reporting potholes, learning the hours for government offices, or filing other complaints. 511 provides traffic conditions and transit info.

211, by contrast, is a service that was introduced in Atlanta, GA, in 1997 through a partnership of the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta and the local Public Service Commission. Today it is designated by the FCC as the nationwide number for accessing community information and referral services offered 24 hours-a-day through text messaging as well as voice. Contact center agents, called “navigators”, field the calls and refer individuals to essential community service providers. Those services span a multiplicity of public resources and businesses that span:

• Basic needs: food pantries, housing assistance, utility bill help, clothing, shelters.
• Health resources: mental health counseling, substance abuse programs, affordable healthcare.
• Employment support: job training, unemployment benefits, transportation to work.
• Family support: childcare, after-school programs, elder care, parenting resources.
• Crisis services: domestic violence, disaster recovery, suicide prevention.

Based on numbers compiled by the United Way, 211 service providers received 16.8 million requests for help, including calls, texts, and Web chats. These interactions triggered 18 million referrals to local resources.

The sensitive nature of the calls and the need to share content across multiple organization calls out for a technology that captures content as well as metadata associated with texts and voice conversations. It also puts a premium on the tools and technologies for protecting each individual’s privacy, including the ability to limit what can be shared and the right to be forgotten.

These features and functions are core to the vCons draft specifications. Here is the link to Strolid’s description of the vCon standard crafted for executives at automobile dealerships. Its 3-word description for vCons, “PDF for conversations”, provides the mental image of a sharable document but, in my opinion, does not do justice to the value of managing the terms and conditions governing how the content can be searched, sorted, extracted, analyzed, and otherwise leveraged to help meet personal and business objectives.

Foundational to Conversational Commerce

vCons are the brainchild of Strolid’s CTO Thomas McCarthy-Howe. A few of my readers will remember as the co-author of a report entitled “The Recombinant Telephony Ecosystem: Voice Mashups and the Telco API” which Opus Research published in 2009. Two years before that, in a post called “Make Way for Mashups” Opus’s analysts described “opportunities to bring together content, information and status indicators from a variety of sources to deliver utility and novelty to phone users.” We also said, “the most successful market participants are those that create revenue opportunities for their technology and marketing partners.”

Often, lack of “real world” implementations hamper the adoption of emerging telecommunications standards. Strolid has already demonstrated how vCons are instrumental to automobile dealerships who employ it as a platform for capturing conversational content and simplifying the process of extracting insights that have direct impact on sales. In the context of 211 services, The alliance  between Strolid and Frontline is poised to have a direct impact on the quality of care that navigators provide callers, and also will provide measurable improvements in agent onboarding, resource allocation, and scheduling. It is a prime example of the sort of partnership required to build a new ecosystem around vCons.

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