Every once in a while, a vendor comes along with not only innovative products but innovative ideas on how to help their channel partners be successful. Communicado wins my praise for “getting it” when it comes to innovative programs for resellers! Last week, they announced a new program, Quick Start Dealer Program to enable VARs to quickly and efficiently remotely manage their customers’ converged networks.

“Oh sure”, you think. “If we take on another product we’re once again faced with ramp up time and money out of our pocket for training and demo equipment.” Yea for Communicado, who claims that the comprehensive program “provides resellers with the necessary tools to drive significant new streams of revenue without lengthy ramp time or large capital expense”.

At the UC Summit in Scottsdale last month, Kerry Shih, founder of Communicado, talked to the resellers twice - once on the secrets that every entrepreneur needs to know and then later on how to get started in unified communications by taking small steps instead of trying to run the whole marathon at once. The message that I get from Kerry is that he thinks outside the box - and that type of thinking shows in Communicado’s products and programs. How refreshing! And certainly worth watching if you’re a reseller!

Tags: UC Information by Pam Avila
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Nancy Jamison and I just finished up a new study on UC productivity benefits, and will be presenting some of the key findings during a VoiceCon webinar on Wednesday, June 4, 2p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT, sponsored by Genesys Telecommunications Labs. You’ll get to hear first hand about our findings – some of which were expected and obvious, some not so obvious (see my VoiceCon eWeekly newsletter about the “hidden” benefits of UC).

For the study, we interviewed real UC end users who use UC in their day-to-day jobs, examining how they use UC in their daily workflow, and how UC has made an impact. We spoke with executives/managers, operations (including IT and engineering), human resources, and marketing users to gain insights into if and how UC has made them more productive and effective at their jobs. They unanimously agreed that UC has made a critical impact on their productivity – in fact, 100% of those surveyed said UC has positively impacted the way they do business.

During the webinar, we’ll discuss the study’s key findings, and break down the results based on the ways in which UC helps workers, and then by job category. Jim Kraeutler of Genesys will also discuss how he uses UC to help him do his job more effectively.

The full study will be available on Friday, May 30 – check the UCStrategies.com home page under “In the Spotlight.”

To register for the webinar, go to https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=110311&sessionid=1&key=ACC1F5D9D5C310F94CE52CEEE627FF12&sourcepage=register

Tags: UC Information, Unified Communications Information by Blair Pleasant
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It all starts in the contact center.

That’s my contention anyway. When you look for the obvious launch point for unified communications in the enterprise, it has to be the contact center. Almost all discussions about UC in the enterprise include a mention of Presence, the UC concept that provides users with an overview of the availability and status of other knowledge workers in the organization and a means to efficiently tap into those resources as necessary.

If you think about it, the contact center is the most logical place for the initial use of Presence and UC in the enterprise. The goal of most, if not all, customer contact centers is first call resolution. In other words, the folks in charge of running customer service generally prefer to have a customer issue resolved in one call. There are two reasons for this, the first of which is customer satisfaction. As a consumer or customer, aren’t you generally happier if the company you call can resolve your issue in one call without repeated call transfers or without asking you to call back in order to speak with someone else later? Everyone’s time is valuable these days and no one likes to have to make repeated phone calls to get a question answered or an issue resolved.

Presence would allow an agent the ability to pull in enterprise resources from outside the contact center in order to resolve a customer call. Agents would be able to identify which internal subject matter experts might be available and the best way to reach them. While still engaging the customer, contact center agents would have the additional resources at their fingertips to keep the customer happy or at least resolve an issue without repeated call transfers or callbacks.

The second reason customer service professionals strive for first call resolution in the contact center is cost. Each time a customer service agent picks up the phone, it costs the contact center in terms of salary, benefits, etc., and if they’re paying for an agent to address the same problem with the same customer more than once, that is usually money down the drain. UC in the contact center makes absolute sense from a cost savings perspective. Here’s where we run into our conundrum, though.
If you’ve been around the contact center long enough you’ve undoubtedly heard the discussions about the strategic importance of the customer service center in terms of its value to operational success and profitability. To hear some people talk you’d believe that the business universe revolved around the contact center. If you haven’t been around the contact center and heard this talk, trust me when I tell you that it’s mostly lip service.
The truth is, the contact center is as important as all the pundits claim it is but the fact is that most businesses look at the contact center as a cost center. As you probably know, it is generally very difficult to get a business to invest in a cost center. Thus our conundrum: an investment in UC on the contact center would undoubtedly lead to cost savings and a tangible return on investment, but there is a general reluctance to invest in cost centers such as the contact center.
I think we may be able to find our way out of this potential quagmire if the industry in general follows the lead of the small percentage of companies who really do view their customer service function as a strategic advantage or differentiator and will invest in UC in order to provide their agents with Presence functionality. It’s going to take time and there will still be those executives who will drag their contact centers into the 21^st century kicking, screaming and protesting the whole way.

Any other ideas?

Tags: UC Information by Paul Stockford
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Verint Systems announced that it won a patent suit against Nice Systems, providing the company with vindication and $3.3 million in damages. Here’s a little background – Nice had initiated legal actions against Verint related to patent lawsuits, and Verint then countersued with its own patent infringements against Nice. Without getting into specifics, the patent is about Verint Witness Actionable Solutions’ speech analytics (the suit was initiated before Verint acquired Witness) and covers systems and methods for, among others, analyzing speech to identify, for example, emotion, words, and talk-over.

A federal jury in Atlanta ruled in Verint’s favor, and the next step is for Verint to seek a permanent injunction to “enjoin Nice Systems in the United States from making, using, selling, offering for sale or importing any infringing speech analytics products, including speech analytics offered with Nice SmartCenter, Nice Perform, NiceUniverse and NiceAdvantage.”  Essentially, the jury determined that the Witness patent was valid and infringed upon, and now it goes to the judge to see if Nice can continue to sell these products, which should be decided upon in a couple months.

When I spoke with my friends at Verint Witness Actionable Solutions right after the verdict was announced on Friday, they emphasized that they didn’t initiate the patent lawsuit, but did it only as a response to Nice’s patent infringement suits against Verint/Witness. They noted that Verint has a long history around analytics, and of course they feel good that their R&D team was validated. And then they celebrated with some champagne. Cheers!

Tags: UC Information by Blair Pleasant
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In real-estate its location, location, location, in the UC world I believe it’s process, process process!

First I went to Wikipedia to see if they had a reasonable definition. The Wikipedia definition is “Unified Communications (UC) is a commonly used term for the integration of disparate communications systems, media, devices and applications. This potentially includes the integration of fixed and mobile voice, e-mail, instant messaging, desktop and advanced business applications, Internet Protocol (IP)-PBX, voice over IP (VoIP), presence, voice-mail, fax, audio video and web conferencing, unified messaging, unified voicemail, and white boarding into a single environment offering the user a more complete but simpler experience.”

UC Strategies  defines UC as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes”, a much easier way to comprehend for simpler minds such as mine. Then there is an array of different definitions from Avaya, Cisco, ININ, Mitel, NEC and Nortel, sorry if I left any of my astute colleagues out.

The history of Unified Communications is tied to the evolution of the supporting technology. Unified Communications relies on the Internet Protocol (IP), which also supports e-mail and the World-Wide Web.

But I need to digress for a moment. Do you remember when the telephone company introduced PRI, in 1990? No body including the telephone company knew how to configure it properly, never mind install it correctly. Only through time and effort did PRI finally come to the common enterprise around 1993-1994. What about IVR and CTI? The first CTI was created by IBM in 1987. The problem was nobody knew the in’s and out’s of it. Everything became customer code and it took till 2002-2003 for CTI to be able to show it could work for the everyday enterprise. Read the book, Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A Moore, for a good history of CTI. Well although VoIP has been around 7 plus years, people are still not sure what to do with it. Yes, its here to stay but in order to make UC work you need the VoIP component. But you need other components as well.

Okay that’s all great but why has everyone in the world not jumped all over this? I think they do not know where to start. Everybody has such different needs, are in different stages and have different tools to work with. They do not know how to put the pieces together.

Most enterprise customers truly do not know what they have and what it will take to even consider UC. You do! Develop a tool kit or checklist of what the entry level to look at UC is. This can come from vendors, manufacturers, peers or research. Appraise the customer’s environment against that list. This creates a baseline to work from. We have a customer who is in the media business and across 10 divisions they do not share common email, business process or disciplines. How in the world is some one like that going to implement and benefit from UC with out taking stock?

Work with the client to develop a budget of what it would take to even consider UC in their organization after taking stock. Next determine the business solutions, revenue generation and cost containment opportunities that will make UC a success for that customer. Remember one organizations opportunity is not the same next door. Take the Hispanic customer in the USA. The latest estimates by the US Census Bureau at the time of writing put the US Hispanic population at 42,687,224 or 14.4 percent of the US population. That equates to one person out of every seven in the US being Hispanic. The projection for 2050 is that this will increase to one in four people or 25 percent of the total population. That means that the client wanting to serve the Hispanic customer needs something different then the client who does not, as only one example. The manufacturer client wanting to communicate out on the line has different needs then a retailer.

Third and most importantly develop the process that will be accepted, implemented and must be adhered too by all stakeholders. If this is not done up front it will never get done. There is no rule book on “How to implement UC” out there that I know of yet. Collectively the consultant community has the opportunity to develop a process that could be applied by anyone practice, group or enterprise.

No technology can fix poor people skills, as reported by Paul Stockford recently in the NACC “In Queue” blog or fix bad or non existent process. If you disagree with that theory please call me, I will gladly provide you with a myriad of examples. Even if you agree we want to hear from you.

Tags: UC Information by Samantha Kane
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Having once played extensively on the vendor side of the field, I have empathy for the vendors’ perspective on where consultants fit in their go-to-market equation.  After all, we’re not as easily categorized as the end-user or reseller audiences.  And quantifying our impact on vendor revenues has never proved straightforward.  But we’re here, we’re very much a part of the UC equation, and we’re not going anywhere.  So I offer a few starter anecdotes and tips on how we add value to the enterprise market and how vendors can benefit from our involvement.1.  As an independent UC consultant, our clients expect us to always be on top of the latest “whiz-bang” application or concept. While vendor-marketing buzz may succeed in prompting attention from these end-users, it actually serves as a double edge sword for the consultant community. Often we find that even if we’re not familiar with the whiz-bang’s name de jour, a second look tells us it’s simply a newer version of a familiar application. Yes, manufacturers are incorporating enhanced functionality and features in their rebranding efforts, but in most cases the products are very similar to their predecessors where it counts most to us - in terms of technical requirements and integration issues.  A Marketing ‘de-coding’ tool would save us a lot of time.

2.  Demand for an independent consultant within an enterprise often starts with the CFO.  Many manufacturers and their distributors focus almost exclusively on “soft cost” business cases and (surprisingly), more often than not, these campaigns are effective.  The reasons for success are varied, yet a soft-cost business case often hits a roadblock when a consultant is engaged.  Why is that?  Are consultants not interested in soft costs?  Of course we are, but we are hired to address what the business stakeholders require most - The Bottom Line.  In today’s toughening economic climate, capturing illusive IT dollars requires a solid business case that considers hard and soft dollar returns.  The proof, though, is in the pudding; we follow-through after implementation to prove that the forecasted returns have been achieved, an important step which is often omitted.  Your probability of additional  sales would be greatly improved if you conducted or participated in such post-sales evaluation processes?

3.  Integration is a key driver to achieving returns, yet an area where businesses - and sometimes vendors - lack the necessary skills to evaluate related issues.  We surely don’t write integration code, but we have the expertise and responsibility to ask the hard questions that may otherwise be overlooked.  Can this slow down a sales process?  Yes, but enterprises can only leverage new ways to communicate when installations are successful.  An independent resource and client advocate who assembles the necessary pieces of the UC puzzle increases the likelihood of success for all involved.   Keep us educated on the integration side of house.

Remember, these are not knocks on anyone.  On the contrary, actually, strong working relationships with the consultant community allow us to effectively represent vendor capabilities.   Consultants should not be perceived as a threat, but as an educated avenue that can improve a vendor’s probability of success.  If an enterprise is willing to expend resources on a consultant, this reflects the enterprise’s seriousness to evaluate and invest in improving or optimizing their technology.  At the end of the day, an independent consultant and the vendor are after the same result - a satisfied and referenceable customer who can confidently say they achieved their business objectives.  Let’s keep talking.

Tags: UC Information by Candice Sherman
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Independent consultants (IC) symbiotically aid both the customer and the vendor. We help the customer better understand the vendors, and we help the vendors better understand the customer. So why then do some vendors have such a negative reaction to ICs? That’s a question I am periodically left asking myself, wondering why some vendors resist the use of an IC on a project. I wonder why they don’t seem to understand how the customer>consultant>vendor relationship can benefit all constituencies. I believe vendor resistance to ICs falls into two primary categories. One category I’ll loosely characterize as “friction”, and the second category I’ll call “competition”. This month I’ll focus on the “friction”. The “friction” speaks to the perception some vendors have that ICs sit “between” them and the customer. While not the only objection cited, one of the most common is that an IC may slow the sales cycle. I unapologetically agree with that, as we seek to bring some structure to the project and move it away from the raw “pitch” stage. Yet, there are a number of friction related complaints with which I disagree. A few of the most egregious follow: Looking at the sales cycle example, one should look at the associated opportunity growth. An IC may cause a 60-day opportunity to become a 120-day opportunity. But, that opportunity will likely grow 3, 4, or 5 fold as we help the customer better understand the magnitude of their requirements, and help them better understand why they should invest in the extra capabilities, functions, redundancy, and the like. If you are an investor, wouldn’t you wait an extra two months to increase your return four times over? Sometimes the vendor believes the IC keeps the customer from understanding the “real value” of the vendor solution. In fact, a significant portion of many IC projects involves customer education. We might not always agree with the vendor that something is “special”, but we do educate the customers to help them see the “value” of all their options.

‐ Vendors often forget the ways in which an IC can reduce the vendor’s pre‐sales time expenditure. We help the customer understand and articulate their needs; we help develop designs; we help articulate the customer’s position, their pricing requirements, their service levels requirements, and more. We also often play a crucial role, without which any vendor would be stymied - we help with the internal business case packaging for senior management so that the project actually gets funded.

‐ Customer satisfaction grows if a skilled IC is involved. We work to make the customer understand what they are buying and what they can expect from it, and we develop a clear set of criteria. Furthermore, if the customer is dissatisfied despite the vendor performing as agreed, we seek to recalibrate the customer’s expectations. We actually do push back on the customer as warranted.

‐ ICs are, in military parlance, a “force multiplier”. A vendor can spend one perishable hour with a customer. Or, a vendor could spend an hour with consultant, and see that hour pay dividends at multiple customers. Of course, if you are vendor and you choose to establish an adversarial relationship with the Consultants, then the multiplication may prove problematic for you.

In the end, vendors will be well served recognizing that independent consultants are their allies. Our allegiance is to our clients, but we really do help both parties.

Due next month… the “competitive” resistance

Tags: UC Information by Tom Marsh - Dataflow Management
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One of the many valuable resources at UCStratgies.com is the “Ask an Expert” feature.  Post your question and one of the UC Experts will send a reply with information, suggestions or other support.

For example, about a week ago we got these questions:

“What are the challenges facing the implementation of Unified Communications in small-medium enterprises (SMEs)?  In terms of deployment of UC, what approach should the implementation take?  I simply mean the phases of implementation.”

These are interesting and important questions, and we thought others might have them, too, so here is the reply from one of our UC Experts:

Thanks for your inquiry.  As a UC consultant at UniComm Consulting that focuses on Business Enterprise customer needs in Unified Communications, here is our response to your questions.
 
The challenges are both clear and manageable.  The main challenge is to decide what you are trying to get accomplished by adopting Unified Communications (UC).  UC should be a tool that improves you business, hopefully giving you high return on investment.  Some examples might include:

• If your business has a large number of field personnel (say sales, distributorship, service organization, real estate) then a UC solution that integrates with the user’s mobile device(s) could really improve your business, allowing clients to reach your people much more successfully. Such a UC solution could also allow the in-office team to see the presence (availability) of the mobile people to link up to them and allow the mobile people to see the presence of the in-office folks so as to get an answer for a customer almost instantly. Lots of other options, too. Microsoft Office Communications Server with the Office Communicator Mobile client is one example of this option. Other examples are available from IBM as well as some of SME solutions from the IP PBX suppliers.
• If your business has a major back-office process, such as would occur in an insurance brokerage requiring underwriting approvals, or a professional services firm like a consulting firm, law firm, architecture firm, accounting firm, etc. then the UC solutions would focus more on the desktop options and the “collaborative” tools. The UC solution would enable a staff member or team member to see the availability of a the appropriate experts (often by skill or role, not just by name) so they can immediately get a consultation or a decision. The consultation might start with an IM session; then with one or two mouse clicks can become a live call or a web sharing session (to review a document), or a video conference, or even a collaboration with reference to documents, client information, etc. Tools for this type of UC are available both from the telecommunications suppliers (Mitel, NEC, Siemens, Cisco, Nortel, Avaya and others all have packages for Small-Medium Businesses or SMBs). Microsoft Office Communications Server with Microsoft SharePoint and IBM’s Lotus Sametime with the IBM Quickr product are also great solutions for this type of business process.

These suggestions focus on improving your business processes.  Of course, if you install the UC solutions, your employees will also find many other benefits for their day-to-day user productivity, but the business process changes usually deliver the greatest ROI, since you can actually manage and measure the changes.  
 
As to the Implementation approach, our recommendation is:

1. Determine what you are going to focus on (as suggested above).
2. Based on those focus areas, decide which features you will need and which employees will need them. Note that sometimes you don’t need to provide UC for all the employees; but depending on the size of your business it may be just as easy to provide UC to everyone.
3. Shop for the best products and support services for your SMB needs. You will usually find one or two suppliers who are “the best” for your needs. Make sure to find a good VAR or distributor who understands this UC approach, not just a telecom or e-mail reseller who “cuts and runs”. The cost for a good VAR will be paid back in higher ROI, for sure.
4. Get a sample copy of the UC solution (or pre-install the system) and test out the new procedures and methods, so you’re comfortable with how they will work. From this, prepare new process documentation (”the new way we will do our work”), the training and “change management” (i.e. the messages from the business leaders, the enrollment of “champions” for the new methods, and the help/support procedures as people learn the new UC methods). Be sure to include communications to your clients, if these new processes will be visible to (and likely much better for) them.
5. Finish the installation and “roll it out” to the employees (some or all, as above). Watch carefully for the questions they have and the “tweaks” you will likely need to make.
6. Monitor the business improvements. Celebrate the successful improvements.

Then, at that point, you can look for more processes to improve, as your next round of UC investments.

Well, that’s the end of the response to that question.  Do you think it was a good answer?  What would you add or change in this response.  We would welcome your post below.

Tags: UC Information by Marty Parker
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