An Appropriate Stance on Unified Communications Adoption - Interactive Intelligence
Year three of the unified communications push finally is showing signs of saneness in the marketing messages surrounding UC adoption. Maybe it’s partially the economy as companies are so much less likely to go storming ahead with full blown UC deployments, and are instead starting to take a much more measured approach; taking the time to really think hard about which pieces of UC they need now versus later, and taking more careful stock of what they already have (read network readiness). This in turn is forcing vendors to soften their approach. But I would like to think that it’s more than network readiness and the economy that is making this happen. I’d like to think that vendors are looking more broadly at what will benefit customers, and benefit them by implementing solutions in a non-disruptive order, than just pushing the ‘everything UC’ button.
For some vendors, a more sane approach has been taken all along, but now they are becoming more vociferous in their marketing delivery. While at VoiceCon, I talked to Joe Staples, Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing at Interactive Intelligence about their approach to UC and he talked a bit about marketeers gone wild when pushing the UC hype. I had to laugh when he said that even vendors who make headsets now say that they are optimized for UC. It’s a bit much.
Interactive Intelligence’s all in one solutions/platform approach makes it a lot easier to add new capabilities, but even without this Interactive Intelligence takes the approach of asking CIOs what problems are they trying to solve, which of their legacy stuff should stay or go, and if the underlying technology infrastructure is sound and in place. Interactive Intelligence also has the vision of communication based business processes which are discussed in my white paper “Peering Past the Unified Communications Frenzy” (June 2008), and in CEO Don Brown’s white paper “A New Approach to Business Process Automation” (November 2008) which are both downloadable on this site. Also worth listening to is Jim Burton’s interview with Joe Staples in which they discuss the communication-based approach versus communications-enabled one.
As for the addition of solutions to the UC mix that Interactive Intelligence sells, today they announced the addition of SMS to their all-in-one multi-channel contact center suite. This might not be the sexiest UC function, but it does enable customers who are into using SMS to interact with a contact center using the method they prefer and have those SMS messages routed, recorded and reported on the way that a call would be. It also allows the contact center agent to respond back in kind. One additional benefit of using SMS is that contact centers will be able to push messages and important information out to their customers, not just receive messages, so that customers can be notified of events, or status updates on everything from order purchases, special events, sales, or critical information such as when a stock price hits a certain level, etc. Although, with the economy and stock market the way that it is, maybe we don’t want to know the later.
Nancy,
I have long been aware of Don Brown’s practical perspective on implementing customer contact frameworks and his move towards supporting SMS is another step in the direction of UC.
I think, however, you missed a key point about using SMS. It’s not just about using text messaging, but exploiting immediate delivery of messages to and from personalized consumer mobile devices (”smart-phones). These can be proactive notification messages from business applications (CEBP) that can open the door to “proactive” self-services as well as selective “click-to-contact” live assistance in various modalities and communication interfaces.
Not only will such access reduce the unnecessary real-time demands on customer support staffs that traditional telephone calls have generated, but it will also improve individual customer contact relationships through more effective, flexible, and personalized interactions with both people and business process applications.
Absolutely. Thanks Art
Nice post. Thank you for the info. Keep it up.
One of the factors that I am pondering at the moment is the way that the UC environment is building a framework that is to an extent similar to those that exist in emergin Customer Communications Management Markets.
What I mean is that in CCM the ability to deliver messaging via mult-channel, in this case print, web, email, sms etc is being driven from a marketing base. Wheras it seems to me that UC is being driven from a Customer Service / Sales base. At some point it seems that these technologies are going to integrate so that when we talk about multi-channel, we are in fact talking about voice, print web, sms, email et al.
The question for me is when will this occur and of the similar technology functionalities which will win out. Also if this does become one big system who will drive it?