Last week in Las Vegas I got to follow up on Cisco’s contact center analyst day by attending Ciscolive, which is Cisco’s big customer event, co-located with C-Scape, Cisco’s main analyst event. Ciscolive was huge! In the main keynote there were 12,500 customers, a lot of analysts, and 23K total attendees if you include those participating virtually. As usual, John Chambers was completely engaging speaking on the vision that Cisco has with snippets such as, “Economies of the future won’t be information economies, but network economies”, and “Every mistake I’ve made as a leader is in being too slow or in having speed without process and being replicable.”

Ciscolive also had what Cisco called, ‘The World of Solutions Expo’, which was essentially a trade show of Cisco and Cisco partners. In the collaboration area we got to see and hear much more about UC and collaboration products, such as Cisco Pulse, and I was happy to hear that Cisco has come a long way in getting the answers to some of the questions I had last November when they announced those products.

The best part of the keynote was the Cius demonstration; Cisco’s new tablet phone. Aimed at a business user, rather than consumer, like Apple’s iPad, this UC tool, is nice. This telephone/tablet combination acts as a portable communications and collaboration platform, working as a phone with a screen that works with Cisco applications such as Telepresence or WebEx, and with Cisco’s Unified Communications manager, or as a tablet. When the tablet is docked it provides the screen, and the base has USB ports, a wired Ethernet connection, and, of course, a telephone handset and speakerphone.

When used as a tablet, Cius has an HD 720p camera that faces the user, and a 5 megapixel camera mounted on the back, so that a user can pop the tablet off of the base, and use it for two way video calls, or video calls in which the user can see the other party and show them whatever the back camera is pointed at.

The Cius tablet weighs 1.14 pounds, runs on the Android operating system, and supports 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and 3G. Later releases will include 4G mobile networking. Cius is blue-tooth enabled, and supports connection of other headsets through a micro-USB port. Cisco said that when the product is released in early 2011 that it will come with a set of applications and a Firefox browser, but also stated that Android developers can write applications to the device using Cisco’s own SDK and APIs. Cisco also claims that the tablet has an 8 hour battery life.

If a unified communications “phone” could be fun, this would be it. It has a nice design, supports a lot of functionality, and appears very easy to use. For Cisco, the Cius is also a very attractive add-on to their shameless drive to put video everywhere, not only because of the video capabilities of the phone, but also because of support for Cisco’s myriad video-enabled UC applications.  There is no hidden agenda here; just video everywhere all the time, and this makes video appealingly mobile.

 Lastly, although the Cius is positioned as a business device, with Cisco’s statements towards bringing the network to everyone, it’s not out of the question that further positioning towards the consumer market might happen not far down the road.

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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A new report from mobility expert, Tomi Ahonen,  shows that SMS has already become the most widely used text messaging application by all users in the world (53%), and even more by mobile users (78%). This reflects a shift from “real-time” voice calls that may run into “unavailability” problems and go to “voicemail jail”, to more practical “near real-time,” immediate message notification and delivery that another study reports will usually be responded to within five minutes.

A 2009 study by Lightspeed Research in the UK showed that 11% of mobile users didn’t initiate any voice calls at all,  while in the U.S., the percentage was even higher, 13%.

I am sure you are all familiar with seeing a user with a ringing cell phone often just looking to see who it is from then simply letting it go to a messaging function. Lately, voicemail-to-text services have taken care of caller voice messages by transcribing them automatically to text messages. So, whether the contact initiator chooses to use voice or not, the contact recipient can still deal with voice messages more efficiently than with voice mail interfaces.

From a UC perspective, where I include “process-to-person” contacts in addition to “person-to-person” contacts, text messaging and SMS are an obvious choice for personalized, pro-active, automated, time-sensitive notifications from a business process application, commonly referred to as Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), because business applications don’t really want to generate voice messages instead of their usual text message output.  (If the recipient requires a speech interface because they are driving a car, we can let them selectively exploit “unified messaging’  options based on their presence status.

With the rapid growth of screen-based, multi-modal smart-phones, the flexibility of input and output can be extended to end users independently of whether they are contact initiators or recipients/respondents for SMS. In addition, however, with the power of UC and presence, SMS exchanges can be easily escalated to real-time Instant Messaging and/or “click-to call” voice connections when appropriate.  This makes conversational voice calls more manageable from both a caller’s and callee’s perspective, and reduces the unnecessary problems generated by “blind” call attempts and voicemail’s retrieval limitations.

Needless to say, SMS itself doesn’t satisfy all the informational needs of users involved in a business process, but provides an efficient,  timely, mobile contact interaction to people wherever they are, along with links to the real information required for the business process, e.g., email. However, SMS is used 2.6 times more than email by mobile users. The key to efficient information exchange is to make timely and efficient contact first, not have conversations or deliver documents. Clearly, UC will be successful with its different forms of communication applications,  if it can exploit mobility for accessing individual recipients as quickly and flexibly as possible.

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
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Technology can only do so much, and sometimes, human nature has to play a role. There are times when a technology isn’t being implemented properly because of cultural or social issues, and there are many situations where we have to change our cultural habits to accommodate new technologies.

In the early days of computer telephony integration, there were examples of call center agents who received screen pops on their desktops providing them with information on the caller’s name and what they’re calling about, and the agents would answer the phone based on this information. “Hello, Mr. Jones, I see you have a problem with your credit card statement, and since you’re a platinum card holder, I’d be happy to assist you.” Instead of rejoicing at this recognition, customers got flustered, wondering how the agent knew who they were, and the time it took for the agent to explain about screen pops eliminated the expected time savings that screen pops are supposed to provide. Some companies stopped using screen pops altogether, but generally most call center agents went back to using a neutral greeting so they wouldn’t alarm the callers.

In the world of unified communications, presence and IM, new etiquette rules are being developed, both formally and informally. I’ve heard of many companies where it’s considered rude to call someone without sending an IM first to see whether it’s a good time to call. Most companies haven’t formalized these rules, but I expect to see more and more companies promoting “best practices” or “etiquette guides.”

Microsoft has a wonderful “Instant Messaging Etiquette Guide” that provides general guidelines. For example, some tips for politeness when using IM include:
•    If you are initiating the IM, it’s generally considered polite to ask the other person if they have time to “talk” with you. This may not be necessary with someone you work with frequently and when the question is quick, as opposed to something requiring discussion.
•    Don’t invite someone to join a conference in progress without first asking the others in the conference if it’s OK to do so.
•    Don’t use all capital letters to type your message. It’s the IM equivalent of shouting (note: this goes for twitter, Facebook, etc.).

Social and personal issues are often the reasons why technologies fail to be adopted, despite the quality and reliability of the technology itself. I often hear from enterprise workers that they don’t want to use UC (particularly presence capabilities) because they don’t want people knowing their status or because they don’t want to be interrupted if they’re working. Instead, they generally set their status to “unavailable” all the time, thus greatly reducing the value of the technology for not only that individual, but for people in their workgroups and organization. This could be avoided if everyone followed guidelines and best practices. For example, respect IM status settings. If someone’s IM status is “busy” or “away,” don’t try contacting them and disturbing them. Alternatively, recognize that just because someone’s status is “available” doesn’t mean that they can drop what they’re doing and interact with you. If someone doesn’t respond to your messaging request, it probably means they’re busy, even if they’re status shows that they are available.

Microsoft also suggests: “If you’re carrying on too many IM conversations at once, those you’re corresponding with may feel that you’re not giving them the proper amount of attention. No more than three conversations at a time is a general rule.” I suggest that contact centers also follow this rule – I’ve stopped using the web chat option for customer service because too often the agent I’m chatting with for service is also helping several other customers at the same time, causing delays in the chat and making it a very lengthy and unpleasant experience.

One of my personal guidelines is that after going back and forth on IM for a long time, it’s generally easier to have a live conversation, and UC users can easily click-to-communicate to have a phone or conference call.

What all of this points to is the need to consider human factors in any design. Success in a UC project will come not just from buying the best hardware and software, but from designing the best solution. As we are dealing with new tools that will allow people to do their jobs in new ways, we need to address the issue of how we help people to use these tools in the most effective way. People know their telephone etiquette, but part of our UC deployment plan has to look at how we teach UC etiquette.

Tags: Unified Communications by Blair Pleasant
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