Thursday, August 12, 2010

CEBP offers our enterprise clients a way to surf the wave of social crm

One of the major technology trends of the past few years has been the consumerization of technology adoption. Meaning, unlike in previous decades where the business market was the first one to adopt technology,  consumer applications or devices are now the leading edge of technology.  

This trend has resulted in consumers (all of us)  pushing to make our employers and business relationships adopt the technology that we use most regularly.  Social Media networks like Facebook and mobile sms tools like Twitter are great examples of consumer apps that are being pushed into the business community creating a social crm channel.  Opening up these new tech empowered social crm channels has become a real challenge for businesses of any size.

Creating and sustaining  a customer, vendor, friend, community communications strategy has real strategic and tactical complexities as well as opportunities. For large consumer driven enterprises, the massive scale attached to opening and managing multiple social crm channels can become mind boggling.  There are two very good recent reports by Gartner and Altimeter covering these social CRM trends.

With many billions of customer service contacts each year at an average per call cost (domestically or off shore) measured at $5.00  adding tens of billions of additional consumer interactions requires new thinking and tools.

Of course, these  new consumer channels need to flow through the businesses contact centers. Yet, this rapidly becomes a tsunami of  real time communications and social media traffic  that will test the capacity of any contact center.  More vitally, consumer expectations have changed. Proactive responses into the consumers’ preferred communication channel is the new standard. The traditional  metric of first call resolution within so many hours is dramatically out of step in a world of consumers posting their negative experiences to their networks of hundreds and thousands.  The old saying that a happy customer tells 5 people and an angry customer tells 25 people  about his experience needs to be exponentially updated.  

To add even more complexity, an old issue , identity verification, becomes even more important as we add millions if not billions of consumer contacts into these channels.

CEBP solutions like VoiceSage can become an integral part of these solutions.  Fortunately, VoiceSage’s ability to leverage  telco grade database queries offers a fast and simple method to provide identity verification for any consumer facing enterprise. These types of data feeds are no longer a function of hardware but of programming interfaces.

I’ve  previously touched on this theme of CEBP solutions as a glue technology. Social media and mobile technologies are the tools of choice for consumers.  Connecting, pulling, leveraging these consumer tools with traditional enterprise contact center technologies is not being done well now. CEBP solutions can be used to connect these two distinct worlds.

CEBP solutions allow our enterprise clients to buy themselves time to open these new social media/mobile communication channels without drowning their business.

Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage USA

Monday, July 12, 2010

Could the CEBP market be as large as the postal service?

The US postal service is once again running billions of dollars in deficits. Its total volume continues to decline by billions of pieces each year. The number of employee layoffs increases. The requests for rate increases and reduced services continues. A Newsweek post argues that this decline in the postal service is actually good for the economy.

My colleagues in the UK tell me about the rather unique tradition of regular postal strikes that tend to be timed to cause maximum disruption near holidays. To be fair, it can be argued that the Royal Mail may have turned the corner at least from a financial perspective if not with service improvements. Their total volume continues to decline too. Despite declining volumes, revenues, and technical obsolence postal services remain some of the world’s largest employers.

Despite these negative signs it is understood there are remaining social contexts and regulatory demands for ubiquitous mail services.Yet, that is really the only supporting argument. Many of the  business related reasons for using traditional mail are obviously outdated already. For the majority of us the mail has become a test of our commitment to recycling rather than a useful government service. It is difficult to imagine a true transformation of something now popularly referred to as snail mail.

At the same time, we can look at the Telco industry (once also a government protected monopoly) and ask if it has a hope of evolving into anything more than a dumb pipe. The next question that comes to my mind may seem a bit unusual.

What if Telcos or possibly a major CEBP focused business process outsourcer decided they were going to directly compete for business revenue and functions that traditionally go to the postal service?

For major Telcos and BPOs  the first question is whether the potential market  is large enough. Are there billions rather than millions in potential revenue? The postal service is a perfect example of a two sided market that benefits from winner take all economies. Thus, the revenue numbers attached to just enterprise sent consumer mail  are in the tens of billions of dollars in the US and hundreds of billions if not in excess of a trillion dollars globally.

The  only major difference between the business functions provided by the  postal service and CEBP solutions is in terms of the marketing function.  At least in the US and UK, permission based marketing is the regulated and cultural standard for telco inspired solutions. A similarly enforced permission based marketing regulation would be the final nail in the coffin of mass mail marketers who rely on gross volume to generate  single digit responses.  

This “marketing” difference is not as clear cut in many developing countries that use affinity marketing as a means to subsidise mobile phone adoption and mobile payment transactions.  Interestingly, I wonder if many of these same countries have as strong a history of government sponsored mail services compared to the UK and US.

This current marketing difference is more a problem of creative business models and culture than one of technology. Being able to proactively send a customer a targeted appreciated  marketing message by voice or sms will become more common as consumers and retailers  continue to get comfortable with social media and understand the value of  creating opt in permissions for their trusted networks of friends and businesses.  Marketing guru Seth Godin bluntly describes the difference in business models as smart versus dumb.

If one goes through the range of reasons why mail has traditionally been most useful for all industries VoiceSage’s clients have already found many more productive solutions through the use of our CEBP application. In many instances the client uses CEBP solutions to remove the need for postal mail entirely from their processes. In other cases the enterprise uses CEBP solutions to improve the experience of any remaining paper based communications. Our ability to provide just in time personalization while handling global scale allows our clients to generate ROI across both big and small business processes.

Our  UK, Irish, and US based VoiceSage clients rely on CEBP solutions to provide logistics, collections, communications, and customer service  business process improvements every day.  With a Telco or BPO style strategic partner,VoiceSage clients in parts of  EMEA could certainly tap the marketing power of CEBP quickly.

We have never thought of ourselves as competing with the largest postal services in the world. Maybe we should.

Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage
July 12, 2010

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

CEBP, business intelligence, and real time enterprise transformation

At various conferences and events VoiceSage regularly does a 15 or 20 minute presentation with a focus on how our CEBP application finds, unlocks, and creates "Value at the Edge" of our clients' businesses. Examples of this value creation can be found across many industries. What we mean is that using real time voice and sms communications with consumers consistently has a positive compounding effect within the enterprise. Good implementations are not just creating cost reductions in mailed letters or contact center volume. These better processes are improving cash flow, increasing warehouse space, reducing patient no shows, building industry leading best practices, and raising the overall value of our clients' brands. Working with many of the largest retail, utility, telco, insurance, financial services, healthcare, and government clients has shown us that this value is created over and over again.


What has caught my attention recently is how the VoiceSage CEBP application can be easily connected into other enterprise solutions in ways that create synergies and add value at an even faster rate than we have experienced so far.

I have had two recent gotcha moments where I figured out that our VoiceSage client experiences are the same every where. Reading the May 24th issue of Information Week, the headline asks "Are your Apps smart enough." Then it states "Until embedded Business Intelligence can tap into real- time transactions, decision support will be stuck in the past." At VoiceSage we have been referring to this lack of real time decision making and consumer communication as the "Lags and Drags" within the enterprise. Yesterday, I noticed a Tweet coming out of the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. It stated that conference attendees want to see more about business value creation and less about tools. Our mantra is we move business metrics.

BI tools or status reports from various enterprise software tools are notoriously bad at informing real time communications to the customer facing staff let alone moving beyond the walls of the enterprise directly to the consumer.
If we consider a single core business process that makes economies run like scheduling a meeting with the customer in person,virtually, or by phone it is easy to see the inherent weaknesses in major classes of enterprise software solutions including CRM, BPM, BI, HCMS, UC, and ERP.

How can we most effectively connect and directly communicate with the consumer and our staff,? More specifically, can an appointment be automatically made, confirmed, reminded or changed between a customer and an available, knowledgeable company representative? It sounds simplistic but it is not being done within most consumer facing business processes. Just by focusing on effectively and efficiently scheduling customer/client/patient meetings we have seen dramatic ROI.

The complete lack of embedded real time, interactive communication processes to leverage the consumer and mobile workers preferred methods( voice or text) is strikingly absent from so many other software solutions today. Obviously at VoiceSage we are working with vendor partners to change this now. Just as importantly, we approach every client with a direct question before we engage them. What business process do you want to improve?

Just as real time data is a requirement in the financial markets and media world, real time data combined with real time communication functionality is becoming a requirement when dealing with consumers. Consumers now expect proactive,personalized, interactive communications with their preferred brands.

By adding an ability to enrich real time communication using other "edge" data we can begin to see how business transformation may look over the next few years Furthermore, the massive investments and expectations being set in enterprise software are not going to be fully realized without the real time functionality and "Value creation at the Edge" that is provided by CEBP applications.

As a standalone application VoiceSage has proven its ability to move business metrics. Working across the enterprise suite of existing corporate software solutions VoiceSage can help unlock true business transformation.

Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage USA

Thursday, May 13, 2010

CEBP solutions provide the right tool at the right time

In at least 4 recent articles Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) messaging was being used to push renewed enthusiasm for non CEBP product offerings. Several articles or posts in NetworkWorld and UC strategies provided a recap of the Unified Communications Summit which focused on CEBP messaging as a way to sell the value of UC solutions. Reduxonline also referenced CEBP messaging relative to needed BPM (business process management) product iterations.

Now, VoiceSage as a world class CEBP hosted application has been evangelizing the CEBP message, improving our enterprise clients' business processes, and focusing on creating hard and fast ROIs for many years.

Given the new interest in CEBP by UC, BPM and other solutions it is important to take a deeper look at how VoiceSage can be used by our clients or partners as an " over the top" application to provide the equivalent of glue or a lever for these other applications.

There are lots of ways the VoiceSage application can make up for current limitations in the standard UC and BPM suite of solutions. Here are two big examples.

1. SILOS
Interoperability between vendor specific UC solutions is a big problem that is dampening down the CIO enthusiasm needed to drive UC purchases. Interestingly, there is a new protocol being presented by Cisco and other vendors refered to as Viper or Verification involving PSTN Reachability. The purpose of this protocol is to find a simple, realtime method of recognizing if/when phone numbers within different UC systems can be recognized, authorized and reached. This would help to bring competing UC installations beyond the silo of the enterprise.

One of the hidden assets of CEBP solutions is, like Telcos, they have enormous amounts of data that come attached to telephone numbers. The vital, real time requirement to identify whether a phone number is working and attached to the right party is what the VIPER protocol requires. In its simplest terms the Viper protocol would act as a shared database that can be accessed by varied and competing UC solutions to authenticate numbers. CEBP solutions like VoiceSage already have this functionality and often possess a realtime database that rivals anything easily leveraged within even a single telco.

In the BPM world, if a human is required within a particular process, email tends to be the only notification option. CEBP moves BPM beyond the walls of the enterprise by leveraging voice and sms functionality while providing simple ways to pull consumers around the world into a process too.

VoiceSage's ability to quickly glue together or leverage other solutions in our work with the National Health Service or the world's largest business database firm provides just two examples of how our CEBP tool can strengthen other solutions.


2. SCALE
UC and BPM solutions are frequently limited in their scalability by being attached to standard server license or hardware focused business models as opposed to cloud applications. Furthermore, UC solutions can be limited by the IP or PSTN infrastructure of the enterprise they are serving. VoiceSage as a SaaS or Cloud Communications service provides a platform for our clients and vendor partners to overcome these real time scale issues. A spectacular example of the power of CEBP scalability is VoiceSage's work in bringing American Airlines on board within 4 hours to help respond to the volcanic ash cloud disruptions.

Our experience shows the vast majority of important business process improvements required by the world's largest industries involve communicating beyond the walls of the enterprise to thousands or millions of customers. BPM and UC solutions have a distinct disadvantage when the requirement is consumer scale at a truly domestic or international level. VoiceSage clients and vendor partners can scale up,down, or around the world to meet the real time needs of their customers.

UC, BPM, and other application vendors are certainly beginning to come to terms with their Silo and Scale challenges. In a world driven by the ubiquitous mobile device using sms or voice as the preferred method of consumer transaction, CEBP solutions can be used to glue other applications and leverage business processes immediately.

VoiceSage allows our clients and partners to improve their own business processes and at the same time better utilize existing software investments. When we talk about this internally we talk about "edge processes". It means we strive to understand how we can deliver improved business performance by using our transactional business model. This allows us to eliminate the capital expenses, eliminate large integration project costs, and eliminate the long wait to achieve ROI. In essence, we strive for Win/Win/Win business models that are by definition unbeatable!

Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage

Monday, April 26, 2010

ECOMM 2010, San Francisco recap: CEBP vs. Platforms discussion continues

Despite the volcanic eruption that shut down much of Europe last week, the US version of the biannual ECOMM event was certainly a success.

Although I have been following ECOMM since 2008 and VoiceSage has sponsored the 2009 EU event this was the first time I had the chance to attend.

ECOMM is three full days of presentations done in 12 to 15 minute bites. A couple of keynote speakers may be allowed 20 minutes but even they are subject to the time clock "gong". The goal of the event is to be a force in reshaping the world's telecommunications industry. The first two days of this event were primarily focused on Telco subjects that are current but may still be considered cutting edge by the main stream media.

The third day was dedicated to Augmented Reality which by everyone's definition is on the bleeding edge of technical innovations. My takeaway from Day 3 was a simple one. There are seriously talented people spending a lot of time and money in AR. Over the next few years we will see amazing results.

On Day 2, I had the opportunity to present the VoiceSage Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) story in a way that everyone in the room could appreciate. Our amazingly fast response in helping American Airlines deal with their passenger communications needs during the volcanic disruptions across Ireland and the UK showed the power of CEBP applications and Cloud Communications in general. The previous keynote speakers, including Martin Geddes, had all used the language of CEBP or touched on the topic briefly. I had the opportunity to drill into CEBP and differentiate VoiceSage as a leader in the space with our focus on moving clients' business metrics.

Telcos are looking for new ways to replace traditional revenue streams that are going away. CEBP applications clearly open up billion dollar business process optimization market opportunities. One variation on this theme is for Telcos to rely upon or buy API platforms that will open up their infrastructure to the innovation of the world's developers. In my opinion, the few winners and losers have already been decided in the Telco API space.

However, regardless of their size or scale, firms that view themselves as developer platforms miss the game changing opportunity to directly understand and impact clients' business processes in the valuable way that is available to VoiceSage or other CEBP applications. Replacing billions in old telco landline revenue with millions in developer api revenues is the tradeoff that many Telcos are grudgingly reviewing now. Replacing billions in landline revenue with billions in enterprise class CEBP revenue is a tradeoff that is also available to Telcos but will appeal to a wider variety of enterprise focused vendors too.

Thanks to ECOMM, this CEBP message is being heard widely and clearly.

Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage USA
April 26th, 2010

Friday, April 2, 2010

VoiceSage and CEBP make good progress in the USA

We have made good progress over the past few weeks with VoiceSage’s launch into America. Mark Oppermann, VoiceSage’s Sales Director, spent a week with me traveling in and around Boston talking with partners and potential clients. We also had a chance to attend a Boston Celtics game!

One of the highlights of this visit was our chance to provide a keynote presentation called Social Media meets the Contact Center for the NECCF Spring event. This is a slightly edited version of the presentation that we gave to the folks in attendance. I am confident we will be seeing lots more of the NECCF community. Our practical message that VoiceSage helps enterprises move their business metrics using a variety of phone and web tool sets was very well received. The questions about great business cases were fantastic. The business challenges seem to be the same regardless of where we are in the world.

A second highlight was our meeting with members of the Dialogic team. VoiceSage has been a long time Dialogic customer and is now a member of their partner program. Dialogic has been an early advocate and enthusiastic supporter of the CEBP space. We look forward to working with them.

We always enjoy providing a bit of a promotion to the April ECOMM conference being held in San Francisco. I will be attending with colleague Paul Sweeney later this month. VoiceSage sponsored the ECOMM European event last Fall. This is always a fantastic gathering of thought leaders in the Telco industry. For those not able to attend in person, I would encourage following the event via several virtual back channels that are available.

Friday, March 12, 2010

VoiceSage is coming to America

One of the VoiceSage company goals entering 2010 was to launch across the USA. So, I was excited to join VoiceSage a few months ago after seeing its fantastic success with the largest enterprise clients across the UK and Ireland.

In this CEBP, Cloud Communications or Telco 2.0 industry (pick your definition), that I've worked to grow and written about here in the US since it's inception, we have seen years of talk, research, and pointing towards a future filled with opportunities.

However, VoiceSage stands out as unique within the industry simply because it has been able to create real value for the largest and most demanding clients across Retail, Utilities, Government, Healthcare, Banking,Insurance, and the Telco markets. For a company of any size, anywhere, the VoiceSage client base in the UK and Ireland is impressive.

Over these first few months, our "soft" launch into America has been recognized by thought leaders across the industry. Here are a few mentions.

During the Telco 2.0, Orlando Executive Brainstorm conference in December, Thomas Howe's CEBP presentation to the crowd of Telco executives identified VoiceSage and Ifbyphone as the two leading examples of CEBP solutions in the world.

In January, VoiceSage was invited to join two CEBP panels as part of the ITEXPO's Cloud Communications Summit in Miami Beach. Here is a video link to one of our panel discussions.

In February, VoiceSage was mentioned as an industry leader in an interesting article about the difference between CEBP and Unified Communications by UC-Edge.

VoiceSage was invited to add our thoughts on improving customer experiences using CEBP with an essay in the Cloud Communications 2010 ebook being published later in March. This book has a stellar cast of industry participants and will certainly be required reading throughout the telecommunications industry.

The NorthEast Contact Center Forum asked VoiceSage to offer a keynote presentation during its March 23rd Summit near Boston. The theme is Social Media meets the Contact Center. We are excited to share client uses cases from a wide variety of our customers' experiences.

Finally, we will be attending and supporting the Spring ECOMM event in San Francisco in April. This event is certainly where the future of Telco gets talked about and launched. VoiceSage sponsored the Fall ECOMM conference in Europe.

With this progress, VoiceSage's launch across the US is just getting started. Be sure to look for regular VoiceSage announcements and updates coming soon.

Thanks
Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage
March, 2010

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

CEBP, Cloud Communications, and VoiceSage at the ITEXPO

It was great fun to introduce VoiceSage at the Cloud Communications Summit during last week's ITEXPO. Despite the small room and limited advertising/publicity around the Cloud Communications Summit it was clearly a success judging by attendance at all the panels. The word is that Cloud Communications will have a much higher profile track at the next ITEXPO.

My purpose as a participant on two of the CEBP panels was twofold.
1. Introducing VoiceSage as a new player in the US market so that we are positioned to build off our great UK customer successes was met by positioning VoiceSage as a business metric/ROI moving, Enterprise class solution relative to other US firms.

2. Introducing CEBP as a concept and as a results driven, profitable practice area gained a boost too. My sense is that CEBP hasn't been covered at previous ITEXPOs in much detail.

There was an unscripted point in our discussion about vertical and industry specific CEBP solutions when I looked at our panel and then confidently asked the audience to name any vertical or industry. I said that our panel would be able to present a solid CEBP application across any industry vertical. There was no hesitation from the panel members.

This one moment convinced me that CEBP has certainly moved from a theoretical analyst coined concept to pragmatic client focused solutions over the last two plus years.

There is plenty of work left to do but I am excited about the progress made so far.

Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

VoiceSage and CEBP gets noticed in Europe and the US

My VoiceSage colleagues forwarded me this link from an event that we attended in France. At this investor conference Voice Sage was voted one of the most fundable international companies.

I am looking forward to meeting up with industry colleagues at the ITEXPO event in Miami January 20-22,2010.
I get to tell the VoiceSage and CEBP story during two different panel discussions facilitated by Thomas Howe during the Cloud Communications Summit on Wednesday January 20th.

Sincerely
Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage
Patrick.Murphy at VoiceSage.com