SOFTEL Case Study

Thirty years ago, when the big players in telephony at the time were just ramping up (AT&T, ROLM, Northern Telecom, Mitel, etc), “not made here” was a bad term. Those suppliers and others prided themselves on developing, for the most part, their own hardware and software. It wasn’t for a decade or more that we began to see the vast amount of partnering that the industry now takes for granted. Now when application stories are written, often the implementation descriptions are peppered with the terms ‘reseller’, ‘systems integrator’ or ‘third-party supplier’, but what do those terms mean? Those terms essentially refer to the underpinnings, or glue that hold together and provide added functionality to a business solution. Very simply, resellers and systems integrators take vendor products and applications and make them work together, often adding their own “value”; expertise or add-on solutions, and third-party suppliers provide add-on hardware or software that complement existing solutions.

To illustrate the added value a systems integrator provides, the following is an example of how one reseller/systems integrator – SOFTEL Communications Inc., worked with a partner (Cisco) to integrate a third-party supplier application into a contact center operation. SOFTEL has been in the business of systems integration and enterprise application solution development since 1993, partnering with many of the top vendors in the industry, including Avaya (and Nortel), Cisco, Genesys and others. This rich history of multi-platform systems integration has enabled SOFTEL to optimize contact center and self-service operations, unified communications solutions, IP infrastructure, and back-end business process optimization for enterprises in North America and around the globe. In this application, Cisco paired up with SOFTEL to help with a customer implementation due to SOFTEL’s experience being a Cisco partner, and working with Cisco products and applications.

SMART Technologies (NASDAQ-SMT), headquartered in Calgary, Canada provides interactive products to enterprises and educational institutions worldwide. SMART introduced the first interactive whiteboard in 1991, has remained the number one supplier of interactive whiteboards, and has greatly expanded the company’s product portfolio to include interactive products of all types, including displays, tables, pen displays, student response systems, wireless slates, audio enhancement systems, and document cameras, along with a full line of interactive learning software. To further help the communities and companies they support, SMART provides free online learning resources, an online teacher community, training and professional development, and technical support.

For much of the company’s history, SMART provided free technical support to customers. However, as any technical support manager can tell you, providing live technical support can eat up a disproportionate amount of a budget, and providing it for free is great for customer relations, but typically cost prohibitive. The answer for SMART was to charge a minimal fee to offset support costs, and to automate the repetitive, upfront payment process so that valuable technical support staff would not be required during the payment process.

To make this change, SMART Technologies employed Cisco to help them with their technical support initiatives using a Cisco Voice Portal (CVP) to provide self-service to customers requiring technical support. The specification for the CVP application called for greeting customers, validating their accounts, processing a $25 credit card payment, then speaking an approval number back to the customer before transferring them to technical support. SMART chose PayPal as the online payment service. As SMART is a publicly traded company, PCI-compliance was also a requirement.

However, as Cisco didn’t immediately have professional services personnel available to do the PayPal integration, SOFTEL, a long-time Cisco partner, was brought in to do the integration work to make that happen. SOFTEL developers used PayPal’s Payflow Pro SDK and wrote libraries to facilitate “card not present” transactions that were “portal agnostic” so that they would work within the Cisco Voice Portal for voice and web transactions, integrating them into PayPal’s back-end financial reporting systems. All transactions in the system are fully auditable, making it possible to trace any transaction from end-to-end. Per the application specification, SOFTEL’s solution was also certified to be PCI-compliant.

The end result was for a nominal technical support fee SMART turned a cost center into a revenue generating service for SMART without increasing the headcount it would have taken if live agents were required to process credit card payments.

As said above, systems integration is integrating applications together and adding the integrator’s own value-added applications into a solution. The SMART/Paypal story is a fairly simple, but powerful example of what a systems integrator can do to integrate solutions when resources aren’t available to add specific functionality into an application flow. To add to this, SOFTEL developers also wrote libraries for PayPal integration with additional platforms such Avaya, and Genesys as well, further adding to their systems integration expertise in cases in which others might also want to add PayPal into a self-service application. For the value-added solution component of systems integration SOFTEL also has products of its own they add, such as the company’s Password Reset application, shown here on Microsoft’s site. The bottom line is, when building out a business solution, such as a contact center, don’t overlook the value of using systems integration expertise, such as SOFTEL’s.

Have financial services hit a new low? While not exactly in the contact center category – although as a potential customer I might choose to call their toll free number, this really got me. I received two pieces of junk mail at my PO Box that were offers from Chase for “Ink Cash” business credit cards with unlimited cash back. But they weren’t for me. They were for two individuals in the industry who I happened to either mention in a blog about their company or do a podcast with, more than two years ago.

The two individuals, who I won’t mention here because it wouldn’t be fair to them, have nothing to do with Jamison Consulting, but suddenly they are getting offers for bank cards at my place of business. The offers were addressed to Mr So and So, with Jamison Consulting underneath, the correct PO Box, and then of course, the wrong city as my city shares a zip code with a larger city.

What is going on here? They are that desperate that they troll the internet looking for names. What a waste of money, time and paper. This is one step lower than the offers my kids get for United Airlines visa cards. At least there is some sort of business relationship there as my kids have frequent flyer accounts. But this is really low. I’m chalking up this as a contact center pet peeve story.

In April I blogged that Nuance was on the acquisition trail again having acquired or in the process of acquiring their second company this year, after three in 2009, four in 2008, and seven in 2007. They have not disappointed. In June Nuance snapped up ShapeWriter – not a speech technology company that most people would think of, but instead related technology with predictive text. This week Nuance was at it again, but this time in the contact center space, with the acquisition of iTa out of Australia. This acquisition will help bolster Nuance’s contact center services offerings in the company’s Enterprise Services division. From my perspective, despite the economy, acquisitions seem actually up this year as a whole, in telecom, speech technologies, etc.

Today brought news that West Corportation had acquired TuVox, who I have thought of as an acquisition target for awhile now. This marriage is actually a pretty good one for West as they have long been a provider of outsourced self-service and contact center services, which is an area that is getting a ton of attention and competition right now from just about every enterprise contact center player in the market. There have been a number of players, such as Syntellect, Convergys (Intervoice), and Genesys who have been providing both enterprise and hosted solutions for years, and of course there are vendors, such as West who have been the big guys in the hosted space. But it seems that the legacy enterprise vendors, such as Cisco, Interactive Intelligence, Avaya, etc., are all getting into or have announced in the last year or so, hosted offerings of their own. This puts a lot of pressure on the legacy hosted providers to be more competitive. Tuvox, with its VoiceXML development tools will go a long way in enabling West to port their older applications over to VoiceXML. TuVox’s application development methodology should also help speed up the deployment of self-service applications, making West more nimble in a ever more competitive environment.

I was just reading Juliana Kenny’s article on TMCnet, entitled, ‘Horror Gets More Horrifying with IVR’, and I followed the link out to YouTube to see the movie trailer she talks about. Yikes! This has to be the most interesting use of speech recognition I’ve ever seen or heard of.

It is a trailer for a movie called ‘Last Call’ in which the viewers register their cellphone numbers to be randomly called as audience participants in a horror movie. Using speech recognition the application randomly calls a registered moviegoer, and they get to interact with, or direct, the actions of the protaganist in the horror movie. My words cannot do this justice, you need to go see the trailer for yourself.

Someone let me know where I can see one of these – in English though. If I had to use German, like in the trailer, I’d send that poor actor right to their death!

I’m a big fan of outbound dialing if done properly. In May, I presented a pitch entitled “Outbound Notification – Its’ not your Mother’s Dialer”, for CRMXchange’s Virtual Speech Symposium, in which I talked about how far we have come from the days of Robocalls. We have come a long way and outbound isn’t going to go away, but instead get better and better.

This morning Interactive Intelligence announced enhancements to the company’s automated dialing application in particular for the credit collection market. Interactive Intelligence’s Interaction Dialer is a blended inbound/outbound dialing application used in myriad different industries, but collections typically holds a pretty good portion of applications.

With this release Interaction Dialer now includes skills-based dialing, “just-in-time” DNC (do-not-call) functionality, enhanced call analysis, and increased scalability. Details from the press release included:

“Interaction Dialer’s^® skills-based dialing feature enables automated outbound calls to be made based on the availability of agents with defined skills. By ensuring that calls are made based on appropriate agent availability, abandon rates and talk times are reduced.

Interaction Dialer’s^® “just-in-time” DNC feature adds the ability to scrub DNC lists – including cell phone scrubs — whose status may have changed between the time the contacts were originally scrubbed/loaded and the time they are dialed. This helps ensure compliance and increases the efficiency of dialing campaigns.

In addition, Interaction Dialer^® now includes media server-based international call analysis. This enhanced call analysis offers improved network message recognition for maximum dialing accuracy. It also adds redundancy and eliminates third-party components for improved reliability and simplified management.

Interaction Dialer^® also offers dialing and database access optimization, thus enabling credit and collection agencies to support up to 250,000 calls per hour/per server or more depending on configuration. The option of a centralized configuration using the company’s SIP-based Interaction Gateway^™ at remote sites also helps lower costs by reducing hardware requirements.

In addition to these enhancements, Interaction Dialer® offers a number of features designed to benefit credit and collection agencies, including the following:

-          Inherent blending that uses the same automatic call distributor for both inbound and outbound interactions for increased agent productivity.

-          Optimized “no-answer” timeouts that minimize answering machine pick-up for increased agent productivity.

-          Dynamic outbound ANI/caller ID for improved pick-up rates.

-          Automated, customizable voice mail messaging for increased productivity.

-          Ability to dynamically change phone number order based on time of day or number of attempts made for increased connection rates.

-          Patented, “self-learning” staging algorithm to more accurately predict length and stages of a call for increased dialing efficiency.”

This is a really well thought out release. Although Interactive focuses on collections in this release, this will enhance all outbound applications in that skills based outbound will improve the effectiveness of any outbound campaign by increasing the probability that the right agent will be there when the call is answered. So although credit collections are a significant portion of the outbound market, this will help all verticals, and it will help all of us consumers on the other end of those calls too, which is key to successful outbound campaigns. Right along with this customer satisfaction booster is the addition of “just-in-time DNC”. Bliss. There is nothing more annoying than being bothered by someone you don’t want to talk to. It is not helpful to the company that is calling or to the recipient.

Not so interesting from an application standpoint, but truly important to the business are the enhancements made to decrease costs and improve accuracy, reliability and management of the applications. All in all this is just a really solid release.

Although its summer and not the high season for big announcements, there are still some gems that have crossed my inbox this week. Here are some highlights:

OrderCatcher, a provider of speech-enabled voice portals for the hospitality and restaurant markets has developed a really compelling voice application development tool that essentially takes the developer out of the equation. I’ve seen a lot of IVR application development tools over the years that I’ve tracked this market, but this one even looks simple in a presentation, and normally they don’t. iSAT (Instant Speech Application Technology) can take a script and turn it into an application with blinding speed. For example, iSAT uses a grammar engine that parses all menu items in a quick-service restaurant menu and generates slot-based grammars, for all possible ways that a customer might order. The engine then generates semantic scripts from the items, and options or modifiers of those items. The OrderCatcher applications are state-based, allowing flexible control of the call flow and a natural sounding application. The application takes into account all of the options a caller will use, and then only prompts for any information it hasn’t received yet.

That is a simplistic description of the tool, but it is simple. The compelling part of iSAT, however, is that it is part of a hosted solution from OrderCatcher that looks to be really attractive for the SMB market, in that a company can give a script to OrderCatcher and within hours, OrderCatcher will have a working application up and running with no development costs to the business. The only fees are for the minutes used by callers. That equates to instant ROI. Interested in hearing more?

Next up was Interactive Intelligence’s announcement of a partnership with Buzzient to incorporate social media into the contact center. Interactive Intelligence is going to use Buzzient’s social media analysis and integration capabilities to monitor social media “chatter” according to customer-defined keywords, and then route the pertinent content as email messages to the person or agent best suited to handle the content, based on business rules and agent skill set.

Buzzient will monitor myriad social media interactions from the normal suspects, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn, but also blogs, wikis and other sources too. The interactions can be tagged with quantitative sentiment scores for tone, such as negative or positive comments. The emails will be routed as part of Interactive’s multi-channel queuing and routing solution, based on the tone or other factors such as a vertical market focus, product name, competitors name, etc.

Finally, I just wanted to mention a developmental addendum to a product called ZoomSafer, which I blogged about on the UCStrategies site in March. A brief description, but you can see more here, is ZoomSafer is a patented solution that provides flexible policy management for the use of mobile devices while driving. It consists of a web application that allows a business or individual to customize their own set of safe driving policies, and track and administer them, a client application to download onto a users’ mobile device to enforce the policies, and a set of free voice services to allow users to text, call or email, hands-free while driving. It uses the customer’s GPS to automatically detect the customer’s speed and if they are driving or not.

After great customer feedback since the company launched the product, this next iteration provides further automation, and integration with Bluetooth technology to automatically determine when the customer is driving, but with zero incremental drain on the customer’s mobile phone battery. ZoomSafer claims that this is the world’s first safe driving software to integrate with in-vehicle Bluetooth technologies to automatically activate/deactivate “safe drive mode” on a user’s smartphone whenever they power on/off their in-vehicle Bluetooth device. In this release the Bluetooth Beta software works on Blackberry smartphones running 4.2.1 OS and higher. Later additions will include availability on Windows Mobile and Android phones as well.

When talking to vendors about competition in contact centers the two names that most often pop up for North America are Cisco and Avaya, followed by Genesys, Interactive Intelligence, and then myriad others. What do Cisco’s competitors say are magic bullets in competing with Cisco? They say that Cisco is too expensive, not fully-featured, complex, and solutions require too many servers. Those bullets are losing speed, since Cisco, in addition to continuing to develop and rollout some rather visionary contact center and collaboration goodies, is working on filling long overdue feature holes in the more traditional contact center products, and reducing the amount of servers required to run it all.

I was happy to participate this week in a contact center day that Cisco held in Boston. We hadn’t had a deep dive into contact center for awhile, in part because of the effort it has taken Cisco to bring to market and educate analysts on their unified communications and collaboration portfolio enhancements. Contact center is part of UC at Cisco, but in last year’s big fall announcement of new UC and collaboration products, traditional contact center products tended to take a back seat; but not now. No, this isn’t a renewed focus on contact center, as the focus has been there all along, we just havent’ heard much about it lately. But in the last year Cisco has added 80+ people to their contact center teams, and are shooting to be number one in contact center; hoping to boot out Avaya, a vision John Hernandez, VP and general manager of Cisco’s contact center business unit, made clear in his opening presentation.

However, getting back to my earlier comment on competitive silver bullets – in order to facilitate adding new capabilities and fixing feature holes in the product line, Cisco made some big changes to both process and organization. The company moved from a waterfall development process to an Agile one so that they can very quickly add new developments or fix issues within products, in weeks, not months or years. They have a board focused solely on customer interaction, and they make use of what other development teams are doing, taking developments within, for example, UC and applying them to the contact center, so they take advantage of existing resources. For example, Cisco is taking the competency collection capabilities of Cisco Pulse, and applying it to skills-based routing functionality in contact centers.

What this has allowed Cisco to do is to focus the bulk of their R&D on the core or legacy contact center portfolio. Cisco still has 70% of its R&D focused on the core platform and applications, and have been avidly working on improving some of the weaker areas of their product lines.

However, the day wasn’t all core product enhancements. Of course, during the event we also heard more on some of more intriguing product additions being made to the portfolio. For example, in November we were introduced to Cisco Pulse, which watches everything going across the network and tags pertinent content building a dynamic picture of knowledge competencies across an organization. Within a contact center, Cisco’s vision is to use Pulse to embellish or replace skills-based routing.

We also heard a lot about how Cisco intends to integrate social media into the contact center as well. For example, Cisco is building a solution to add social media to customer care agents. Cisco is already openly talking about this for launch later this year. Basically, it is an appliance that taps into the social web, captures consumer-generated content, analyzes it, prioritizes it, and then distributes it through workflow. More details to come as they get to announcement.

In all, the new things Cisco is working on seem very compelling, and much more clear than when we sat through the big launch in November. For example, seven months ago Pulse was a concept. Now it is available, and fairly soon we will get to hear about how contact centers are using it. I’m looking forward to it.

At the conclusion of Interactive Intelligence’s annual “Outrageous Interactions” Video Contest this year there was a clear winner. “On Hold” is a must see. This is the third year for Outrageous Interactions and the second for them in video form, and this year was even better than last. Interactive Intelligence decided to have some fun with customers and started the contest three years ago by soliciting outrageous call center stories from customers, as seen through the eyes of customer service reps.

The winner was titled “On Hold”, by Tim Merlau, and it fictitiously depicts a customer named “Dan” who’s been on hold since January 2005. Honestly, I haven’t seen anything related to this that was this funny since Al Bundy spends an entire episode on the now defunct sitcom, Married with Children, trying to navigate the IVR menu from hell to get a car replacement part.

The winner was announced yesterday at the annual Interactive Intelligence User Forum held in Indianapolis, Indiana. As Interactive’s Chief Marketing Office, Joe Staples said, “The ‘On Hold’ video is a deserving winner of our contest due to its relevant theme and the humor with which it’s depicted.”From the very first scene with a disheveled Dan in a bathrobe cradling the phone in his hand like a third appendage, this video perfectly spoofs the experience of being on hold. Whether you relate to Dan’s story as a customer or a call center agent, trust me, this three-minute video promises to entertain.”  Joe was not joking. Watch it.

Tim Merlau and his team of five also produced another entertaining  acceptance speech video. All finalist video contest submissions can be viewed here .

One of the most interesting panels at the recent Mobile Voice Conference was one on patent law and its effects on industry innovation. It wasn’t even so much the hampering of innovation as the scope of damage that can be done out of greed, and the need to stop it. The panel on patent law, was made up of Marie Meteer, of MM Consulting, speaking on “Speech Technology Consortium – Building the Prior Art Library to Enable Better Patent Application Examinations”, Jason Peltz, an attorney with Bartlit, Beck Herman Palencher & Scott LLP, speaking on “Patent strategy: considerations in filing a patent infringement suit and in defending such a suit”, Mark Powell, the Director of the Technology Center 2600 of the US Patent and Trademark Office, speaking on “United States Patent & Trademark Office – How You Can Work With Us”, and Ria Farrell Schalnat, a patent attorney with Frost Brown Todd, speaking on “Speech Technology Consortium – Using Re-examinations Proactively to Clear the Threat of Patent Trolls”.

There is evil lurking out there in the form of patent trolls, which is threatening to stifle creativity and stall the speech technology industry, and others, one of which is unified communications. Ria Farrell Schalnat started her presentation on patent trolls with excerpts from Terry Pratchett’s 1992 work — Troll Bridge, which I found amusing enough to add here:

“It was a lonely bridge across a shallow, white, and treacherous river in a deep valley.A grey shape vaulted over the parapet and landed splay-footed in front of the horse. It waved a club. The troll blinked. It took this long to realize that the saddle was unoccupied. It blinked again, because it could suddenly feel a knife point resting on the back of its neck.

“Hello,” said a voice by its ear.

The troll swallowed. But very carefully.

“Look,” it said desperately, “it’s tradition, OK? A bridge like this, people ort to expect a troll . . . ‘Ere,” it added, as another thought crawled past, “‘ow come I never ‘eard you creepin’ up on me?”

“Because I’m good at it,” said the old man.

The troll risked a sideways glance.

“Bloody hell,” it whispered. “You think you’re Cohen the Barbarian, do you?”

“What do you think?” said Cohen the Barbarian. “

So just what is a patent troll? In a nutshell, it is a non-practicing individual or group/entity that buys up patents from willing sellers or struggling companies that then turns around uses to sue related companies for patent infringement. In other words, this is someone who has not practiced their patent, and is not contributing or innovating in the industry in any way. Instead, they accrue patents as an arsenal (with multiple claims in each patent), bundle them up, and then take companies to court. We saw this happen starting more than a decade ago, with Michael Katz taking on the voice processing industry (at the time, voice messaging and IVR), and now, extremely aggressively, with Phoenix Solutions, who have sued big companies such as Sony, PG&E, and Wells Fargo, for their use of speech technologies.

To set the stage, Jason Peltz explained that there are 200K patents that are issued annually, with 2700 patent suits filed annually. Currently, there are 4000 patent cases pending. The average case takes two years, with an average cost of between $4.5 to $5M to defend, with an average jury award of $6.5M. Something that was equally interesting is that 30-40% of patent cases are overturned on appeal, which is dramatically higher than any other form of litigation. Also, in the case of patent law, the higher courts at the federal level do not have to defer to the trial court’s interpretation of the claims in the subject patent, so if a company successfully defends their patent, and the “troll” decides to appeal, they may get a second bite at the apple, with all the associated costs escalating. Many small companies just fold, as it’s often less costly to pay license fees than legal fees. But it is not just small companies that fold. In a recent case filed in 2002 (US patent 5,799,273) Allvoice Computing, PLC vs. Nuance, Nuance won their first case, and then ended up settling rather than going through it again on a federal level. Why does this matter? Because even though Nuance won, when they settled in July of 2007 rather than pay, it gave the patent troll a big stick to use against smaller companies by being able to say that Nuance paid rather than fight — we can beat you too.

The panel discussed what could potentially be done about this, and Ria Farrell Schalnat talked about using re-examination as an alternative or supplement to litigation.

Depending on the type of re-exam conducted, costs may initially be anywhere between $5,000 – $50,000+. It all depends on the complexity of the patent as well as whether the initial decision is appealed.  Although these fees are a fraction of litigation, they may still be too cost prohibitive for one company to take on by themselves. The potential solution would be to band together to fight the trolls as a group – hence the birth of the idea of a Speech Technology Consortium (STC), which would pool money and intellectual property resources to defend and win against the trolls. There would be a membership fee for participating companies, but no charge for the cost of accepted re-exam requests. A key component of this effort would be to uncover, gather up, and create a database of prior art to be used as evidence in the re-exams.

Ria cited statistics showing a 73% patent “kill rate”, through August 2008, which is a complete elimination of all claims targeted by a requestor, which represents a rate much higher than litigation at 33%.

I just love the whole concept of a group effort to defeat something which only hurts the industry. Needlessly spending money to defend or settle “claims” only drains the coffers of companies trying to honestly innovate, and has the effect of inhibiting new companies from emerging because it jacks up the cost of entry to the market.  I believe that as the STC is developed, that companies in the unified communications space should definitely jump on board and help out as the technologies used in UC, and the features and functions in these claims are interwoven, leaving UC companies at risk of attack too.

As a follow up of my November blog on Oaisys, who provides contact center management solutions including call recording, quality monitoring, and workforce management, the company announced their latest release of software, with  once again, some very compelling content.

Perhaps one of the most useful features is that Oaisys can now integrate directly with SIP trunks to record calls. In this first release of this functionality, Oaisys will be able to capture call data, such as caller ID, call duration, etc. Later releases will allow SIP trunking recording with SMDR and CTI integration. The reason this is important is that for companies that record for reasons such as compliance, they need to capture the entire experience of that caller, not just what happened during the call with the agent. So understanding what pre-recorded announcements were being played for the caller, for example, is something that needs to be captured and combined with the call, including what agent they were transferred to. Currently that is not possible with existing solutions.

Oaisys has also added speech analytics capabilities, so that contact centers can export selected call recordings based on whatever criteria they choose, such as call duration, etc. However, Oaisys didn’t just add the capability for one speech analytics vendor to be used, but made it so customers had a choice of several speech analytics vendors that they can interface to, depending upon features, costs, or other needs.

Oaisys also instituted an on-demand licensing model so that customers that really need to record for quality monitoring purposes or want to carefully choose groups or individuals to monitor can do so in a cost effective manner.

Additionally, Oaisys added multi-language support with the addition of Spanish and Portugese language packs. This goes in line with Oaisys expanding globally, and will be added to as time goes on.

Finally, Oaisys expanded its relationship with Avaya, becoming a gold level partner in the Avaya DevConnect program. With this the company announced that they are fully supporting integrated call recording with Avaya’s Communication Manager software using Avaya Application Enablement Services. Oaisys’ Talkument and Tracer solutions now support CTI connectivity with Communications Manager using the Telephony Services Application Programming Interface (TSAPI).

The next three quarters of their roadmap look equally enticing; especially with more SIP trunking functionality.