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.

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.

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.

I would say that the bulk of attention in the industry is paid to the handful of big vendors and multitudes of smaller ones that create products and solutions, and then sell them direct or through partners, and systems integrators. We talk about “the channel”, but don’t talk a lot about the channel, typically because of the vast amount of announcements that require our attention from the big manufacturers, such as the Cisco’s, Avaya’s and IBM’s of the world. The same holds true for technology vendors that supply adjunct or peripheral technology to those same vendors, such as speech technologies, for example. We tend to talk less about them, and often their contribution is hidden in products delivered by the big guys. I’ll save this last group for a different blog, and instead today focus on a couple of examples of how systems integrators work and the contribution they play in getting solutions to the market.

Systems integrators are a valuable group of partners that supplement a company’s direct sales and support staff. More importantly, for the customer, they understand how to successfully integrate the systems and applications not just from one vendor, but multiple vendors, which more often than not is the reality of any company’s business infrastructure. They also provide continuous systems and application improvement, maintenance and support over time. Long term they develop deep expertise across a wide range of platforms, products and applications, which is something that the bigger vendors often don’t do as well. In essence they act as a trusted arm of a bigger vendor.

Let’s look at two of these vendors, and one vertical – mobility – to show how this works. Acclaim Telecom Services, Inc., while not billed as a classic systems integrator, acts in some capacity as a systems integrator in that they have broad knowledge across multiple platforms, act as a systems integrator for some of them, such as delivering self-service (IVR) applications on Microsoft Speech Server, and develop and deliver applications on multiple platforms as well.

For example, in the case of mobility solutions, Acclaim has launched the company’s Smartphone Mobile Solutions Division, powered by one of those platforms; Unwired Nation. Acclaim launched this as a hosted service to provide diverse mobile applications for companies wanting to take advantage of the growing use of mobile applications as a customer channel. The Unwired Mobile Platform (UMP) provides access to multiple device platforms through a single integration API, which means that an application can be developed once and deployed across multiple mobile devices, without regard to operating system or device manufacturer. This solves a problem that I touch on briefly in my upcoming April Voice Value column in Speech Technology Magazine. Despite the proliferation of mobile applications, having to write to different devices and operating systems is a deterrent to growth.

As another example, SOFTEL Communications, is a classic systems integrator/reseller in that they have very broad expertise in integrating products and solutions across multiple vendor platforms, such as Genesys, Avaya and Cisco, along with third-party application providers, such as CRM, workforce management, VoIP, etc. SOFTEL also creates complimentary products and solutions to supplement those offered by such vendors.

In the case of mobility, for example, SOFTEL provides location-based services (LBS) to companies, such as Telco’s for their end customers, such as downtown business districts or mall owners. They create the solution and partner with Telco’s to deliver to end user customers.

In both cases these companies partner with other vendors, integrate platforms and products together, and then provide their “value-add”, on top to round out and improve the offering.

If you are a customer looking for a solution it is well worth checking out the third party providers that work with the big vendors. It works well in the past, and as a proof point, more and more of the bigger vendors are radically changing the mix of direct and indirect sales that they use to a more indirect model.  It shouldn’t be hard to find one that has the right mix of expertise for the solutions that you might have or be moving towards.

I didn’t personally do a speech technology prediction column at the beginning of 2009, but one of my colleagues at Speech Technology Magazine did. Eric Barkin wrote a feature article, entitled, 2009: What the New Year Will Bring, in which he talks about the effects of the economy on speech technologies, and on some of the predictions for speech from some of my analyst colleagues. It’s debatable whether the economy has gotten that much better in a year, but that didn’t stop the speech industry from moving ahead. Harvesting nuggets from Eric’s column, here are the predictions from that column, followed by what I think did happen in his categories, along with some others that didn’t make it on his list, but made headlines in 2009 nonetheless.

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This week I participated in a webinar, along with Voxify, on the new VUI or Voice User Intelligence in customer support applications. You can listen to the replay here if you are interested. The main theme was the importance of creating a better user experience for customers within self-service and some of the advanced ways of improving self-service applications to achieve this. The folks at Voxify and I have talked for a long time about how they are improving applications in the hospitality sector with such customers as Red Lion Hotels, so from a over-the-phone customer support perspective, Voxify is using speech, and intelligence about the customer to give the customer better service when they call in.

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