Implementation

Don’t let social media distract your contact center

Is social media important? Yes.

Does your contact center need it? Not necessarily.

Here’s the hard truth: Your contact center still has plenty of room for improvement without even throwing social media into the mix. The IVR menu structure could be tweaked. Response from the backend data dip could be optimized. Speech applications need tuning. Staffing issues need resolution. Quality monitoring is inconsistent. Incorrect screen-pops are becoming a menace. Business intelligence is fast becoming an oxymoron. Etc.

So why are you worrying about social media?

Just because industry analysts and researchers say so? People like Zeus Kerravala of The Yankee Group cannot wait for your company to “get on board with social media,” but in this case the research was tied to Siemens Enterprise, which of course has an interest in selling as many of their social media-capable products as possible. I understand that this is part of the job description and have nothing but respect for guys like Mr. Kerravala, but here is my humble opinion on the whole matter.

Of course, the whole social media craze is spreading like wildfire — much like VOIP, I dare say — but it’s starting to sound like a WMD, or Weapon of Mass Distraction, to contact center operations. There. I’ve said it. Usage of Facebook and Twitter has increased dramatically, but trust me, not a whole lot of these interactions are about business interactions. Most of the time we’re commenting on a friend’s vacation pictures from Mexico (“Awww, so cuuuuuute!”) or tweeting about celebrity gossip (“LiLo gets only 90 days in jail?! #justicefail”). Don’t believe me? Go to Twitter’s website at any time and look at the trending topics. Rarely you’ll find anything relevant to business (e.g. company name, business terms, business buzzwords) on the list… Need more evidence? Listen in on your call recordings and find out what percentage of callers complain about you guys not using social media.

Yes, go ahead and take that deep breath. Do you feel less anxious now?

During my attendance of VoiceCon and ACCE a good portion of workshops and keynotes were dedicated to social media topics. Social media was billed as the next wave of customer engagement and interaction. UC systems, CRM systems, and CTI systems will all need to integrate with social media or risk being marginalized. Contact centers better adopt social media or risk being blamed for trashing a company brand. I saw supervisors under tremendous pressure to learn, devise, and execute a social media plan that I was worried about their health.

Enough already. It’s not the end of the world if your contact center lives in a time warp of 90s technology. My Mom thinks her Luxo-like iMac is the best thing since sliced bread. As long as the technology is doing its job by enabling great customer service to be provided — and need I remind you of the human factor in this equation — then there’s no rush to embrace the buzz of the day.

It would be wise to take a step back and take a hard look at your contact center. I can assure you there will be room for improvement without even mentioning the phrase “social media.”

UC’s impact mostly hype?

If your organization isn’t thinking about unified communications, you may get that nagging feeling of being left behind in the latest communications technology promised to delivery positive business impact.

Well, don’t feel too bad now. InformationWeek surveyed a few hundred business technology professionals about UC’s impact, and the results are enough to rain on any UC parade:

The buzz around enterprise unified communications is loud, and getting more so as IT spending loosens. The problem is, in our experience and confirmed by our InformationWeek Analytics 2010 Unified Communications Survey of 406 business technology professionals, enterprise-wide UC programs that have a truly transformative impact on business processes are all too rare.

For example, videoconferencing has lately hogged the spotlight. But too often we see IT groups set up expensive video systems and walk away, with nary an hour of training or any plan to track whether employees even use the tool. From the CFO’s perspective, consumer-class applications, such as Skype and Yahoo Messenger, seem to provide much the same benefit as enterprise-class systems, without all the hassle and expense. No wonder we’re faced with frustration, misunderstandings, and elusive ROI.

Does this remind you of anything? Say, back in the days when CRM was taking off and was the buzzword in almost all business technology articles?

In the glory days of PeopleSoft and Siebel, there seemed no end to their high-flying potential. They hired almost anyone out of college who could be molded into a business/technical consultant. They signed on customer upon customer whose CTO drank the Kool-Aid and was sold on CRM’s transformative powers. The promise of cost savings, business processes re-engineered, and happy executives. Seemed like a no-brainer!

But as we all know, many of these CRM implementations failed miserably. Over time and over budget. Litigations ensued. In fact, there’s been stories of how failed CRM projects broke companies.

UC adopters: may past CRM projects serve as lessons for you. Like CRM vendors, UC vendors will promise the moon. It’s best for you to stay grounded in evaluating UC’s benefits for the organization. Executives are especially vulnerable these days because of the economic downturn, and vendors will certainly exploit that.

If you follow closely the developments in UC, you need to read the whole article.

Marin County v. Deloitte

There is a lawsuit that is attracting a lot of attention among the tech systems integrators and their customers. In County of Marin v. Deloitte Consulting LLP, the County alleges fraud on part of Deloitte for misrepresenting their team resources as experienced professionals and/or experts in the SAP Public Sector implementation. The County even goes as far to say that Deloitte used this contract to provide on-the-job training for some team members. Deloitte was hired in 2005 and after all these years the ERP system is still a mess, according to the lawsuit.

Deloitte fired back with a claim alleging “breach of agreement and unpaid invoices.”

Michael Krigsman has a good writeup on ZDnet. Here’s my take stemming from my own CTI project experiences…

Integrators LOVE public sector projects

Government and municipal customers are often considered the cash cows for systems integrators and vendors. Lots of milking and lots of expensive CYA. The truth is, a public sector customer is often overstaffed, bureaucratic, and loaded with taxpayer money (okay, maybe not with the recent economic turmoil). It gets even worse if there are union workers involved. Sadly that is just the nature of government. Vendors realize this and will certainly exploit it to maximize profit and margins.

Because of the inefficient nature of government, it will take more dollars to get things done. That’s just the way it is. For each layer of management approval required for project changes, dollars are going down the drain. For each hour that’s required for reviews by everyone and their bosses, and as hours turn into days with no decision in sight, money is being thrown out the window. Public sector employees are also very risk-averse and resistant to change. They prefer to avoid accountability for fear of embarrassment, but usually when something bad happens they will just pour more money into the problem rather than admit fault.

That’s perfectly fine with SIs. In fact, SIs count on it.

I’m willing to bet that Marin County never really took control of the project. I bet the County just wanted to hire somebody to take care of everything, i.e. pay somebody (Deloitte) to make the problem (the SAP project) go away.

It cannot work that way. The customer has a duty to keep SIs on their toes. I’m not saying to constantly ask for status meetings or watch over their shoulders, but to convey the expectation that all parties will be accountable for their end of the deal.

Even better, the public sector customer can disrupt the stereotype by being flexible and open to accept better processes, new organizational changes, and being a good steward of taxpayer money. That ought to shock the integrator.

Technical complexity requires simplifying everything else

The more complex the system, the better it is to streamline and simplify everything around it. That means cut down on paperwork, flatten the team organization, and streamline the processes.

Who wants to deal with a five-day waiting period before a firewall port can be opened? Who wants to get that phone call from AP about a missing $1 receipt for that Coke you got at the vending machine? Is it really necessary to ask for VP-level approval for taking just a few days off?

Having to deal with crap (yes, that’s a technical term) like that only puts additional burden onto the team which I’m sure is already inundated with technical challenges and deadlines.

Technical ability doesn’t guarantee success, integrity does

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you’re thinking: Eugene is high on crack. But I firmly believe that many issues and problems facing troubled IT projects are results of dishonesty and unethical behavior, applicable to both the SI and the customer.

Technical problems are almost always solvable in today’s environment. Perhaps it’ll take some more time and money and manpower, but it shall not hinder the ultimate success of the project.

Big SIs will lie to make more money; small SIs will lie to survive. It’s that simple. If you work for an SI then you should do everything in your power to maintain your professionalism and integrity. It will pay off in your long term career.

What gets the project in trouble and pushes it to the edge of failure? Dishonesty about team resources, dishonesty about expenses, dishonesty about existing IT systems, dishonesty about payments, etc.

Closely watched lawsuit

The outcome of this lawsuit could have far reaching effects. Just think of the number of IT projects that aren’t deemed a success. Add on to the fact that many SIs today rely on outsourced resources (some even offshore) which definitely complicates matters.

What’s your take on this litigation?

Hitler Not Happy meme applied to UC interoperability

Well, I supposed this was bound to happen sooner or later…

BearPaw Software digs a niche in Genesys ecosystem

As I had written earlier, a new sponsor showed up to this year’s Genesys G-Force Chicago and Amsterdam: BearPaw Software. It was noteworthy to me because although BearPaw’s been serving the Genesys ecosystem for years, this was the first time it’d signed on as a sponsor and even threw a kick-butt (from what I’d heard) welcome reception in Chicago. Also, in a previous engagement years ago I had the chance to meet its founder, Duane Abrams. I reached out to him last week for an interview and opportunity to catch up, and was very grateful that he took time out of his busy project schedule for a phone call.

One thing you’ll notice about the company is that it primarily focuses on software. Most companies in the Genesys ecosystem feed off professional service gigs which traditionally provide greater margins (or used to, when the economy was in better shape). These are the systems integration (SI) departments from the top carriers (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) and top consulting firms (IBM, Accenture, etc.), to the next tier shops (Aria Solutions, Touchpoint, etc.), to the third-tiers (Mediu, eLoyalty. etc.), then to some boutique outfits. Oftentimes a Genesys implementation team would consist of resources from these various companies, whereby the contracted company would subcontract work to augment the team, and sometimes even the subcontractor would subcontract some work.

Messy, I know. According to Duane, it is tough for a small company like BearPaw to compete with the top dogs for SI work because most of the time the contract is awarded to the vendor which helped (re)sell the Genesys software. Instead, he decided there was a market for additional software to complement Genesys’ products to “enhance the Genesys core and fill gaps in Genesys.” That is the main differentiator of BearPaw.

The company has developers in Europe and the U.S. to make Duane’s product visions come true, such as its flagship CallFlow Analyzer and ReVision offerings.

CallFlow Analyzer aims to provide analytical insights into a customer’s operations by mapping the paths of calls from cradle to grave. The business can then look at these diagrams to determine which call segment is costing the most money or producing the least caller satisfaction, and make adjustments accordingly. Perhaps tweaking an IVR menu, or modifying the wording of a menu option, or optimizing a database transaction along the way. In essence the tool allows the business to easily baseline and benchmark the impact of contact center programming, and may even be used as a call flow debugging utility. There is also a plan to add a simulation feature to the product which may come out sometime in 2011 in a beta version.

ReVision would be a product that any Genesys consultant could get excited about. Billed as “version control for Genesys,” ReVision will definitely help with all those common configuration tweaks necessary on nearly all Genesys implementations.

And what of the much publicized hosted architecture and the new exciting Genesys 8?

The truth is, Duane hasn’t seen many hosted implementations of Genesys either, in the U.S. or across the pond. In 2009 Genesys touted the partnership with AT&T which provided hosted Genesys services for InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), but since that announcement it appears no other major customer has jumped onto that bandwagon. Duane thinks that for most corporations who can afford Genesys they likely already invested in one or more data centers, so selling them a hosted solution along with a more complicated deployment and support plan because of it doesn’t make much economic sense.

Genesys 8, considered to be a very important and major update, has generated a lot of buzz in the Genesys ecosystem. The thing that’s holding customers back, according to Duane, is Genesys’ lack of a clear migration path. Topped with Genesys’ history of “dot oh” troubles, most customers are in a holding pattern in terms of upgrading. Parent company Alcatel-Lucent, posting a significant first quarter loss, may need Genesys to aggressively push for upgrades in order to help with the bottom line. After all, Genesys is a software company and makes most of its money from licensing and upgrades.

So after years of low-profile success, BearPaw Software is ready to step into the spotlight to become the premier Genesys ISV. Its high-profile sponsorship of G-Force was the first step, and according to Duane, he’s also ready to commit more resources in the future, perhaps a deeper involvement with the annual Genesys Developers Summit. And I’m sure that’s welcome news for those in the Genesys ecosystem.