A day (two actually) without the intarweb

Tuesday, May 26th was one of those really frustrating days where nothing seemed to go my way. This badness started in the morning when I figured out that something had gone horribly wrong with my high-speed internet connection. I could connect to the internet and every now and then I could open a web page, but I could not send email and most of my IM’s wouldn’t go through. Worse was the fact that my home phone didn’t work, since it is a Vonage phone and depends on my cable modem from Comcast to function.

This is not a situation that I have had to deal with extensively in the past, with only 2-3 days without a network connection in the past 5 years (barring hurricanes where there was no power for multiple days). That’s a pretty good track record and a testament to the general reliability of the cable service in my neighborhood. I am also quite meticulous about having every piece of electronic equipment in my home on either a UPS or a quality surge protector. That includes all of the networking gear, so that I don’t lose network connectivity if the power goes out briefly. In South Florida, a good rain storm will cause brown-outs and brief power outages, and I hear the alarms on my various UPS’s go off about 3 times a week.

What was interesting about this experience (besides scouring Google Maps on my iPhone for a Fedex Office or Starbucks location with Wi-Fi nearby) is that I actually had an opportunity to test out Comcast’s customer service and tech support for myself, after reading about their recent surge in CSAT scores and focus on Twitter as a service channel.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comment: “RightNow, Salesforce Offer Services To Track Customer Complaints On Twitter, YouTube”

Comment on this article by Mary Hayes Weier on InformationWeek’s Cloud Computing blogs, found via @D_Hong on Twitter.

Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is a step in the right direction for the enterprise adoption of social media. Web 2.0 companies like RightNow and Salesforce that are already experts in cloud-based computing and CRM have found a way to use social media to enhance their existing offerings in a way that is both meaningful and quantifiable for companies. I have not seen a demonstration of this technology yet, but the article mentions that several of the oft-referenced Twitter-darlings, like Comcast and Dell are already using the technology. From the article:

Here’s how it works: You set RightNow Cloud Monitor to search for key words, in 33 languages, in Twitter and YouTube, such as, “XYZ Corp.,” “phone,” “junk,” “crap,” “mad,” “angry,” and the ever-popular “sucks.” After retrieving the tweets or videos, an XYZ customer agent can respond to the individual or create an incident report and put it into the RightNow workflow (RightNow, by the way, is offered in the software-as-a-service model.) Then a statistically based natural-language processing system applies a scale for how positive or negative the emotion is in each incident, which lets XYZ rank the priority in which it deals with each incident.

RightNow is planning future support for Facebook and LinkedIn, and is looking at how it can apply the service even more broadly, such as chat rooms. RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte tells me that some customers have been using the product for nine months, and it’s ready for use by the company’s full customer base.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com will offer a similar application for its CRM service this summer that monitors Twitter. Comcast, Cable, Dell, and European telecom company Orange are among the customers that have signed up for it.

The integration of Twitter in a meaningful way with Salesforce.com is of particular interest to me, because the computer telephony integration (CTI) products for Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) have a Salesforce.com CRM connector. This means that when Salesforce begins offering the service later this summer, existing contact centers running UCCE can begin to leverage Twitter (and hopefully other social media) without having to develop their Twitter strategy from scratch. They can simply manage and track the Twitter cloud as an extension of the Salesforce CRM product. The extent to which the Twitter integration is able to be leveraged by customer service agents using the CRM connector and how it will impact contact center reporting is my first and most pressing question.

This is a HUGE first step, and I look forward to learning more about the offerings from both RightNow and Salesforce.

One additional comment on this passage from the article:

So let’s get back to the aforementioned creepy aspect of all this. If a company contacted me on Twitter following a post, I think, initially, I might be taken back a bit. But really, this is in no way a violation of privacy. When you tweet, you’re tweeting to anyone and everyone. That’s the nature of Twitter. There is no privacy there. Same with YouTube. You don’t get to choose who responds to what you have to tell the world.

I find this particularly interesting because it so directly contradicts the expectations and disappointment expressed by Catherine Ventura from The Huffington Post, in an article that I commented on recently. On one hand we have a blogger for The Huffington Post getting, well, huffy about not getting a response to her Twitter post about a “horror story” with AT&T. On the other hand we have a blogger from InformationWeek discussing how scary it would be to have her Tweets tracked and analyzed by large corporations with whom she does business - but ultimately she admits that the prospect seems inevitable if you use a social media service.

Two very different views of the same subject. I think it illustrates an even larger challenge that is yet to come for enterprises hoping to leverage social media. How much is “too much”when it comes to monitoring and tracking your clients and customers?

I am a Sr. Principal at eLoyalty (a Cisco Partner). The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent eLoyalty’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Comment: “The ROI from Twitter: Don’t bother telling your CFO”

This is a comment on a article on blogs.ZDNet.com by Tom Steinert-Threlkeld.

I think this article’s title is dead on, at least for now, about the ROI that one might expect from Twitter in the enterprise. From the article:

In the question and answer period, after Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein delivered their tips, one of the questions was: “How do you quantify the benefit of Twitter to a CFO?”

O’Reilly’s response: “I wouldn’t bother.”

As I have mentioned in previous posts on this blog and on my Twitter feed, the metrics and tools of measurement for customer service (or any enterprise interaction) via Twitter still remain to be seen. These tools, methods and metrics may be under development in some code bunker somewhere or secured within the walls of a Fortune 500 company with time and money to invest in such matters. They certainly have not become mainstream.   Read the rest of this entry »

Comment: Sprint Links Up with the Enterprise

My comment on this article by Eric Krapf, Editor on NoJitter.com.

One of the last barriers to enterprise Unified Communications (UC) appears to finally be coming down. Sprint has announced that they will support presence status for mobile phones on the Sprint wireless network. Sprint Mobile Integration will allow companies to extend their Cisco Unified Communications Manager or Avaya Communication Manager out to enterprise mobile users with support for presence. From the article:

Sprint is touting the service’s ability to avoid desk phone deployment for highly mobile workers, who can use their mobiles and stay on-net; Dan Jacobson told me an enterprise could even consider the Mobile Integration service as a way to avoid deploying a PBX or any other premises system at small offices–you just give everyone a mobile and they hang off the Sprint network that’s tied to the main enterprise system.

This has two significant effects from my point of view.

1. This represents a huge potential shift in the designs for branch PBX deployments for large distributed enterprise PBX systems. Currently these branch deployments require locally based routers (voice gateways) in case the WAN fails and someone needs to place an emergency call, as well as adequate WAN bandwidth to support the voice calls that will terminate to or be generated from each branch location. There is a potential savings in hardware (phones, routers, switches, etc.) and deployment time for large branch deployments.
2. This capability may the first part of the “missing link” that enterprises are waiting to see in the UC market. There is so much talk of “federation” and platform integrations, as well as B2B presence sharing. With the increase in mobile users, work-at-home users and outsource relationships it will be critical that carriers step in to fill the gap between enterprises.

The next major step will be to support additional presence states, beyond just “Available” and “On The Phone” at the carrier level, and across carriers. Imagine if you never had to dial someone again, just to hear a voicemail message and wait for them to call you back. Comprehensive, universal presence would allow you to see when people in your contact list are available, busy or out of range and plan your contact with them accordingly.

Skype does this today, and is one of the fastest growing telephony services in the world - all on the carrier’s own networks. It only makes sense for Sprint and others to offer the same flexibility to their customers. It will be interesting to see if the other carriers offer competing products and whether Sprint will secure new business as a result of this offering.

A question to my readers: Will presence be the death of voicemail? I’ll have to cover that in a future blog post. Feel free to comment.

Response to: “AT&T operators should answer more social media calls”

This is a response to this article that I found through a retweet by @tfamous from @D_Hong:

I certainly won’t argue the “image value” of recent appearances of social media in customer service, but articles like the one from The Huffington Post’s Catherine Ventura fail to recognize the costs associated with introducing a full-blown new channel for customer service. From the article:

“Is anyone from AT&T on Twitter?” I tweeted several weeks ago, “I have a horror story.”

The silence was deafening, despite the fact that there are at least six Twitter accounts that feature AT&T’s blue-striped sphere as their avatar. Granted, with a foreboding Tweet like that, I might not have wanted to respond either, but I’m a customer, so AT&T should have been paying attention.

I have to admit I was perplexed that that the AT&T sphere is not participating more actively in the Twittersphere. – Catherine Ventura, The Huffington Post

At a company like AT&T, where there are millions of customers that need support and customer service each month, the implementation of a new customer support channel is a major strategic decision which could cost millions of dollars to implement. Any corporation undertaking this sort of effort will want to do so  in a way that is supportable, sustainable and consistent. But more importantly, as I mentioned in my previous post on the subject of Twitter, there is an emerging shift from reactive customer service to proactive customer relationship building through social media that is practically demanded by Ms. Ventura under the terms of her customer relationship with AT&T.

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Lunch Hour Review: Polycom VoiceStation 500

I spend a huge portion of my day on the telephone, predominantly on conference calls. For the past year I have been using a Panasonic multi-handset DECT6.0 cordless phone with speakerphones built into each handset. Honestly, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the voice quality and often found myself struggling to be heard, especially in conversations where one person tended to dominate. In these instances the Panasonic just wouldn’t let me interject clarifications or corrections at the appropriate moment. This was a major source of frustration, and led to a search for a good conference room phone, similar to those used in most offices.

I do not have a digital phone system at home, so I needed a conference phone that supported an analog line (actually a Vonage line in my case). As I researched PolyCom phones, which have always been my favorite conference phones, I happened upon the PolyCom VoiceStation 500 on Amazon.com. This phone works with analog lines, but the most exciting feature is support for Bluetooth phones and direct connection from your computer. In a single product I could have my Vonage line, my iPhone and even my computer all connected to a single device for conferences. I placed an order immediately.

Image of PolyCom VS500

First impressions:

The VS500 is very easy to install. It comes with a power “brick” which has three ports, a few cables, and the familiar three-mic base unit. To install, you plug in the brick, connect the included cable with RJ-45 ends to the brick and the base unit, and connect your analog phone line directly to the brick. Both power and voice are carried on the single RJ-45 cables, thus reducing the number of cables you must drape across your desk or conference table. The phone looksgreat, with a grey top and darker grey lower section, built in keypad, mute, and volume controls. The top of the VS500 has three LEDs which shine a bright red when the phone is muted, and green when a call is connected (unmuted) via the analog line or when the analog line is ringing. There is also an analog auxiliary port in the brick, in case you want to connect a fax, modem, or handset behind the conference phone.

Likes:

• Bluetooth connectivity
• Clarity of speaker
• Superb volume range - I can hear it from the other side of the house at maximum
• Multiple microphones with 7-10 foot range without shouting

Dislikes:

• LEDs do not light up when talking on a call using Bluetooth - Blue LEDs would have been cool to distinguish from an analog call
• Re-establishing Bluetooth connection for a paired device that was out of range - sometimes gives me trouble
• Cannot use the keypad on the VS500 to dial the mobile phone - not too bad since my iPhone sits in a cradle next to the VS500

Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 5

1and1 has a sense of humor

Have you ever had one of those moments where you were on hold or in queue for a contact center and the music was so good that you didn’t want anyone to pick up? Yeah, neither had I - until today.

I called my webhost (1and1.com) this morning to discuss my hosting package, and while on hold with their sales department I was treated to the ultimate in contact center hold music. What song could possibly engage me so thoroughly you ask?

This song.

For the uninitiated, this song is from the closing credits of the video game Portal by Valve Corporation.

Thoughts on Twitter

I am beginning to use Twitter, along with several free services that augment it, for keeping up with topics that are trending in real-time related to my job. No matter where you turn, you seem to see, hear or read something about Twitter these days. Large corporations are taking advantage of search tools to monitor every mention of their company on Twitter and respond in real-time to those mentions, whether good or bad. Ostensibly, this has the effect of fostering a closer relationship with those customers and potentially reducing customer service costs down the road. A simpler explanation is that customers are reacting positively to this new real-time customer service model, as evidenced by Bloomberg’s report on Comcast’s rising customer satisfaction scores. (Could the hiring of 15,000 new customer service reps since 2007 or proactive network monitoring be the reason for the improvement, or is Twitter really responsible?)

I can understand why Twitter is perceived as a revolution for customer service, but I also understand very well how the traditional contact center is organized and managed. If you think about it, Twitter is fostering a reversal of the model for customer service that has been developing in the contact center space for more than a decade. Read the rest of this entry »

After a long time away from blogging…

This is the first blog post that I have written in quite a long time. My current job keeps me rather busy, and I simply haven’t had the time to invest in writing about my daily life. Additionally, I can’t write about much of the work that I do because of non-disclosure agreements with my employer’s Clients.

I am not entirely sure what I will write in this blog or if there will be a primary topic, but I know that I am anxious to resume writing about my interests - technology, gadgets and SCUBA diving, as well the focus of most of my days at work - Cisco, VoIP and the Contact Center.

Let’s just see how things go!