So what if IT won!

So what if IT won…it still has to work, right?

Remember Datamation’s voice & data are like oil & water cover from Spring of ‘86? What a difference a quarter of a century makes. Just ask Nortel or AT&T or even Cisco! Where am I going with this? Technological schizophrenia.

Datacomm and data networks are truly wonderful things. They remind me of the analog computers of my misspent youth in the subbasement of Tech - all those wires (think patch cords) going all over the place. But I digress.

By telecom standards, data networks win ugly. Stuff goes bad by design and the network simply fills in around it, no problem. But telecom always had a different approach. Telecom was all about 2 hours of downtime over 40 years (http://www.greatachievements.org/?id=3639), i.e., the telecom network always had to work. None of this fall down & get up & fix itself stuff. Hence the arrogance of all us telecom types over the last few decades. We looked at IT encroaching on our domain, shook our heads & rolled our eyes and said customers just won’t put up with that kind of performance. Voice communications must be inherently reliable, but data networks are built to fail and recover. Dial tone comes from God. They’re just plain incompatible. Period.

So what happened? Cell phones. They weren’t a big deal 20 years ago when they weighed 3 pounds, you needed a bag to haul them around, they had an antenna that stuck up 6 inches, and they cost $3 a minute to use when you could find coverage under you carrier or plan. But cell phones softened everyone up over time…changed everyone’s expectations. In exchange for convenience, customers accommodated what was, by classic telecom standards, unacceptably lousy performance. And now everyone has one.

So what’s that mean to us in the contact center industry? Can we slacken our standards to meet the lowered expectations of cell phone customers familiar with networks that go up & down like yoyos and conversations that periodically turn to hash & evaporate?

I don’t think so. In fact, we have to take it up a notch!

Why? Customer expectations about the reliability and integrity of “stuff” on our end really haven’t changed. With their end so unreliable, we in the voice world have to compensate on the contact center end of the call.

Just thinking about voice apps on an IT-managed infrastructure using IP gives me chills. But that is of course where we come in. IQ Services represents the conscience of telecom professionals past. We’re the “2-hours of downtime over 40 years” people looking over the CIOs’ shoulders and helping them deliver networks that live up to customer expectations of what voice – and web – self-service should be. That is…solutions that are always available and work well 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

Just like Ma Bell always said it should be – no matter who’s minding the store.

Telecom’s still telecom, even if it has been homogenized. It still has to work. Period. Even if there’s no such thing as dial tone any more.

For those of you who didn’t mind the earlier digression, take a peak at these:

http://www.sys-bio.org/sbwWiki/_media/sysbio/labmembers/hsauro/vs-heathkit-ec-1-analog-computer.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdu/94291699/

Mike Burke
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423
http://www.iq-services.com/

Telecom is in my blood

When it comes to telecom, I’m more than a little abnormal – it’s in my blood. My dad retired from AT&T Long Lines after 42 years (he had one of those “Ma Bell is a Cheap Mother!” shirts during one of the CWA strikes), and my mother was one of those ladies on roller skates working the cordboards back in the 40s. My first real job was Co-Op Engineer for GTE AE Labs in beautiful Northlake IL – when I told my dad he said something like “Haven’t you been paying attention? All the nights & weekends I had to work? Knowing how to answer the phone at night? I thought you were smarter than that – and not only do you go to work for a phone company, you go to work for THAT phone company!?!?!?!”

He was shattered. I was hooked.

I still don’t have Caller ID on my home phone – partially because I’m too cheap to pay for it & partially because I genuinely enjoy answering the phone completely unawares, sometimes hoping it’s a telemarketer so I can turn the call around, find out where they’re calling from, whose gear they use, whether or not they’re on the payroll or contracted, and then I pitch them. I always volunteer to answer the phone when visiting my family & the display says something like “out of area – undisclosed caller” – but they don’t let me.

I like calling customer service toll-free numbers & playing with the speech reco lady just to see what she can do. Zeroing out just to see if the screenpop worked, and whether or not I actually get connected to *Krissy*. Firing up a chat session while I’m on hold on the speakerphone just to see which one comes up in queue first.

Which brings me around to Get Human . If you run a contact center and you don’t know about Get Human you should. Because chances are if you don’t know about the Get Human standard for customer service, your customers probably feel like Joe Thompson…

It doesn’t have to be this way of course, and your customers won’t get anywhere near the thrill I do from a visit to telecom hell. They might just strap on their skates and disappear. Check out the Get Human standard – like dear old dad said “Haven’t you been paying attention?”

Mike Burke










http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Telephony vs. Cacophony

In my last post, I wrote about overhearing some folks talking about how voice telecom has become passé. Their basic point…why bother to dial someone in your company when you can IM them? So I started thinking about how much of a pain in the neck IM and SMS really are when I have contacts scattered about on Yahoo, Skype, AIM, Windows Live, etc. I run IM IDs on my box almost all the time to accommodate my friends, colleagues and customers. I’ve managed to keep some of them the same across networks, and Trillian certainly helps. But we have “standards” at work and I have a “persona” I maintain outside the office. So in the heat of the moment and the rush of the day, things can get very interesting when you accidentally click on the wrong contact, type something a little too quickly or that email auto-fills the incorrect address. And who isn’t thrilled to get that IM or Tweet to remind you to check a recently deposited voicemail or email?

I’ve been in telecom a long, long time. This train of thought led to memories of those ads in Telephony Magazine circa 1975 that showed the masses of phone lines & wires that appeared a couple of decades after Alexander made that first call to Mr. Watson. As you old timers will no doubt remember, there were separate dial-tone providers and networks and no mechanism to go between them. So they each strung their own wires, and if you really wanted to speak with your Aunt Bertha, on Scott Rice Telecom, and you had already installed Frontier, you had to put in a second phone and a new connection to your home!

So here we are again – multiple networks, multiple IDs, multiple devices, multiple personalities. Something of a zoo methinks. Better? Sure! But I have to believe that what happened 100 years ago is bound to repeat. Google’s on the path with its Google Voice service. Perhaps SIP is the mechanism that will make it all possible. What can be done for chat? Who knows.

Mike Burke



http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

#1 - Dial tone came from God…

Heard at an InAAU session in Orlando a couple of weeks ago (that’s the Avaya User Group meeting)…

An Avaya distributor was talking about a client he’d been courting for a few years – a big one – 4,500 to 5,000 desktops. They’d done the Y2K thing last round, so they’re ripe for a new switch, right? All that new technology out there, IP’s mature now, lots of new features, UC, OCS, etc. Guess again! What they heard was “Why bother? No one calls anyone internally anymore. We’re all IM now & we’ve got what we need. That old box will be fine.”

Whoa! Can you imagine how that hit the Account Exec? How many other clients are thinking the same thing these days?

Clearly the industry’s changing, but would you have thought it could go that way? Why bother with voice? A client you thought you knew? Wow!

So what’s ahead for voice?

During a discussion with a voice veteran about communication modalities the other day we took the standard trip down memory lane – he’d learned, just like I did, that dial tone came from God. But, he pointed out, those days are long gone & we just better get over it. Thirty years ago there were no other options for real-time communications. You could send a letter or a telegram, but if you had a real-time need, it was telecom. So it had to work.

Today there’s IM, email, mobile phones, web conferencing – a whole host of new modalities, all with real-time components. And with everyone trying to do 3 things at once (if you still have a job), email is often more real-time than a voice call because you can answer an email while you’re in a conference call. Same goes for IM of course.

So voice telecom now has backup, which means it doesn’t have to always work because there are so many other ways to communicate right now -- even if us fogies haven’t caught on yet. Telecom really is just another app. Make that a modality.

Get the message?

How ‘bout I IM you the next time we need to chat... I’m on yahoo, AOL, MSN, skype… hmmmm.

Mike Burke

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423