Adios my friends…

Forgot to mention…I attended INNUA – the annual Nortel User Group meeting in Pittsburgh last month. Bad enough Nortel’s on the edge of mortality, but then you throw in the economy in general and it got really weird. We were exhibiting, and it was amazing how happy and grateful they were to have us there. Thank you from the committee! Thank you from Nortel! Thank you from Pittsburgh!

But it was Nortel’s swansong and everyone knew it. Mike Z. was up there saying things like “Thank you all for your loyalty through the years. I know you want to know what’s next and I really want to tell you, but I just can’t yet. We’re going to try to keep it together as best we can…” So a week later Nokia-Siemens picked up the network piece for a song. But now what about enterprise? Siemens again? Avaya? Who can tell? When will we know? A surprise perhaps? Maybe Nortel could come back as Rolm? What do you think?

You know it’s not all just going to go up in smoke. Those DMSes out there aren’t going to disappear overnight by any stretch of the imagination. Wouldn’t it be weird if Avaya, the remnant of AT&T Business Telecom, actually ended up buddied up with its old nemesis? I guess stranger things have happened.

I spent a lot of time in the company of Nortel folks, all moving forward but in an altered state. It was clear they cared about their company, their innovative technology and their brand, but they’re still in shock that their time in the sun has come and gone. I was reminded of that web bit that made the rounds during the telecomm crash in 2001 – the one about the 2 Nortel guys who each got a bonus; one decided to invest in Nortel stock, the other bought beer in returnable bottles. (http://oclug.on.ca/archives/oclug/2001-September/009408.html) After the crash, the returnable beer bottles were worth more than the stock. Who knew it would actually turn into liquidation? What a world, what a world…

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

IQ Services
6601 Lyndale Ave South, Suite 330
Minneapolis MN  55423

 

Red River keeps on rolling…

There’s a lot going on around the world this week – wars, tourists in space, North Korean rockets, Bear Market bounces, greed grief, and, of course, weather.

But here in the Upper Midwest there’s really only one story – the Red River of the North.

The Red’s unconventional in that it flows north, ultimately to Hudson Bay, which means it’s melting & wants to flow out before there’s anywhere for it all to go. This flood’s unprecedented – more water earlier in the year than there’s ever been before. You can prepare but you can’t really practice for a flood of these proportions. Disaster recovery planning is essential, but for an incident like this it is really hard to dry run – pun intended.

(Warning…bad segue approaching)

Fortunately, when it comes to testing your communication and contact center solutions, there really is a way to practice or to dry run that disaster or business disruption response. Around good ol’ IQ Services, business continuity and disaster recovery testing is an every day event. It is what we do. We make sure communication and contact center solutions work the way they are supposed to despite routine maintenance, accidentally pulled plugs and — worse yet — lightning strikes and hurricanes.

This week one of the newest members of our IQ Services family is “up nort” helping his family and others weather the storm. He is busy making sandwiches and moving special belongings to higher ground. He says things have calmed down a bit for the moment. Blizzard like weather is still in the forecast. Even when the threat is over this year, there is still next year. There will be more floods, blizzards, and tornadoes; more pulled plugs and bad cards. We’ll just keep doing our thing. The people of the Dakotas and Minnesota will keep moving, keep helping each other. The Red River will keep rolling…

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

 

What you don’t know you don’t know WILL hurt you!!

Why do contact center managers test their systems?

• So they don’t get fired when it all goes sideways 23 minutes into peak busy hour?
• So their customers won’t be inconvenienced when they use that new self-service, speech reco- enabled, web services-fed hosted IP voice portal
• So their customers won’t be frustrated when they opt-out and get CTI-MPLS-transferred to Krissy in Bangalore or dropped?
• Maybe all of the above?…

Everyone knows a well-crafted contact center solution is a thing of beauty. But it is also complex — a best-in-class hybrid implementation. Kind of like Monster Trucks – designed to perform spectacular feats in a really cool way but most importantly to get the crowd to say “WOW! That was awesome! Let’s do it again!” Making sure the “Wow!” is really there is a big part of contact center planning these days.

Everyone knows they don’t know if the “Wow!” really is there. They know they won’t know whether or not their systems have been properly implemented end-to-end until they turn them on and take them out for a run. And they certainly would prefer the maiden voyage not be with live customers whose first use becomes their last use when the “Wow!” turns to “Whoa!” Those customers decide quickly that from now on they might as well 0-out & talk to Krissy in the first place.

But no one knows what they don’t know.

And that’s the real reason they test. The smart ones know there are things they don’t know they don’t know. But they know they want to know.

You wouldn’t believe the stuff we expose – stubbed out IVR apps that make it sound like you really did make a payment on your car loan (but didn’t), systems that go catatonic waiting for a recognizer to kick in (but only after 77% load is achieved), spans that are connected and look like they’re on, (but aren’t and apparently never were), servers that go bump in the night the first time they really spin up, and more.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve personally heard “If I hadn’t heard it I wouldn’t believe it – I had no idea!”

But how would you know? It all looked good on paper. You hired the best team possible.

It’s the stuff they didn’t know they didn’t know that keeps them coming back – especially the smart ones.

And Krissy is happier too.

Mike Burke

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

 

The Experience Matters

Don’t you love it when something that seems like it should be intuitively obvious to the casual observer turns out to be right on the money? Literally?

13 years ago, IQ Services was started by a couple of guys that had a really cool idea – if you could only figure out how good the user experience was going to be before you put a new contact center into production you could tune it before it went into production instead of 3 days later after it dropped to its knees the first time it was hit with full load.

Customer experience – make sure you’ve got it right before it’s too late.

Sounds like a natural, doesn’t it? 13 years ago they already knew it was all about the experience, what happens when someone actually uses your system, not just how it looks on paper when you list the components, comb the ACD metrics or plot the standard deviation of AHT or some such thing.

So what’s this got to do with Interactions? This past week in Orlando, Intervoice formally introduced its new personna – Convergys (http://www.convergys.com/) – to its base of longtime loyal users at Interactions. Ravi Narayanan, VP, Market & Product Strategy, making the point about the importance of customer experience, cited a study by The ACSI (The American Customer Satisfaction Index – http://www.theacsi.org/) that documents this importance in no uncertain terms:

those companies with a high ACSI rating outperform the S&P 500.

Of course outperforming the S&P500 doesn’t seem to be too hard to dothese days , but it’s affirming to know that when your customers like you – and are willing to say they like you – it’s not just their lips flapping. They’re voting with their wallets too.

Makes cents, not just sense. And there’s proof!

Now that’s cool.

Mike Burke

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