March 2003

By Vickie Marvich, Nortel Networks

Today, companies face tremendous business challenges which are underscored by the rapidly changing pace of technology and the growing need to react and adapt to them quickly. The Internet, whose scope continues to evolve, is one such challenge. While becoming a significant sales channel for enterprises, it has also become a challenge to manage and leverage to its maximum potential. With competition being just a mouse click away, enterprises need to differentiate their organizations, as well as the services they offer to their customers to differentiate themselves. However, in this frenetic pace of global competition and endless choice, how can companies set themselves apart? The answer lies in knowing one's customers and anticipating their every need. The so-called 'engaged business model' allows companies to anticipate customers' needs in a time-critical manner, and offer the information in a media adaptive way that suits their communication channels and available tools. It is based on a 'one network' strategy that streamlines capital expenditures and operating expenses costs for maximum business advantage.

To become an engaged business, enterprises must follow an evolutionary process that in the end will deliver revolutionary results that move beyond customer loyalty to providing a unique competitive advantage. By implementing an engaged business model, enterprises typically will progress through four categories: siloed, linked, integrated and, ultimately, engaged. 

Currently, most enterprises fall into the siloed category, which focuses on cost containment and independent transactions, and where success is measured by operational statistics, such as return on investment (ROI). In the linked category, enterprises place more focus on customer service and information sharing. Integrated enterprises emphasize customer loyalty and personalization and success is measured by revenue per customer, not just customer satisfaction. At the highest level, engaged businesses build on all these categories, and they anticipate their customers' needs and focus on developing their customers into company assets. For the engaged business model to work, enterprises need 'technological glue' to integrate disparate systems into their core. This 'glue' includes a set of network technologies that integrates corporate applications, locations and communities of interest.

The Technology Solution 
Four key technologies make it possible to build engaged applications ' IP, SIP, Web applications middleware and XML. These technologies are necessary to integrate e-business or Web applications with multimedia communications technologies.

Internet Protocol (IP) is the foundation for networking. IP provides an addressing scheme that allows an unlimited variety of devices to communicate with each other over an IP domain. This type of network is already ubiquitous today because it can be accessed from any phone line and from an increasing number of locations with wireless access. IP networks supporting engaged applications must provide secure environments to prevent any compromise of customers' personal information or other information critical to their businesses. This network must also provide customers with the necessary quality of service (QoS) characteristics to support real-time communications.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the standard Internet protocol for building multimedia as well as multimodal applications. SIP's single purpose is to establish a session between two endpoints in an IP network regardless of the media type ' SIP is media- and device-independent. Endpoints can be devices such as PDAs, telephones or agents' PCs. Individuals have single addresses regardless of the device in use. An engaged application will find the device the user is currently using in order to deliver the information to that user. 

Before an endpoint can participate in a session, it must first register with the network. This registration, called presence, provides a unique capability to determine if a session can be initiated without first dialing a call. The concept of presence is demonstrated to millions of instant messaging users who create buddy lists of individuals with whom they want to chat.

When one of their 'buddies' signs onto the network, presence is shown on the buddy list. SIP extends presence with additional information about the device being used and the willingness of participants to have their presence known. This allows the engaged application to dynamically adapt the session to the device in use.

As enterprises started to Web-enable their businesses, they experienced integration problems between these technologies and realized the transition to an integrated, seamless business communication model was not an easy task. Initial implementations usually yielded new business systems that handled Internet-based communications but not legacy-based communications and vice versa. This resulted in two different approaches to integration that left many customers disgruntled. For example, Internet-based customers trying to change orders that were placed using Web self-service applications found they could not do so by calling the contact center. Oftentimes they were told the call-based customer service center did not have access to that information.

J2EE, .NET and other Web applications middleware were developed to solve this information gap ' facilitating the process for an enterprise to integrate applications. Each middleware implementation is slightly different, but the basic premise provides for a multitiered application environment that partitions the application into three tiers: presentation, business logic and data access.

By dividing an application into tiers, one tier can be changed without impacting the others. This multitiered environment is important to businesses because it enables application code to be reused throughout the organization.

Consider an enterprise that writes an order-tracking application for the Web. The presentation tier of the application displays the Web pages and captures the required input from the customer. The business logic tier is the code necessary to validate the input and determine the order's status. Meanwhile, the data access tier has a standard interface to all the various legacy data sources that contain customer information, including inventory data, product orders, reservations and countless other types of crucial business information. If the enterprise wants to extend the order-tracking application at a later date so it can be accessed using speech recognition, then the enterprise need only write a new presentation tier to handle the voice prompts and speech recognition components. The rest of the application can continue to be used in its current state.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the most widely accepted, platform independent standard for building structured documents for Web applications. Structured documents include data such as spreadsheets, address books, configuration parameters, financial transactions and presentation scripts.

XML supports international and local formats and is becoming the de-facto standard for data exchange between applications. Since XML is the universal format for data exchange, 'dialects' have been developed to exchange data with people as well as machines. One of these dialects ' VoiceXML (VXML) ' is a standard way to write speech recognition scripts. In a traditional self-service interactive voice response (IVR) environment, the complete speech application (presentation, business logic and data access) is written in a proprietary IVR language unique to each supplier's hardware. If an enterprise has hardware from multiple suppliers, then an application must be written in each platform's proprietary language. Also, if an enterprise develops traditional IVR voice-based applications as well as Web-based applications that accomplish the same task (e.g., Web banking and voice banking), the enterprise cannot reuse any of the code from either software development. The introduction of multitier architectures and standards such as VXML are radically changing the IVR business. 

Call Control XML (CCXML) is another important dialect of XML. CCXML is defined as a standard way to provide telephony services to Web-based (multitier) applications. CCXML is used in conjunction with VXML in the engaged application to provide call redirection, conferencing and monitoring based on the occurrence of unplanned events. 

Speech Application Language Tags (SALT), a third extension of XML, makes it possible to build multimodal applications. SALT supports speech as a Web navigation method so users can perform tasks such as speech-enabling their PocketPC to obtain their itinerary instead of typing in a URL. These enabling technologies allow for the creation of engaged applications because they provide for the integration of business processes. Coupled with unique customer knowledge, engaged applications create and deliver new, personalized anticipatory services.

With these four key technologies, enterprises have the ability to build an engaged application. The enterprise business model relies on systems such as these, which contain customer information and operate as one network to serve their customers needs. Fundamentally, being an engaged business is a proactive approach to customer management. As such, customer relationship management (CRM) has a critical role in the engaged business model. 

The Benefit Of Integrated Channels
Companies are coming to realize that one of the necessary components of an effective customer strategy and an engaged business model is customer relationship management (CRM). CRM applications are designed to facilitate the capture, consolidation, analysis and enterprisewide dissemination of data from existing and potential customers. This process occurs throughout the marketing, sales, and service stages, with the objective of better understanding customers and anticipating their interests. A CRM strategy has two primary goals:

1) Enable companies to more effectively identify, contact and acquire new customers. Certain CRM applications automate the process of generating customer and market profiles, tracking marketing campaigns across a variety of media, and managing the quote and proposal process from negotiation to close. By accelerating and refining the process by which prospective clients are identified, these applications can also allow companies to focus limited marketing resources on the most promising target markets, thus maximizing top-line growth.

2) Leverage existing customer relationships. The two primary means of accomplishing this task are identifying cross-selling opportunities and increasing retention through improved post-sale service. 

Along with CRM, other technologies and applications that companies must implement to reap the rewards of customer attraction and retention include: 

Self-service. Customers can make inquiries about their accounts anytime from anywhere. Self-service also enables electronic bill presentation payment, so customers can see and hear what they owe and pay online or by touch tone if appropriate. 

E-mail management. Once customers start getting personalized information from the Internet, the possibility of follow-up questions and information requests requires efficient systems for responding to e-mail. 

Integration with existing voice call center technology. Beyond self-service and e-mail, the ability to interact in real-time with a company representative can often make the difference between an abandoned and a fully executed shopping cart. 

Business rules. Business rules are needed to ensure that any transaction from the customer is processed in an efficient manner. For example, if a company wants the most profitable and high-volume customers to be serviced by experts, business rules can clearly define the criteria and contact workflow for these users.

Data warehousing. Managing relationships with customers depends on customer information, which is usually in disparate databases. A technology framework that allows all the applications and databases that have customer information to be integrated can make a big difference in implementation. For example, a company can segment the types of customers it has in the data warehouse and launch a marketing campaign geared toward specific customers that meet certain criteria. Similarly, good data warehousing can help in presenting information based on certain business rules to help in cross-selling and upselling to customers calling for other reasons. 

Where the benefits of CRM fall short is when organizations are running independent business operations. For example, if the call center is not integrated with the IVR self-service system, and that, in turn, is not integrated with the CRM system, customer service will suffer. To avoid this breakdown, end users must have a cohesive and integrated view of the enterprise and the information it is trying to communicate. This is the only way CRM will perform up to its promise. It is crucial for organizations to move to a more integrated, engaged approach where knowledge is shared across these disparate systems. 

Making The Engaged Business A Reality
Engaged applications are a way for enterprises to leverage integrated applications to create incomparable competitive differentiation. Engaged applications promote closer relationships with customers by delivering a new level of service that increases their loyalty. Finally, engaged applications result from marrying proficiency in CRM, customer contact and self-service technologies with network design and deployment leadership, which provide businesses with solutions that move customers beyond loyalty to maximum return on relationship ' ultimately, enabling these customers to leverage their current investment while receiving revolutionary benefits for their businesses.

Vickie Marvich leads the customer contact and voice portal solutions marketing team for Nortel Networks. This includes product marketing, positioning, collateral development and market development for all of the Symposium and Periphonics product lines. With over 13 years at Nortel, and 17 years within the industry, Vickie has held numerous leadership roles throughout her career including; sales engineering, product management, professional services, Symposium World Wide Applications Team and marketing. Nortel Networks is focused on transforming how the world communicates and exchanges information.