SUBSCRIBE TO TMCnet
TMCnet - World's Largest Communications and Technology Community

CHANNEL BY TOPICS


QUICK LINKS




SOA Web Services

SOA/Web Services

 

SOA/WEB SERVICES FEATURE ARTICLES


May 30, 2007

Improving Communications Through Voice Presence

By Alan Rosenberg, BlueNote Networks


Telephone tag – noun: telephoning back and forth by parties trying to reach each other without success.
 
We have such a difficult time reaching people on the phone; we’ve even coined a term for the phenomenon — telephone tag (the above definition is courtesy of Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary). According to Sage Research, nearly three-fourths of business calls are sent to voice mail, and the average employee wastes the equivalent of two days each month playing telephone tag. Telephone tag clearly impacts worker productivity and adversely effects business communications.

 
The basic problem in placing a phone call is that you have no way of knowing if the party you are calling is available or willing to accept your call. The party could be away from the phone, on another call, or simply not interested in speaking with you. Incorporating presence capabilities into telephone systems helps eliminate some of this guesswork. Furthermore, presence information can be used to intelligently route calls based on business rules to increase worker productivity and improve customer interactions.
 
Presence has long been used in instant messaging applications. Early messaging applications offered basic capabilities to identify other users logged into the system. But just because a user is online does not mean he is available to chat. He could be away from the computer, talking on the phone, or engaged in another activity.
 
Messaging vendors responded to this limitation by introducing status indicators so you could set your state to busy or away. But if you are like me, you can’t be bothered to change your status by hand. Or worse yet, you might change your status to “away” when leaving the office, but forget to change it back to “available” when you return.
 
To overcome these issues, most modern instant messaging applications detect a user’s status automatically by monitoring keystroke activity, screensaver activation or through other techniques. Furthermore, many enterprise messaging applications offer integration with Outlook or other applications to automatically reflect calendar data as presence information. Thanks to all these innovations, you can often discern with a reasonable degree of accuracy if a friend or coworker is online, active, and available to chat.
 
Next-generation Business Communications Platforms are applying the principles of presence to telephony. Voice presence is used to detect and convey one’s willingness and ability to talk on the phone. Presence-enabled telephony services reduce telephone tag, increase worker productivity and improve customer satisfaction.
 
In its simplest form, voice presence information (on-the-phone, DND, idle) is displayed in a directory or on a buddy list so you can quickly see if a colleague is available to speak before you place a call. In more advanced applications voice presence information is used to automatically route calls based on availability, role, device type, or other criteria.
 
In a unified communications environment voice presence helps employees communicate using the most suitable means. A worker may have many communications methods at his disposal — voice, video, text. Presence helps establish communications via the most appropriate means at a particular point in time, depending on the user’s activity and communications device at hand.
 
Say I have a multimedia SIP client on my laptop. I use it for voice and video calls while in my office. When I take my laptop into a meeting, or am accessing the Internet from Starbucks, I may wish to communicate via text chats only. When I am offline I may wish to receive business telephone calls on my personal mobile phone. My Business Communications Platform uses presence information to intelligently direct calls — issuing voice/video calls to my desktop when I am in the office, permitting only text chat invites when in a meeting, and forwarding calls to my mobile phone when I am off-line. With presence technology, callers don’t have to deduce how to contact me — video call, phone call, text message. With presence, they have a much greater likelihood of reaching me the first time, via the most appropriate mode at the moment, without the guesswork.
 
In call routing scenarios, presence information is used to efficiently route calls based on availability, skill, language or other business considerations. For example, a big box retailer deploys a Business Communications Platform to deliver telephony capabilities to in-store kiosks. When a customer has a question about a specific product the call is routed to an available in-store product specialist equipped with a WiFi handset. If no in-store experts are available, the call is routed to an expert available at another store, or to a back-up call center.
 
In another scenario, an enterprise operates a virtual call center comprised of traditional brick and mortar call centers plus Internet-based work-at-home call center agents. The virtual call center supports numerous product lines and functional roles in English, Spanish and French. Working from a call center facility or from home, any given agent might support one or more businesses or roles in one or more languages. Using presence information a Business Communications Platform routes calls to the agent best qualified to serve a particular caller based on their spoken language, product inquiry or other business criteria. Presence-enabled communications platforms deliver better customer experiences with shorter wait times and fewer transfers. And, businesses enjoy improved economics by leveraging geographically-dispersed workforces and Internet-based employees.
 
Nearly any business or organization can benefit by adding presence to their voice services. Presence-enabled Business Communications Platforms can supply call center-like features to ordinary employees at a fraction of the price of a full blown call center implementation. Imagine a salesperson needs to immediately extend an extraordinary discount in order to close a deal. Only the regional sales director, VP of U.S. Sales, or Sr. VP of Worldwide Sales are authorized to approve the discount. Using presence information the salesperson’s call is routed automatically to the Sr. VP of Worldwide Sales, who, online in a hotel room in Manhattan, happens to be the only manager available who can approve the deal. The salesperson receives discount approval with a single phone call.
 
Presence-enabled Business Communications systems improve communications, boost productivity, and increase customer satisfaction in just about any industry or market segment. By adding presence to their telephony services, enterprises can help make telephone tag a thing of the past.
 
 
-----
Alan Rosenberg is director of Product Line Management for BlueNote Networks (News - Alert). With BlueNote SessionSuite platforms, enterprises, ISVs and partners can quickly and easily embed interactive real-time communication services into a range of commercial or custom software applications, Web sites and internal business processes using industry-standard interfaces and technology. He can be reached at [email protected].
 

SOA/WEB SERVICES





Technology Marketing Corporation

2 Trap Falls Road Suite 106, Shelton, CT 06484 USA
Ph: +1-203-852-6800, 800-243-6002

General comments: [email protected].
Comments about this site: [email protected].

STAY CURRENT YOUR WAY

© 2024 Technology Marketing Corporation. All rights reserved | Privacy Policy