Communications-Enabled Business Practices & Processes

By: Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

Many people confuse Communications-Enabled Business Practices/Processes (CEBP) with Unified Communications, which industry expert Blair Pleasant (News - Alert), defines as “communications integrated to optimize business processes”. CEBP early on was associated with accelerating business processes and workflow by reducing human latency, usually via functions ranging from click-to-dial to advanced CRM or ERP apps, to autonomous event-triggered notifications and applications. To do this, CEBP can call upon UC functions running in the business process flow, which in turn can use presence and various communications media to hunt down and notify agents and outside experts if they are not immediately available to further the process at hand.

There is, then, some overlap and even a symbiotic relationship between the two (especially when one has the luxury of defining terms as one sees fit). The Gartner (News - Alert) Group defines CEBP (Communications-Enabled Business Processes) as the ability to enable “communications functions to be directly and tightly integrated with the IT systems and applications that individuals may be working with at any time.” Yours Truly likes to add to CEBP yet another “P” – Practices. On the other hand, Avaya’s original formulation of CEBP, which involved the Avaya Communications Process Manager and Event Processor (News - Alert) to monitor events, not always dealt with either UC and favored machine-to-human rather than human-to-human communications. The term continues to evolve.

Avaya’s Director of Unified Communications (News - Alert) Architecture, Lawrence Byrd, says, “The way we view our entire portfolio is that, ultimately, all of communications is realized in some way, at the top level, in various access devices, through screens, interfaces, through integration with Microsoft (News - Alert), IBM or SAP. For us, that’s the ‘layer’ where communications is experienced. Underneath that are things such as collaboration and interaction solutions, which is our entire set of UC and contact center portfolios, but those typically rest on some kind of real-time core communications servers that sort of glue everything together. Historically, that’s been IP telephony and, going forward, we believe it’s that plus a whole lot more.”

Byrd goes on, “Avaya (News - Alert) Aura, our new product, takes components we’ve had for a long time and significantly expands them to be a new foundation for UC and contact center solutions. It includes our flagship product of many years, the Communication Manager that his been our IP telephony foundation, but Aura expands it with new capabilities, some of which are brand-new and others we previously announced, such as a long-standing application enablement capability that allow you to integrate with a whole third-party ecosystem that can extend and integrate and obviously that starts to move us into a discussion about CEBP. It includes the presence services that we announced a year ago that aggregates presence from Microsoft, IBM (News - Alert), XMPP and SIP/SIMPLE sources and from all of our real-time phone data, and bringing it all together so that an application can use it. That has relevance for UC, but also in general for smarter CEBP and other applications, but can now use presence to make decisions about what to do.”

“Underlying all of this is the introduction of a whole new end-to-end SIP framework, which we call Avaya Aura Session Manager,” says Byrd. “Which is about how everything gets connected. How do systems, users and devices get connected? And how can we change the architecture of communications to be much more flexible in how it allows new UC and other applications to be deployed. So that’s what are recent announcement was about. It’s built on the premise that today’s communications architecture is broken, ‘medieval’ and it needs fixing, since it acts as an impediment to deploying unified communications in CEBP apps. We’ve done a tremendous amount of work with our customers to consolidate components, and get down to smaller systems. But customers aren’t quite there yet, and generally, for customers of any size, their network tends to be somewhat convoluted. Everything is still tied up with individual systems. I’m sitting here in California, my associate Deb is sitting in New Jersey, and we’re connected to different switches and therefore whether or not we have the same application completely dependent on what switch we’re connected to. It’s the legacy of the PBX (News - Alert) era.”

“The first phase of VoIP has enabled you to put phones and gateways everywhere,” says Byrd, “but all of my context, applications, trunks, dial plans, and information is still locked up inside one system, and each system needs to connect to every other system, and know how to do so, in order for everything to work. This rapidly makes things complicated. So our customers find it confusing just where to plug in UC – they have to plug it in ‘everywhere’ or differently in each case. They’re not even doing IP telephony very well. When we look at how many calls traverse your own network, how many go over the PSTN, how many trunks you have, and what you’re spending right now on traditional TDM connectivity, the answer turns out to be a lot. We have one customer looking to save a million dollars a month in costs that you would have thought the first wave of IP telephony would have squeezed out. But it requires every individual system to be separately configured to do that. They have over 200 IP PBXs. We have the good fortune that of course they all come from Avaya, unlike what we see with our customers, but that means, just mathematically, that we would have to configure thousands of IP trunks to mesh them all together which involved making thousands of entries in different systems. Customers by and large haven’t done that. They’re not taking advantage of keeping calls on-net, sharing resources, hopping of the network in the proper place, and as a result they’ve not really squeezed the costs out. This becomes a very practical discussion right now in these economic times because customers don’t want to hear a lot about new UC or CEBP things. What they do want to hear about is, first, how to save money now? And by the way, don’t touch anything in our organization.’ The approach we’ve taken resolves that paradox by introducing a middle-tier of the architecture that is how everything gets connected, and we need to normalize all of that occurring over SIP, and then everything will be connected via a centralized SIP core and Avaya will ensure that it’s distributed and that it’s scalable and secure, and now, as a first step, all of the systems can talk to each other in a standard way. If there’s a legacy TDM system, we’ll put an easily-deployable SIP gateway in front of it. Now you have a central way in which to gain connectivity benefits and telecom savings, then you can start to do things such as introduce SIP trunking centrally. Instead of going to lots of different places to do things you bring it into one place, the core, and it can be shared across the whole organization, which saves money, then new applications can be introduced to, say, the datacenters and make available such things such as centralized messaging, conferencing and web conferencing, or self-service apps on our Voice Portal product.”

Communications in, Costs out

CDW (News - Alert) Corporation is a huge (6000+ workers, $8 billion+ sales) provider of technology products and services to business, government and education.

CDW’s Kevin DeMers, Senior Manager for Unified Communications, says, “Trends in CEBP today really involves cost take-out, something that a customer can do that will either take immediate hard dollar costs out their organization or do more with less so that they can accommodate their sales goals and their service goals or just their business initiatives without having to invest in more people, which is usually the most costly resource. Right now what’s in high demand are things such as audio and video conferencing. When we talk about CEBP we normally talk about tying in voice, audio, video and data all at the desktop in type of UC client, but customers are using things such as audio web video conferencing to change the way they work so that they can be more efficient. An example would be a remote sales force that works together as a team that normally has to travel or save their collaboration experiences for specific days of the week, but now they can use audio web videoconferencing on-the-fly. This changes the way they work with their customers and the speed with which they can respond, as well as the amount of activity that can be done with a smaller group of people. Another popular trend relates to the customer-facing experience – how can we service more customers without adding more people? That touches the call/contact center area. Also extremely popular right now are self-service applications, utilizing such things as speech recognition that can service a customer without delivering a phone call to physical call center agent. The capex investment into such technologies usually has a very fast return on investment, and customers can be serviced in a very comfortable way and yet the company can still focus on one’s core business.”

“UC as an application on the desktop is also a trend,” says DeMers. “It perhaps had more momentum last year than it did going into this year, because of the economic situation. It’s a little harder to draw straight hard dollar cost reduction out of that technology. Still, it’s very popular – It’d say 1 out of every 4 customers that we work with and usually when we get engaged at my practice level, they’ve already made a decision or investment to roll out IP telephony so they’re a bit ahead of the curve in terms of the overall industry. It changes the way they collaborate internally to serve a customer or simply to get business done.”

“In terms of how we engage and what our role is in that process,” says DeMers, “we’re really there to help consult with the customer to find out what their business needs are. This has been a shift in the way that VARs in general have to approach the industry. When you’re talking about dial tone and voicemail, or PBX, that’s a utility that’s usually get delivered throughout the entire organization as a service, just like when somebody gets a desktop or laptop, they get a phone. Unified communications and specifically CEBP really affects different business units of the organization, so our role is to really work with the different business units and have different solutions deployed for different types of business users. Human Resources will have a different need for CEBP than, say, the sales force or customers service will. But you can’t really holistically deploy the same application across the entire enterprise. You have to examine it business unit-by-business unit. That’s our role, along with generally deploying solutions that fit those different departments.”

A Zeacom (News - Alert) Case Study: Tower Insurance

The scary prospect of revamping an existing communications system – such as modernizing an contact center – can be alleviated if you deal with a company that has a wide range of technology and expertise. Zeacom, for example, is known for its Zeacom Communication Center (ZCC), a complete unified communications solution.

Ben Zachry, a Vice President at Tower Life Insurance is a happy Zeacom customer. He says, “Our aging existing phone system was such that we definitely needed an upgrade, and we also wanted to improve our general communications abilities, since at that time all we had a simple call center that accepted voice calls from our customers. We wanted to gain some advanced features and functions. Prior to our dealings with Zeacom, all of our calls came in, but we didn’t have any information about the caller calling. It was very limited, and so there was a lot of time spent initially on a call authenticating the caller and then figuring out what they needed.”

“We looked at various solutions,” says Zachry, “but Zeacom really had the most complete solution. They were probably the one company that spent a tremendous amount of time on the front-end. I’ve done enough projects to know that front-end planning has everything to do with success in the end. Zeacom spent a lot of time during the sales cycle understanding our business and what is was we wanted to accomplish. It really helped us understand what solution they had to offer and how it would fit for us. One thing we really wanted to have was an IVR system so customers could perform some self-service. We also wanted CTI (News - Alert) integration and do some screen pops or present information to our customer service agents so they were prepared to immediately assist callers. Another area significant for us was the fact that we didn’t have very good reporting capabilities on our old system. We wanted to know who was calling us, how much time we were spending on those calls, and if there was an opportunity to provide some self-service options so that our customers service agents could deal with the more difficult calls where a customer must speak with a representative.

“Zeacom could do all this for us,” says Zachry, “and one thing Zeacom could do that other systems couldn’t concerned our fax-on-demand system. To understand how, you first must understand that we’re a life and health insurance company, but our largest segment is acting as a third-party administrator. For large employers that self-insure their medial plan, when their members or employees go to the doctor or hospital, all of those claims come into our office and get adjudicated. Consequently, the calls received in our contact center are really from three sources: first, providers calling to determine if a member is eligible for service, and if so what level of benefit; second, there are member calls wherein they as they’re eligible or the status of their respective claims, or general questions; third, employers call us since we work directly with them. So many calls are provider-based, and we offer a fax-on-demand system that provides this eligibility and benefits information. One thing we wanted to be able to do was track, monitor and report on that as well. We wanted to treat those incoming lines as if they were being handled by agents, and that was something that not so many systems we looked at could do, but Zeacom could do it, so that was a big plus for us. We could now do faxing from the desktop.”

“Zeacom offers a sort of ‘a la carte selection of functions that you can buy and they’re able to package all of their different modules into one system,” says Zachry. “You can buy any of the ‘pieces’ and add on other ones later. That was very attractive to us, and we ended up buying quite a few of the ‘pieces’. We ended up replacing our phone switch too, which was not from Zeacom, but Zeacom did provide the IVR, fax solution, standard and customer reporting, and a terrific state-of-the-art voicemail system. We now have a great system, and our business processes are enhanced and accelerated as a result.”

Here Comes Communications-Based Process Automation

Indianapolis-based Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) is well-known for its Customer Interaction Center (CIC) IP application suite. Their own approach is to take one step beyond CEBP with what they call Communications-Based Process Automation (CBPA). Their new Interaction Process Automation solution takes the functionality that deals with interactions in a CIC-based contact center and applies those tools to automate business processes in a centralized manner. CBPA and its embodiment, Interaction Process Automation, allows companies to move beyond simple UC and leverage advanced functions so as to have a quantifiable effect on their business. IT

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC (News - Alert)’s IP Communications Group.

Avaya - (www.avaya.com)

CDW Corporation - (www.cdw.com)

Interactive Intelligence - (www.inin.com)

Zeacom - (www.zeacom.com)

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