What began as some ranting on solutions that seem doomed to fail, heads in a different direction here.

Ted Wallingford posted Ken SCATHES Rebtel and Jajah; I pile on in response to some other posts yesterday, and I want to jump in with some more thoughts. Hopefully they aren't jumbled. They've been rattling around in my head since last night. It's also a chance to recognize some things Ted said, so where I quote him, he's in italics and it should be obvious.

I’ll take a liberty here and say that Ken Camp has an “old-school” telecommunications background. That’s not a bad thing. It just means he knows HOW we got to WHERE we got.

Old school indeed, but I didn't personally interview with Alexander Graham. I began my career purely in telecom at Pacific Bell in 1980. And when divestiture of the Bell System came along, I was one of the task force team putting pink and blue tape on central office floors and dividing up the assets. I did live in the old Bell System, yes. So I have lived much of the history and evolution directly and personally. I was also one of the rare data people in the telephony world for a good part of my time.

With that in mind, it’s important to realize that his firey scalding of Rebtel and Jajah is a reinforcement of the notion of Voice 2.0. Look, Voice 2.0 is about empowering USERS, it’s about removing barriers to human interaction by making applications that converge voice and other mediums smartly. It’s about wrangling the OSI model into something that fulfills the promises of the dot-com bubble, in many respects.

It doesn't get much clearer than this. Voice 2.0 isn't about making users work harder. Users do not want to do less with more. Ted's key phrase nails it - it’s about removing barriers to human interaction by making applications that converge voice and other mediums smartly.

Ted says "We need to focus on increasing ACTUAL functionality and lose the obsession with placing band-aids on the infrastructure of yesterday in order to save a half-cent a minute." I say amen, brother. I say again, amen!

I wrote IP Telephony Demystifed in 2001 or thereabouts. At that point in time, much of the industry saw VoIP as the long distance killer. AT&T and MCI were pillaging the market with absurd per-minute long distance charges. even the, iun the book, I pointed to the real future of VoIP as an integration and convergence tool. Believe me, not everything I projected in that book is accurate. We all make predictions that go awry, but let me share a snip or two from that book of five years ago.

Market leading companies experience tremendous difficulty in embracing disruptive technologies. It’s the nature of their business to support existing customers and sustain an ongoing revenue stream. This requires the adoption of widely deployed standard technologies. The motivation isn’t to innovate and do something completely new and untried. The motivation is to not rock the boat, but rather, to maintain status quo.

Disruptive technologies lead to new markets, which are difficult to analyze, and harder still to project. The traditional old-school planning methods used in the telecommunications industry make this task nearly insurmountable because the value created by the disruptive new technology is incompatible with the business model and processes, even the corporate culture, of the incumbent providers.

The telecommunications industry didn’t begin as the mature, even lethargic behemoth it is today. It began as a disruptive technology, displacing the telegraph system with a completely new, real-time, interactive communications tool. But no technology can remain disruptive. Once it becomes the mainstream, as the public switched telephone network did long ago, it becomes a sustaining technology. And once the sustaining technology matures, incremental advancements slow, and the door to disruption from outside opens.

Today, I look at those lines and instead of the telephony legacy they were speaking about, I think of VoIP. VoIP isn't a sustaining technology yet, but it still hasn't disrupted the industry the way it can. The way it should. And I think part of the reason is that there is a bit of a sustaining technology mindset in the VoIP sector. Too mamn VoIP companies appear to be complacent.

Here's a larger excerpt of something I saw as a path to follow at the time

Internet Call Centers
One implementation of IP telephony that will grow in the next year is the call center. We’ve seen many changes in how people work in the past several months. More and more people focus on family, friends and want to change how they participate in their work environment. Internet call centers provide an approach that offers a work-at-home job, but with far more connectivity that we’ve previously seen.

Call centers have historically driven jobs to areas that offered a lower tax base to businesses. Many US companies now use offshore call centers in other countries where the labor rate is lower, but the distributed call center approach alters the cost structure and provides an effective method to hire domestic staff around the country. With the growing E-Commerce environment of the web, call centers have proven to be a growing segment of the market, yet traditional telephone technologies still present a barrier.

The leading approach for home agents has historically been ISDN. The Integrated Services Digital Network still doesn’t provide integrated services. The bottom line costs wind up being too high for most companies to invest in this architecture. A shift to IP telephony reduces the cost and provides better integration of services than ISDN has ever offered. Many companies are now looking at IP telephony coupled with DSL and cable modem solutions to fill future call center requirements.

Perhaps the greatest vision of promise in call center technologies was driven by the burst of the dot-com bubble. There were a large number of companies who tried to enter the Internet market selling all manner of goods on the Internet. These businesses had no “brick and mortar” which was on of the attractions, but many also had no history in providing customer service. Some succeeded, but even Amazon, one of the most successful examples, has yet to become a profitable company. Most attempts failed, and many failures related directly to inability to provide proper customer service. The focus of any company doing business on the Internet has become customer service. There is a demand for customer service that is best filled by the ability to speak with a live person. The call center, in any form, provides that ability.

Consider the picture below. The telephone network and Internet are both represented, but linked together much as they are in the real world. Customers might be at home or anywhere. They might contact the provider via telephone or via a web site. According to the Gartner Group, more than 70% of transactions take place over the telephone. Those web sites that have been able to implement live voice support for potential customers report as much as 50% increases in sales. Online worldwide revenues from retail sales are anticipated to hit $35.3 billion in the US this year.





The provider of products or services receives a query for customer support, and through distributed call center technology is able to redirect that call to a Customer Service Rep working from home.

Staffing of call centers has always been a difficult issue. The ability to hire remote staff, perhaps even part-time remote staff, allows the provider, regardless of location, to find good, qualified employees. Time zones become a non-issue. Even Customer Service Reps with special linguistic skills become obtainable resources. The benefits to telecommuter work force have been studied time and again in the past 10 years or more, and everything suggests continued migration to work-at-home efforts.

This solution also provides an opportunity for a pool of workforce candidates that may have been inaccessible in the tradition call center. Stay-at-home mothers, retirees, even people without transportation now become potential job candidates, participating in the workforce in ways they may not have been able to previously.

Distributed call centers do not require IP Telephony, but it does provide the greatest level of integration at the lowest cost. The distributed call center has often been implemented using PBX solutions and off-premise stations or ISDN lines. ISDN can be expensive, often more than DSL or cable modem, and is not at all ubiquitous. The newer generation of IP and Internet technologies make the distributed call center more cost effective to implement today that it has ever been in the past. The use of IP technology as a “PBX extender” creates a virtual call center environment that can physically be anywhere. Employees needn’t be passed over because of their geographic location. To customers, the company presents a single unified point of presence.

A broadband or high-speed connection capable of supporting voice and data simultaneously is optimal, with DSL being the technology of choice for most companies implementing these call centers today. The “home office” or heart of the distributed call center is typically traditional call center technology, but as we’ve already seen, is easily replaced by an IP solution today.

Distributed call centers use of a technology for job performance requires that managers take a more “hands off” approach to supervising workers than traditional workflow methods. Supervisors learn to rely on the systems, both telephone and computer networks, to measure and monitor productivity and worker activity. The idea of a worker being in the corporate office where work can be directly observed is transformed into a measurement of productivity and results rather than activity.

For some companies, the challenge of remote teleworkers becomes one of combating isolation. Since workers don’t have the social interaction with colleagues (i.e. water cooler chat), supervisors must adapt a management style that encourages interaction at all levels to minimize the chance that the remote worker will be left “out of the loop” and disenfranchised from the business of the company. Conference calls, computer video conferencing, and regular visits to the office or meetings with colleagues have proven effective in overcoming this issue.

The distributed call center provides a very attractive alternative for companies in large metropolitan areas that often have alternative commute requirements for air quality management. This solution can aid in bringing a business into compliance with these regulations.

While there has been a trend to move call centers offshore, today many companies have become very security conscious and are more reluctant to engage in offshore arrangements. The distributed IP telephony call center allows for substantial savings above traditional costs without sending jobs outside the US, although that option can also work using IP telephony.

Benefits to distributing call centers can be measured in a variety of ways. Some benefits cited by companies implementing this technique for managing a call center business include:

• Reduced cost of office space - Since teleworkers do not require a cubicle or workspace in the corporate office, that office can shrink, reducing real estate and associated costs. In reviewing real-life implementations, the companies interviewed estimate that the building costs alone were recouped within 3 years by shifting to a distributed model.
• Location – From the mid 1970s through the 1980s there was a migration of call centers from major metropolitan areas to more rural settings that provided a readily available work force and a reduced tax incentive to business. In particular, Omaha, NE provided some incentives to companies considering relocation and successfully attracted many call center businesses to the area. With the distributed model the corporate location is irrelevant, but so is the location of the teleworkers.
• Tax benefits – In major metropolitan areas particularly, there are mandates to comply with alternate commuting methods. Car pooling, bicycling to work, and telecommuting are all proven alternative commutes in the proper setting.

Any organization that interacts with a distributed base of customers over the telephone may have need for a call center. These companies ranger among the following:

• Healthcare providers, particularly large organizations and HMO/PPO groups often staff to handle patient calls.
• Insurance carriers must deal with customer calls regarding policies.
• Catalog or Internet-based merchants that have a high volume of telephone transactions
• Airline, hotel, event registration and ticketing agencies have been very call center oriented businesses for may years.
• Financial investment firms, particularly those dealing in high volumes of telephone calls.
• Social services organizations of many types provide call-in services for their clients.

In general terms, the call center is probably not an appropriate technology for the small business. This solution is the best fit for high volume, transaction based services that require interaction with a customer service representative. On the other hand, a small business with an IP Centrex solution can implement call center services easily to provide new levels of customer service. In short, IP telephony brings the call center into the reach of a small company without the burden of a full-blown, expensive implementation. IP telephony not only disrupts the telecommunications industry, but also can level the playing field for smaller companies, providing tools that have only been available to businesses with a large budget and staff in the past.

Today, I look at what's happening with Asterisk deployments as call centers for SMBs and divisional call centers inside large enterprises, and I can't help but ask, what took so long.

Ted said Think IP. Think 2.0.  I agree, but with caveats. Think that to survive today. Think 3.0 if you're looking to thrive today and survive tomorrow. Think 4.0 if you'll looking at stardom and a place among the best companies of all time.

Don't think commodities. Don't think complexity. Don't make the users work for the value. The value has to be in-your-face obvious. I'd liken it to a e-commerce analogy often used in the past for web-centric businesses. The real estate you have to work with is very small. It might be a 15 inch monitor, but it might be a PDA/cellphone display. The customer has a short attention span and you are one mouse click from being history. If you want to win the customer, you have to truly win the customer.


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