I just finished reading Michelle Goodall Faulkner’s article in CRM Daily, “When Getting Human isn’t Enough," in which she pretty succinctly lays out what she terms the “comprehensive approach to the design and deployment of customer-facing applications in the contact center.” She brings up the downside of self-service applications that lead to caller frustration such as misrouted calls, hang-ups, and other factors such as those tediously long menus that we all suffer through when companies fail to apply best practices to IVR design. Which, I might add, after 20+ years of IVR deployments, there is just no excuse for, but I digress.

The gist of her article however is on testing, and here she lays out the three main components of testing a customer service application – usability testing, automated functional testing (AFT) and load testing. She also references the 10 “standards” for application and design testing detailed in gethuman standard v1.0 on Paul English’s Get Human web site.

I agree with Michelle. Testing is everything and it should be done before deployment, not after you use your customers as guinea pigs.

Regrettably, SpeechTek and VoiceCon overlap 100% on the days they are being held this year. Since I cover the same areas that both these shows do, my decision to go to VoiceCon, instead of SpeechTek, is based entirely on the formula of “pay lots of money to fly to New York for four days, or sleep in my own bed and drive to San Francisco.” All I can say now, is “oh rats!”, as Syntellect put out a press release Tuesday about having a sneak peek at a new product they are introducing, that alleges to solve many of the issues I brought up in my testing blog last week.

Here is an update on a startup company in the UK that I’ve been following for a year now, and a few of you may know about. Well worth checking into, VoxIQ provides an enabling technology to the contact center market that combines speech technologies and knowledge databases to assist live agents in providing the best customer service and satisfaction possible - and they do it really fast. The key to VoxIQ’s uniqueness is in the combination of speech recognition and the use of knowledge databases. Many companies use speech recognition or speech analytics to improve agent performance, or knowledge-based systems (KBS) to assist agents, but VoxIQ uses them in tandem, to provide dynamic database information to the agent in real-time as the conversation progresses with the caller.

In case you aren’t familiar with Voxify, they are one of the pioneers in the use of speech-recognition-driven automated agents in contact centers. With customers like Hammacher Schlemmer in retail and Red Lion Hotels in hospitality, Voxify agents have really taken automation in the contact center to a different level. Since coming out with these speech-enabled agents Voxify has made regular updates to the product, so I was thinking that maybe their next move would be to add some sort of speech analytics or knowledge database-driven capability to their agents, but not this round. Instead, they surprised me by announcing two other things at SpeechTEK – allowing customers to deploy their solution on-premise, instead of or in addition to the hosted solution that they have been providing, and enabling contact center managers to change routing and scripting of self-service call flows dynamically.

OK, OK. I know I should be blogging about what I saw at VoiceCon and heard about at SpeechTek, but I’m not done yet. Besides, it’s no fun to work all the time. I have found two little call center nuggets to pass on though. Just for fun, I have to post this. I was cruising MSNBC.com and saw a story “The Worst Boss in America” which is a contest recently finished on the web site Working America.org. Surprise! One of the top two winners was a call center help desk story, and one of the 20 runner-ups was about a call center. In between picking up my slack jaw from my knees, I was either laughing or shocked. Like a slow moving horror movie, I just couldn’t stop reading. Check it out and be happy you work where you do.

Although I wasn’t able to attend SpeechTek last week in New York, I did talk to a number of people who were there, along some of the vendors who were exhibiting. Based on the show floor and announcements this month, the industry has made a lot of headway into automated customer support, mobile applications, and entrance into emerging markets, such as unified communications. Here is fraction of what I missed.

Just a short update on VoxIQ. Seeing as my August 19th blog title was “VoxIQ Enhances Next Generation Speech Recognition in the Contact Center and Beyond”, I figured I would have to give an update and say that VoxIQ enhances itself this time. True. VoxIQ and Loquendo announced this week that VoxIQ is using Loquendo’s Automated Speech Recognizer (Loquendo ASR) through Loquendo’s VoxNauta VoiceXML and CCXML platform to facilitate improvement in real-time call flow between agents and customers.

Interactive Intelligence announced their 3.0 release for Customer Interaction Center (CIC) and Vonexus Enterprise Interaction Center (EIC) with lots of new functionality, including integration to Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging, and some features to simplify deployment. But the new security features and speech technology function were what caught my eye.

I spent much of last week in sunny Phoenix at Interactive Intelligence’s partner conference, which was quite a show. For a company of roughly 600 people, competing with the likes of the Cisco’s and Avaya’s of the world, they are doing all right. After 15 consecutive profitable quarters, cash flow is up, sales are way up, and they keep getting awards like Indianapolis’s sixth fastest growing company, placement among Indiana’s 50 great businesses, and just missed cracking the 200 mark among the top 500 Global Software and Services Suppliers – the company ranked 209th in this year’s Software 500, up 21 spots compared to last year.

I had the pleasure of being introduced to Dimension Data at the Cisco Unified Communications Summit in Toronto in September. Dimension Data, founded in 1983 and headquartered in South Africa, is an IT services and solutions provider with vast expertise in networking, security, operating environments, storage, and contact center technologies. They aren’t your typical systems integrator/VAR outfit either. They are huge; managing over $12B in network infrastructure around the globe. In fact, they have built out over 2000 IP networks in just the last three years, and are heavily into unified communications. They are also a Gold partner for both Cisco and Microsoft on five continents, and just recently received a Cisco Master Unified Communications Specialization designation.

In a separate announcement, but in conjunction with its 7.5 release, ShoreTel continued to amp up its product portfolio by announcing a strategic distribution agreement with Syntellect, to sell Syntellect’s Customer Interaction Management contact center solutions. This is a superb fit for ShoreTel, who has been storming the IP telephony scene with its scalable, software-based, systems, and unified communication solutions. Until now, ShoreTel has had three contact center solutions – Workgroup and Contact Center, which are for the SMB market, and Enterprise Contact Center, which effectively goes up to 300 agents, but didn’t scale past that and wasn’t as feature-rich as many larger customers have demanded. Syntellect’s contact center offerings will give ShoreTel an extremely competitive offering in the higher end market, and fill out their portfolio.

On the second day of UC the industry gave to me what SMB loves,
and a clear definition of UC.

My second day of UC wish is a particular interest of mine. What SMB loves is to be the center of attention. Don’t we all enjoy that? But its my opinion that when it comes to unified communications the industry hasn’t done enough to educate small and mid-sized businesses on the impact that UC applications can have on their networks, nor have we done a good job of educating SMBs as to the possible pitfalls of blindly adding on applications without proper network assessment and planning. Then there is the issue of security. SMBs may not want vendors to muck with their data, but its not uncommon for someone selling into those businesses to have to educate them on the value of backing that data up, let alone what the impact would be on the security of that data if new applications are added that might create security holes. Therefore, wish number two is a stronger focus on the SMB market.

On the seventh day of UC the industry gave to me overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
and a clear definition of UC.

This is all about going green. How could anyone that reads a paper or goes onto the Internet not see the issue of green initiatives as a hot topic? My day seven wish is the second, along with assistive technology, that is about companies doing more to promote what they have or are doing. Day seven is that companies talk more about their green initiatives because we don’t hear enough about them. If we don’t hear about it, then customers don’t hear about it, and in order to go green customers need to be able to make intelligent choices when choosing vendors. In fact, Siemens recently held a webinar, entitled “The Green Contact Center – Making “Green” Work for you”. In it they held a poll with the question “Do you believe that a significant number of customers would be positively inclined to buy from vendors who publicly demonstrate a commitment to the Green initiatives?” Approximately 95% responded yes. Therefore, day seven is a wish to hear about green.

On the Eleventh day of UC the industry gave to me, the value of video, not hyping,
no more pagers beeping,
interface enhancing
CFOs bilking,
overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing
five phone rings
the voicemail market girds
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.

Its not that we don’t have video out there; we sure do and it’s a mind boggling amount. At Cisco’s C-Scape I believe the figure that was mentioned was something like 250 billion videos were produced in 2007. That is mind boggling. That includes videos incorporated into Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube, and social networking sites etc. Some estimates have Internet video increasing four fold by 2011. However, my day eleven wish is certainly not for that number to increase, although it will undoubtedly hit some mind numbing figure by the end of 2008. No, I’m wishing for businesses to “get” the value of video too, not just consumers, and for vendors to help them “get it” without the hype.

This morning I had the pleasure of speaking with Jon Catlin, Vice President of Product Development at Syntellect on their revolutionary VoiceXML testing tool, Voiyager. Voiyager does what Syntellect terms Dynamic Application Discovery, in essence, it completely tests every possible path of a VoiceXML application with remarkable speed; something that previously wasn’t possible in VoiceXML application development. I think it is very cool. You can hear Jon talk about what the product does and how effective it in this podcast. Just click on the podcast tab.

Yesterday I had a talk with Tellme about what they have been up to nine months or so after being acquired by Microsoft. I’d followed them since their birth back in the late 90’s during the original “voice portal” craze, when companies like Tellme, BeVocal and HeyAnita! all came into being, touting web surfing using your voice. At the time all the analysts were crazed about surfing the web using your voice. That died down for awhile, and companies such as Tellme changed their business models to incorporate application development for self service applications and the like, creating large developer networks, tools, and networks for hosting applications.

I stumbled on a new one today. I just got a new credit card from Capitol One – you know the no hassle guarantee people. It had that sticker on the front that said that you had to call to activate your card, so I did. First off, I was greeted with that irritating “press 1 for English”, but that isn’t my main beef. It was that the next prompt, surprisingly asking me to say or enter my 16-digit account code. Yippee! Speech recognition. I could almost forgive them for making me press a button because I speak English. But wait. After giving them my 16-digit account code and being transferred to an agent queue; notice I didn’t say agent; the very first words out of the agent’s mouth, once I got one were “please give me your 16-digit account code”. This company is savvy enough to use speech recognition in their application (albeit for only one prompt),but they don’t even have basic CTI? Goodness gracious. What happened to their no hassle guarantee?

Last week ShoreTel held its first industry analyst conference, in San Francisco. This was a good thing, as the subject of my blog, brand recognition, involves the analyst community too. I’m assuming the majority of my colleagues know who ShoreTel is – a purveyor of VoIP switches, contact center, and unified communications software – but I bet that not many of them previously knew ShoreTel to the depths we went last week. Even I didn’t, although I have to admit I should have as I’m married to a ShoreTel reseller, hear about them all the time, and use their products every day.

There are dozens of conferences and trade shows every year tugging at the attention spans and calendars of customers, prospects, and analysts alike. Next week we have two great competing shows in the VoIP, telephony and unified communications space with VoiceCon in Orlando and VON in San Jose. In that case with topics, products and vendors being equally represented at both, my decision to attend was based on time and geography more than anything. Not so with the new Voice Search Conference that was held in San Diego this week as it was a must attend event for me. We have a lot of shows to choose from, but so few focused on speech technologies as the driver, even if those technologies are now being applied to contact centers, UC, mobility applications and other areas.

Some of the most interesting presentations given at last week’s Voice Search conference in San Diego were focused on the contact center. These sessions honed in on four aspects of using speech in the contact center. The first, and most interesting to me, was using voice user interfaces (VUIs) and speech analytics to assist contact center agents to do their jobs more effectively, and also to improve automation of IVR front-ends to contact centers, to enhance the caller experience and agent portion of the call, if required. In this context voice search is really the convergence of speech recognition and analytics to provide contact center agents with information on their screens that they normally would have had to go type to search for.

It took a long time, but Intervoice has finally merged their enterprise and network platforms into one, both from a solutions and philosophy standpoint. That is one of the key takeaways that I got from having attended the Intervoice industry analyst event in DC this week. That doesn’t sound like such a big deal but it is when you consider that it completes a transition born out of a) moving to a software and services company from one that a decade ago was proprietary down to the board level, b) melding two very different businesses – service provider and enterprise, c) completing the integration of some big acquisitions – namely Brite, Edify, and Nuasis d) blending together contact center, self-service (IVR), messaging and notification onto the same platform.

Back in February I blogged about my mediocre customer service story with CapitolOne, and their egregiously bad use of speech recognition, coupled with lack of CTI into their contact center. However, things aren’t all bad in contact center land as I just had a quite opposite and stellar experience when I called Replacements Ltd.

It’s been a quarter since I blogged my industry wish list for unified communications, so I figured I would revisit the list to see how we are doing. I don’t want to make this a beauty contest as there have been so many announcements, big and small, particularly as we had a number of voice shows last quarter, but here are some highlights. One caveat; just because we have had a lot of announcements this quarter doesn’t mean we have marked anything off of the list. It just means we have made progress in several categories. Here is a recap of my December “wish list” song, and the category each line represents:

I just caught up with Syntellect to see what has gone on since I last blogged about Voiyager, Syntellect’s incredible application testing technology. I’d seen a few press releases on recent successes, including one in April on a win of one of the largest dental insurance carriers (name withheld to further disappoint this analyst in her 12 days of UC wish for more referenceable accounts). Besides not revealing the customer name, the press release left out some of the jaw dropping results of the customer test. The main details of the press release were:

Siemens Enterprise held their global analyst event last week in beautiful Vienna, Austria, and in addition to wanting to get an update on the business, possibly every analyst in attendance was eager to find out if Siemens was going to announce which company would take over the enterprise business. However, as Brian Riggs of Current Analysis pointed out in his ‘Siemens Enterprise: June Wedding Postponed’ (loved that title) blog on NoJitter, there was no long awaited news on who the lucky partner would be for Siemens – yet. However, that didn’t stop many analysts at the event from trying to squeeze shreds of info out of Siemens execs as to who it might be, yet they remained strong and didn’t and couldn’t say.

It’s the dog days of summer in telecom. Just what are the dog days? According to Wikipedia “The phrase Dog Days or "the dog days of summer", refers to the hottest, most sultry days of summer. They are a phenomenon of the northern hemisphere that usually falls between July and early September but the actual dates vary greatly from region to region, depending on latitude and climate. Dog Days can also define a time period or event that is very hot or stagnant.” It’s no only hot in here, since I dropped the kids off at camp and came home to my closed up house and an air conditioner that wasn’t working – and tomorrow is when the heat wave is supposed to start, it’s also that stagnant time of year in telecom.

So summer is not completely as boring as I wrote in my Dog Days of Summer post this week. There is activity in the speech technologies bullpen.

Late last month, newcomer, Vlingo, announced a new product, Vlingo for Blackberry, which will allow users to create and send e-mails and text-messages, search the Web, work with mobile applications such as dialing their phones, look up contacts or work with their calendars - all using unconstrained speech. This speech applications works on all Blackberry devices, which I was happy about as I have a Blackberry Pearl and applications such as FaceBook, are sorely lacking in functionality on the smaller Pearl keyboard. I’m going to try out Vlingo for Blackberry. Hey, if I’m lucky they will have voice-enabled FaceBook so I can carry my social network addiction on the road. Something like Vlingo would be spot on perfect for the Blackberry Pearl, as it has a small keyboard that has dual letters for each key. FaceBook for Blackberry has a password screen that doesn’t show you the letter that you have typed in the password fields, for security reasons. The problem with this is that with the error correcting mode for typing on the Blackberry, if you can’t see your password, you have no idea what letter Blackberry has put into the password field as it tries to guess at the correct spelling of a word. It’s impossible to log on.

I woke up to a press release on Convergys acquiring Intervoice. I have to say that I’m always somewhat surprised about these things, but not really, and when I look back on Intervoice for the past year the timing made great sense. There had been rumors of a small shedding of people over the last few months, but a lot of companies are doing that. That wasn’t a huge clue. The biggest change, that would make them an attractive acquisition target, but not a predictor of being acquired, was that they finally completed the roadmap they had set out do when they acquired Edify. That is, they finished merging the two product lines into a single software-only platform of solutions.