Enhancing Workforce Mobility Through the Consumerization of IT
by Jamie Ryan on May 1st, 2012
Within the last year, businesses have undergone a major transformation as the consumerization of IT makes its way into the enterprise and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies become more prevalent. As today’s workforce increasingly requests the capability to use the same technologies on the job as in their everyday lives, IT departments have been forced to adapt to workers’ preferences and implement policies to support the use of personal devices within the enterprise. According to a 2011 Citrix survey, more than 67 percent of senior executives and IT managers reported that they don’t have policies, procedures or IT systems in place to manage the use of personal devices for business purposes.
Image courtesy of Maas360 www.maas360.com
This consumerization of IT is also further enabling an increasingly mobile workforce. In order to strategically embrace this trend, CIOs must understand how these changes have and will continue to impact the enterprise. Rather than work to block these technologies, CIO’s must find ways to leverage them while maximizing employee efficiency and helping to streamline business processes.
The question is what do organizations gain from allowing employee devices with the walls of enterprise IT? One of the biggest challenges now is keeping a balance between consumerization and the security needs of legacy systems. Since our employees are also consumers, when we understand them we’ll better understand our customers. So while IT needs to adapt in order to keep up with IT consumerization, they also need adopt a “manage the middle” attitude in order to bridge the gap between the consumer and the corporation. It’s a challenge granted but doing so will allow employees to leverage enterprise technologies without sacrificing security while using the tools and techniques that best engage customers.
Unified Messaging Platforms
by Jamie Ryan on December 2nd, 2011
It’s been said that technology can only be as effective as the business strategy it supports. Before you can formulate an effective strategy, however, you need to understand what a particular technology can deliver. That sentiment definitely applies to unified communications. Too often, companies get caught up in the technical aspects and lose focus on how it can make the end user more productive.
So when companies evaluate unified communications, it’s important for them to define what they hope to accomplish. I’d urge people to ask three basic questions:
- How can this technology affect the way people do their daily jobs and improve customer value?
- How does it streamline processes such as collaboration, scheduling, and other activities?
- What level of IT support is necessary to provide people with this added functionality?
What’s truly transformational about unified communications is that it gives users a single interface to manage and manipulate their interactions. When Aspect was preparing to implement Lync’s predecessor, OCS, our strategy was to unify our disparate messaging platforms—that is, voice, voicemail, e-mail, instant messaging, video, online meetings and conferencing, and calendar.
Think about the how you use different communications platforms throughout the course of a workday: voice conversations are pretty easy and spontaneous; email tends to me more formal and planned; instant messaging is short and immediate; and calendars should reflect and integrate these interactions.
When people are dealing with day-to-day tasks, they tend to stay in their communications environment. The ability to manage all of these different platforms without switching screens or devices is a tremendous time saver and delivers significant benefits.
A platform that accommodates individual tastes. With unified messaging platforms individuals have the flexibility to adapt the technology to their work style—something that’s critical for user adoption. Similarly, with the intuitive interface, users can jump in without extensive training.
Voice commands across messaging platforms. With Lync, people can use Outlook voice activation to respond to both e-mail and voicemail by phone. For example, say I’m in the car running 15 minutes late to a meeting. To notify people, I can simply click on the meeting invite and say that I’m running 15 minutes late. Lync automatically sends a message to all attendees and adjusts the meeting time on everyone’s schedule. While some smartphones are now adopting this same idea, we have been using it for the past three years on a global basis.
A unified view of messages. Lync also features such as voice-to-text translation, which allows individuals to prioritize voicemail and e-mail messages at the same time by using preview screens in e-mail. You can get an idea very quickly of what people want. In separate environments, you can’t do that.
The right messaging platform every time. With rich presence, your colleagues quickly understand the best communications channel to use based on your availability. If someone sees that I’m not available, they aren’t going to leave me a long voicemail. I’ve found that people intuitively understand how to select from their messaging options to get the best response. It’s why I’ve received just a handful of internal voicemails since we implemented unified messaging.
Recognizing what unified communications can deliver to your organization is the first step. Next, companies need to devise an implementation strategy to achieve these benefits. In my next blog, I’ll share a basic framework that can enable every organization to begin to integrate unified communications into their daily operations.
How to add the right social media channels to customer contact
by Jamie Ryan on June 17th, 2011
As a CIO, I deal on a daily basis with new and emerging technologies: assessing their capabilities, figuring out which ones fit with business strategy, and devising implementation strategies for those with the most value for our organization. So I can relate to the challenge many companies are facing regarding customer experience and which social media channels to integrate into customer contact.
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, and most companies don’t have the resources to be all things to all people. Instead, they must choose the path that meets the majority of their customer needs.
One of the key factors in selecting social media channels to pursue is a company’s ability to support a large and engaged following. It’s the classic “be careful what you wish for”: if you actively promote Facebook to increase your number of fans, for instance, you’re sending the signal that it’s now a preferred channel for customer engagement, so you better have someone monitoring the traffic.
Given this added commitment, companies should make an objective assessment of their current approach to social media to help select the highest value channels.
- How would you rate your customer contact and level of service?
- How many channels are you currently operating in?
- How integrated are your internal functions?
The answers will help companies determine the maturity of their customer engagement as well as their ability to integrate new channels easily. Armed with this knowledge, companies then must determine which channels are most effective for customer contact. A few things to keep in mind:
Different channels move at a different pace. Think about the varying customer expectations for response times based on the contact channel: voice (real time), SMS text message (within 15 minutes), messages posted to Facebook (by day’s end). Contact centers need to establish realistic guidelines so that they can provide the same value and level of service regardless of channel.
Customer inquiries are fielded by a diverse workforce. In the typical organization, there’s not just one department that owns social media. Customer contact, marketing, sales, and communications can all be involved, so it’s important that everyone is operating with the same messaging and approach.
Gathering information is one thing, keeping track of engagement is another. In the old days, companies would use a CRM system to track customer contact. If 50 requests came in, a sales force member might resolve 40 and hand 10 off to contact center. Now requests are coming in through multiple channels and being sent to six different functional areas to be solved.
Choosing which social media channels to integrate can be moving target, and it’s not just about the technology. Companies should follow a three-step process to integrate social media into customer contact.
1) Expand gradually. Choose the one or two channels you feel most comfortable with and offer the greatest value to the organization, master them, and then integrate additional channels over time.
2) Take a coherent organization approach. Departments such as sales, marketing, and customer contact must begin to work more collaboratively and transparently.
3) Implement the right systems and processes. Companies need to develop a strategic approach to take action on the information these channels generate, which means developing the appropriate organizational tools.
New technologies are emerging every day, so the most successful companies will implement a social media strategy that is flexible enough to evolve and respond as the business landscape changes.
Let me know what approach your company has taken to social media and customer contact—what’s worked, what could be improved, and the response of your customers.
Meeting the evolving standards of multichannel customer contact
by Jamie Ryan on May 20th, 2011
How would you like to be on hold for days? That might seem like an exaggeration, but bear with me.
I was replacing the kitchen cabinets in my home, and that meant that I also had to replace the cabinet face on a built-in dishwasher. The issue: I couldn’t figure out how to change the cabinet face. I put a call in to the manufacture, and the service rep said he would e-mail me instructions. Case closed, right? Not so fast.
I waited but didn’t receive the promised e-mail. It eventually took three separate calls to get the contact center to e-mail the instructions. What should have been an instantaneous fix took several days, made all the more frustrating because the customer service reps raised my expectations by assuring me that the instructions were on the way. I couldn’t help thinking, “How long does it take to send an e-mail?”
The lesson here is that if a company decides to engage in a new channel, its representatives have to be prepared to respond according to that channel’s standards. The increase in instant communication channels such as text messages and chat has conditioned people to expect immediate attention and resolution of issues.
Back in the old days, customers had one channel in to the company—the phone—but the company controlled the conversation and the information they made available. Now consumers have been freed from the handcuffs of communicating through only voice channels, but they haven’t lost their expectations for great service. In fact, the expectations have increased.
The number of channels—online forums, Facebook, Twitter, and others—continues to grow, and these are beyond the contact center’s control. Companies have recognized for some time that to be really effective, they need to have multiple paths to communicate with customers. Here’s the challenge: how do you ensure they’re providing a consistent level of service and information, and meeting expectations across all of them?
Contact center managers have established levels of service for traditional channels, but now they need to do the same with nontraditional channels. Oracle, for instance, has supported robust online, customer-driven forums that allow programmers to trade ideas and information. The company has come up with a strategy to manage this channel in a way that enables consumers to resolve issues without ever having to engage with a customer representative.
The contact center must have the systems and processes in place for each channel to respond in a consistent and acceptable time frame. That means if you open up your contact center to tweets, you need to determine the appropriate response time. Getting back to someone’s tweet a day or two later just isn’t acceptable.
Without a coordinated, consistent approach, companies run the risk of waiting too long to respond—in effect, putting the customer on hold for days. These kinds of interactions have the potential to do lasting damage to customer relationships.
In my next post, I’ll talk about how companies can make strategic decisions about which channels to engage in.
Winning over the entire organization in an IT implementation
by Jamie Ryan on April 25th, 2011
Obtaining executive support and buy-in for IT initiatives is crucial. But that’s just one piece of the puzzle. A completely different challenge is to ensure that the rest of the organization understands the benefits of any new technology so that they fully embrace it.
As soon as employees don’t buy in to the new system, you’re sunk. People will find every reason the new solution can’t work instead of helping find ways to make it work. When that happens, the time and resources you’ve devoted to the new system have been wasted, and you are spending time reselling the idea vs. celebrating a successful deployment.
For Aspect’s OCS implementation, we had a couple other obstacles. Our workforce is distributed in 23 offices around the globe. Each location had become accustomed to and comfortable with its own platforms and systems. Getting employees to embrace a new technology is always tricky; when you throw in different languages, cultural norms, time zones, and geographies, the potential for resistance increases significantly. So we had our work cut out for us.
Companies getting ready to embark on a similar path should be sure to address three areas:
Understand your constituencies. CIOs need to be aware that each part of the company cares passionately about having specific types of functionality. While the executive team is much more focused on the financial and strategic implications of an IT effort, the rest of the organization will need to find ways to be productive with the solution. So CIOs ignore the administrative assistants, department managers, and functional employees at their own peril. Lots of companies have botched implementations by ignoring key parts of the organization.
Clearly communicate the value. Most people are averse to change unless there’s a well-defined benefit. For an IT implementation, CIOs must be timely and transparent so that employees understand what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how it affects them (the “what’s in it for me?” factor). With an enterprise-wide implementation such as OCS, you can imagine what the reaction would have been if the only thing that people understood was “we are losing our phones” instead of “our phones are being replaced by a fully integrated UC solution.” We were very diligent about sharing timelines and rationale to ensure that people were fully aware of all changes and how they would be affected.
Get people involved. Prior to rolling out OCS to the entire organization, we conducted pilots—not just to test the technology, but also to create champions for the new system. In my experience, getting people from various groups involved early in the process is critical. By including representatives from multiple functional groups, we were able to convert doubters into our biggest boosters. There’s no more effective way to drive adoption than for employees to hear from their coworkers about a cool new technology and how it’s improving their productivity.
I should note that the ease of adoption for OCS and later Lync greatly facilitated all of these efforts. Employees were able to get up to speed quickly, the interface was intuitive, and the benefits were immediately tangible. Our migration from OCS to Lync 2010 took just under five weeks. During that time, we upgraded 100 percent of our employees, across 23 sites, in 13 countries. A deployment of that size and scope only happens when people across the enterprise believe it’s a winning proposition.
Defining the role of IT in the mobile world
by Jamie Ryan on April 4th, 2011
With the rollout of the iPad 2, the world was once again caught up in the excitement of the promise of a new product. Who wouldn’t like a thinner tablet with enhanced functionality?
I see the announcement as another installment in an ongoing challenge for CIOs struggling to keep pace with the consumer market. As more and more individuals buy smart phones, tablets, and other devices, they increasingly rely on them for business. This dynamic raises all sorts of questions:
- What’s the line between business and personal use when employees are expected to be responsive in the evenings and on weekends?
- How does a company safeguard sensitive information when it has less and less control over end users and devices?
- Is IT responsible for providing technical support for these devices? …Read more >
Four keys to achieving the full benefits of unified communications
by Jamie Ryan on March 15th, 2011
With the potential to transform the way employees interact and collaborate with one another, unified communications represents a valuable opportunity for companies to capture significant value. To do so, however, executives must ensure that the implementation effort extends beyond IT.
When Aspect migrated to OCS several years ago and then to Lync at the end of 2010, we understood that to maximize the impact of these technologies entailed far more than integrating existing systems. We had to take a more holistic approach that encompassed processes, organizational structures, and company culture. …Read more >
Assessing the hard and soft ROI of unified communications
by Jamie Ryan on March 2nd, 2011
For companies that are thinking of adopting a unified communications (UC) platform, one of the lingering questions is verifying the return on investment (ROI). Even though the economy is recovering and IT spending is predicted to rise more than 5 percent this year, any major technology investment must be rigorously analyzed and justified before committing resources.
In a previous post, I highlighted the bottom-line benefits that Aspect has captured in implementing Microsoft Lync (and its predecessor, OCS) in our offices around the world. A little background: two years ago, Aspect made a commitment to implement a UC platform for our entire global workforce—1,900 employees in more than 20 offices. We achieved substantial cost savings—$2 million of annualized spending in the first 12 months.
Our experience at Aspect is consistent with a Forrester Consulting study on the total economic impact of Microsoft Lync on a composite organization. Forrester estimated a 337 percent risk-adjusted ROI, with a payback period of 12 months. We actually achieved an ROI within nine months of adoption.
As we moved from OCS to Lync, we saw additional savings via an 80 percent reduction in our server footprint. …Read more >
Huge cost savings and rapid ROI with Lync
by Jamie Ryan on January 31st, 2011
When Aspect replaced Microsoft OCS with Lync, it had an immediate impact on our entire organization. A few facts tell the story:
- Deployed to 1,900 employees in 22 countries just 5 weeks after Lync’s general availability (GA)
- No training required to move from OCS to Lync
- Reduced server footprint by 80 percent
- Achieved ROI in just 9 months
For more details, check out this video:
Prepping IT for OCS Deployment
by Jamie Ryan on June 21st, 2010
Successful software deployments are usually a result of thorough planning and preparation. IT departments and organizations should be well aware of the user adoption process, especially on a scale as large as OCS deployment.
During UC World’s live event, Bill Lynch, Senior Director of IT Infrastructure at Aspect, suggested providing easy, quick access to the information and resources employees need most as a key factor in their OCS deployment. Also, he attributed Aspect’s successful rollout to engaging vendors early, pilot testing feedback as well as a thorough communication and training campaign throughout deployment.
Is your IT Department prepared to go with unified communications?
Improving the way companies communicate internally and externally with their customers is an important objective for all organizations. This blog is focused on levaraging the collective knowledge withing Aspect.