Mobile Users Want to Use Their Own Devices, Want Employers to Bring the Security
by Tim Dreyer on May 10th, 2012
A lot has been written about the influx of personal devices being used in the enterprise lately. And while there are certainly benefits to employee efficiency in allowing the use of the smartphones and tablets to help them remotely connect to the enterprise, there are clearly security risks as well.
An ITWorld piece published this week on BYOD cited some very interesting stats from a recent Juniper Networks survey of 4,000 or so mobile-using IT professionals and several points jumped out at me. 
Many of the mobile users who responded to the survey said that they depend on their network provider for their device and content security. And when they use those devices within their employer’s enterprise, they have the same expectation. In fact 90% of those surveyed felt that their employer should provide personal device security when they use on the company network. The problem is many of these employees go around their company’s device security policy anyway. So there should be no surprise then that about a third of the companies in the survey encountered some level of security issue from non-approved personal mobile devised accessing enterprise data.
Cleary BYOD is not going away so learning how to balance the benefits with the security issues is the task at hand. IT needs to adapt in order to keep up with IT consumerization in order to accommodate the skills and technologies that make employees productive and allow them to leverage enterprise resources. Intelligent, measured management that balances IT device consumerization and the security needs of legacy systems is a big and growing challenge for IT. Meeting in the middle ground is key. It is nearly impossible to construct a policy to allow every personal device onto the network so if departments can identify the phones and tablets they are able to support and employees restrict their personal device usage to conform to those policies, both security and productivity can remain high.
Social Business Part II: From Sociability to Reality
by Mike Sheridan on April 4th, 2012
In my last post on social business, I talked about social business being a powerful global conversation: a conversation that allows us to share information at blinding speed. I mentioned one example of social business being the evolution of contact center to engagement center. But theoretical conversations don’t get us very far without a plan of action, do they?
OK, you want to socialize your enterprise but where do you start? Your organization likely already has a CRM application, but in order to create internal social collaboration, a truly social business environment, we need to expose the connectivity capabilities if they don’t exist already.
Typically CRM applications do:
- Maintain Master Customer Records
- Provide Interaction Tracking through a variety of channels
- Support Process Automation for Case management using workflows and tracking activities
To create an enterprise socialsphere though, we’ll need to be able to save chat, email, and voice exchanges automatically into the CRM without relying on the agent. We should be able to create and present prompts – like upsell – based on a customer’s profile. And we need pass parameters like account information from IVR or Chat context messaging automatically to pop the preferred account screen for the agent on call acceptance
Web 2.0 digital functionalities like these are already pervasive on the Internet, so the idea here is to create an anytime, anywhere access environment with a single, internal routing engine. Doing this will ensure content and context continuity, flexible engagement strategies, and workforce optimization that will harness the social energy of employees, allowing them identify, retrieve and deploy resources in real time for optimal customer engagement.
Companies can do this by:
- Learning from every interaction. Knowledge is everywhere and the ability to synthesize the intelligence about your customers, your resources and your processes from your interaction systems are the metrics that can help you continually improve results.
- Gathering that intelligence. Putting data into context provides a view into your operations can help establish specific KPIs that will allow you achieve better, more consistent performance measurement.
- Putting learning into action. Applied learning is what really creates a social business atmosphere. By putting alerts and notifications in place, identifying, rewarding and cross-pollinating best practices and informing, coaching and influencing how transactions are routed creates active, thriving and intelligent workflows.
Social business success isn’t just about agents, social business also extends to the experts throughout the enterprise, the content creators and all back office resources who play a part in managing the customer experience. A social business platform leverages CRM and incorporates a robust, workforce optimization platform that minimizes customer service disruptions. By helping ensure that an organization consistently matches the right resource to the right customers at the right time, true synchronicity in the agent-expert universe can be achieved.
You can learn more about the architecture behind a social business environment here.
Social Business Myth Busting
by Tim Dreyer on March 26th, 2012
Mark Fidelman posted a smart piece last week on the importance of sound social business strategies. His piece focuses on moving from social media tactics to evolving a social media strategy that is broader than just establishing a social media policy and having a corporate Facebook page. He sees the need for a social business strategy that lays a roadmap to fully leveraging the knowledge of employees, customers and partners. Like Mike Sheridan’s his recent blog All Business is Social but How Social is Your Business? the idea of the social business moving beyond a business with a social media strategy to one that makes social practices part of their operating DNA is rapidly gaining momentum.
While Fidelman is talking to the enterprise as a whole, these concepts and principles are even more relevant for the customer contact center, the epicenter of customer engagement. In fact, with the increasing consumer use of Facebook and Twitter and multiplying customer service mediums, you can argue that the contact center needs to be the epicenter of a social business. Consider the following parallels:
1. Make subject matter experts “heroes.” Making expertise available and visible to those on the front line of the connected consumer – in real time – allows the contact center to respond rapidly and potentially resolve increasingly complex customer issues within a single interaction.
2. Build a community. Customer engagement is all about building a community internally – and extending it beyond the walls of the enterprise to customers. Harmonized multi-channel engagement backed by a collaborative organization is the new key to contact center success. Breaking down channel silos opens up the ability for that anytime, anywhere customer engagement. Breaking down departmental walls allows agents to connect with each other as well as with marketing, finance, fulfillment, legal or even suppliers if they need to – without abandoning the customer. By doing both, organizations create deeper, more productive customer engagements.
3. Leverage collective intelligence. This is also cited as a way to create an atmosphere where individual learning can be shared to create a more organic knowledge center. By enabling agents to gain, share and house knowledge, they not only the right information at the right time – and have built-in reinforcement – but this kind of environment reduces onboarding and re-education efforts considerably.
Social business is quickly becoming business as usual. Are you ready?
All Business is Social But How Social is Your Business?
by Mike Sheridan on March 19th, 2012
Tweeting for dollars, blogging for bucks. The common misconception regarding the idea of social business is that it’s simply selling through social media. And while selling to consumers is a part of it, social business is much more than that. Social business is the idea of is taking the principles, technologies and behaviors of consumer social media and applying them to the enterprise. That is, replicating social collaboration within your enterprise community. Does that mean selling? It could, yes. Does that mean enabling Words with Friends for the shipping department? Probably not.
So what are those collaborative technologies? When the idea of Enterprise 2.0 was put forth by Andrew McAfee back in 2006, he made the realization that not only were Web 2.0 technologies like search and instant messaging in use but many of them were already in the enterprise stack enabling communication, knowledge sharing, etc. He noted that these applications, if applied internally, can knit the enterprise together and create employee collaboration that wasn’t possible before.
So really, when we think about Enterprise 2.0, we need to look to the new consumer or Consumer 2.0. This is the consumer who uses Facebook to connect and crowdsource decisions, uses Twitter to build circles of experts and Foursquare to update friends on location and status. He or she uses smartphone-enabled search apps and gets reviews and recommendations in real time quite often at the same time.
What is important to point out here is that the idea of social business is not just social technology in the enterprise. It is primarily social empowerment of the employee. It’s all about letting them use the tools like information acquisition in real time, crowdsourced, contextual intelligence, and knowledge sharing that they use in their personal lives, in ways that creates deeper customer engagement. And it is about tying this social enterprise to a company’s customers.
Enterprise 2.0 is about that powerful global conversation: a conversation that allows us to share information at blinding speed. The effect is that the consumers get smarter and in some respects, get smarter faster than the companies that are trying to serve them. Where Enterprise 2.0 and Consumer 2.0 meet is where the change in customer engagement happens: engage your customers not only in the mediums but also in the manners they prefer. They have a knowledge base, your agents have a knowledge base, they get real time answers, the contact center gives them real time answers.
Social business exemplifies itself most readily in the evolution of contact center to engagement center. In next week’s post, we’ll look how to apply the tools and create the applications to optimize your CRM platform and take advantage them.
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.
Enterprise 2.0: Not quite the social butterfly?
by Chris O'Brien on September 1st, 2011
He’s one of the top decision-makers in the company. He’s well-educated and highly compensated. And he probably values social tools LESS than other collaboration tools available in his Enterprise 2.0 workplace.
These are the latest findings revealed by Forrester’s analysis of survey data taken of content and collaboration professionals, discussed in TJ Keitt’s blog: Is Social Software Relevant to Information Workers?
The answer to Keitt’s question actually seems to depend on what Enterprise 2.0 expects and needs from its social technology, both now and in its evolution alongside the consumer.
Doing Business in a Social Marketplace
As described by thought leaders and analysts, Enterprise 2.0 is the path forward that enables market-savvy businesses to engage today’s sophisticated, socially networked consumers.
Forrester’s data indicate a substantial number of businesses are following this trend, leaving behind the antiquated “hanging shingle” model of doing business and adopting a customer-facing approach driven by relationships, long-term loyalty, and referrals.
This approach? Just like the customers it targets, it’s extremely social.
So, has a social marketplace and a social business strategy translated into widespread adoption of social tools in the workplace?
Surprisingly, no.
When surveyed, the heaviest users of social tools within an organization – like the executive we met earlier in this blog – felt that social tools actually had less value to their organization than other workforce collaboration tools.
“Liking” the Metrics
The big question is, why? It may depend largely on the industry.
For the knowledge worker, collaboration within the organization is a two-way dialogue – an exchange of information that is often the key to workplace effectiveness. In contrast, there is a point of diminishing returns for this type of collaboration in terms of productivity in other areas of the organization, such as the contact center. There, efficient collaboration is a matter of streamlining the information exchange into an agent’s workflow – providing real-time access to information throughout the entire organization.
In the contact center, the value of social customer contact is directly relevant to how each interaction can be channeled, captured, parsed, routed, and queued for follow-up by an agent. Tools that fail to do these things are of limited value, and executives with any understanding of Consumer 2.0 will quickly come to that conclusion.
A new offering from Aspect announced last week suggests new possibilities that may deliver the true business value that has long been absent from social media tools.
Aspect Social Media Channel Integration is a business workflow solution that complements and enhances virtually any social media monitoring tool an enterprise already uses.
This application is, in fact, truer to the vision of Enterprise 2.0 and enables the company to be more responsive to customers on a much larger scale. In addition to monitoring and responding to individual social interactions, an enterprise will now have the capability to determine the relative social influence of a customer providing feedback – and automatically assign a follow-up task to an agent’s queue through Aspect Unified IP. Recorded outcomes, agent interactions, and performance benchmarks for the enterprise’s social strategy all become part of the trackable, reportable data.
If perceived value is tied to metrics, this may be the turning point Enterprise 2.0 needs to come out of its cocoon.
If the whole organization is responsible for marketing, what role should the contact center play?
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on July 18th, 2011
The McKinsey Quarterly just published an article, “We’re all marketers now,” that highlights how the rise of digital channels and the shifting dynamics of customer engagement have extended responsibility for marketing to the entire organization. It’s a great piece featuring insight from executives of top global companies. As the article notes, “At the end of the day, customers no longer separate marketing from the product—it is the product. They don’t separate marketing from their in-store or online experience—it is the experience. In the era of engagement, marketing is the company.”
The authors’ main premise closely parallels a vision Aspect has been advancing for some time: that providing a seamless customer experience will require customer contact to extend throughout the organization. In effect, marketing and customer experience will become so closely entwined that the entire company will be responsible for their execution. As CEO Jim Foy predicted in a recent interview, the traditional contact center will no longer exist in a decade. Instead, the enterprise will need to change and mobilize to keep the customer satisfied.
All of that sounds good, but to get there companies will have to transform the way their organization functions. As the Quarterly notes:
The starting point is a mind-set shift around customer interaction touch points. Companies typically think of them as being “owned” by a given function: for instance, marketing owns brand management; sales owns customer relationships; merchandising or retail operations own the in-store experience. In today’s marketing environment, companies will be better off if they stop viewing customer engagement as a series of discrete interactions and instead think about it as customers do: a set of related interactions that, added together, make up the customer experience. That perspective should stimulate fresh dialogue among members of the senior team about who should design the overall system of touch points to create compelling customer engagement, and who then builds, operates, and renews each touch point consistent with that overall vision. There’s no need to worry about traditional functional or business unit ownership: whoever is best placed to tackle an activity should do so.
Two key components the authors don’t address: how the contact center and collaboration technologies fit into the equation.
I believe the contact center has a huge role to play in executing this new approach. While marketing is tasked with branding, the contact center already supports overall brand value by engaging customers across multiple channels. Similarly, sales owns the customer relationship, but the contact center is an integral element of strengthening that relationship.
A critical element to support this organizational approach to marketing is transparency and collaboration. When the enterprise adopts a unified communications solution, it supports more effective contact center operations as well as providing a platform to share information seamlessly across departments. Contact centers have developed and honed effective strategies and processes over years of experience. Unified communications enables contact centers to bring the company’s best resources to the conversation in a seamless, efficient, and well managed way—in effect, extending the contact center to every function of the enterprise.
And when it comes to ownership of certain activities, the contact center is well placed to manage social media monitoring and engagement. In fact, contact center technology already integrates these functions to allow service agents to respond to customers in their preferred communications channel.
Progressive companies have already grasped the benefits of unified communications. At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer noted that 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies have implemented Lync.
But while technology is advancing rapidly, organizations must evolve as well to reap the full benefits—a far more difficult and entrenched challenge.
If your company has already begun to shift to this more holistic approach to marketing, I’d love to hear from you—what’s working as well as the impact it’s had on customer experience.
Microsoft Lync: If you build it, they will come; they will most definitely come
by Mike Butts on July 8th, 2011
James Earl Jones, playing Terence Mann in the 1989 blockbuster movie Field of Dreams, echoed the famous words “People will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.” Obviously, this famous line convinced Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) to destroy much of his corn field in favor of a baseball field.
Like Kevin Costner, every IT decision maker wrestles with user adoption when faced with a key decision on whether or not to add a new “crop” to their technology farm. Deploying technology can often be much easier than getting employees to use the new application, technology, or tools.
I have personally witnessed (and been part of) companies that have spent significant hours and money on end user awareness and training in an effort to get employees to embrace new software tools only to come up short in realizing the solution’s full impact.
There has also been a lot of recent banter, such as this recent UC Strategies roundtable discussion, on whether or not intensive training and interaction policies are needed to achieve desired unified communications productivity gains.
Luckily for IT decision makers, Microsoft’s unified communication platform (known as Lync) virtually makes these worries disappear.
Let’s face it: today’s business climate requires companies to ask more and more from their employees, which leaves their most valuable resource feeling frazzled, annoyed, stressed, underappreciated, and more. What employees want is to feel valued, connected, and empowered to perform their varied functions. It’s not about communicating or delivering a message; it’s about creating deeper connections and collaborating with coworkers and customers.
Every day I witness the power and productivity that Microsoft Lync delivers to our organization, and we do it with very little end user training or guidance. Microsoft Lync defines our organization’s work culture because the platform allows our 1,900 employees across nearly 20 countries to collaborate using a state-of-the-art tool set that incorporates one-click instant messaging, online conferencing, and voice communications.
Nowhere is this more evident than when new employees start at Aspect. New employees, at least in the departments I interact with, typically get a informal 15 minute overview on Lync’s various features such as instant messaging, scheduling, participating in online conferences, and some of the other cool features such as contact tagging, organization charts, status bar updates, and using the Lync Communicator as their soft phone.
Within an hour or two of their employment, new hires are sending and responding to instant messages and participating in online conferences complete with screen sharing. Of course, they uncover other capability gems later, but the new employees I talk with are astounded and stunned that Microsoft Lync isn’t deployed as a standard desktop tool at all companies.
But please allow me to repeat. This is all accomplished without formal training and guidance policies. Our employees quickly gravitate to the tool because they find value and it’s easy to use.
Also lucky for IT decision makers is that Microsoft unified communications technology has emerged as the global leader in unified communications outpacing rivals Cisco and IBM, as noted in this recent ABI Research study.
Let me wrap up by saying “If you build they will come; they will most definitely come. And don’t be surprised if there isn’t some sort of revolt if you ever try to remove Lync from your organization.”
Til next time.
How the contact center can support collaboration and brand building
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on June 15th, 2011
I came across an interesting post on the HBR blog by David Aaker, “How CMOs build brands by collaborating across silos.” The first thing that struck me was how long we have been talking about organizational silos. The second was that, for once, the author did not advocate the need to break down the silos. After all, the perennial recommendation to tear down these walls (Mr. Gorbachev) overlooks the fact that they are a necessary organizational element of corporate life.
Instead, Aaker recommended replacing competition and isolation with collaboration and communication across these silos, with the CMO acting as the facilitator. He offered five suggestions to achieve this goal:
- Define the role of the CMO team as facilitator, consultant, or service provider
- Use teams
- Develop and exploit silo-spanning programs
- Identify and leverage great ideas
- Get a common planning and information system
This approach seems eminently more reasonable to me. For a real-world example, see what’s happening now with the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives and Office of the President on the budget deficit talks.
So when it comes to strategy and idea development, this decentralized model is a good one. However, to integrate some of these ideas and recommendations in marketing operations, organizations must come together around a common, centralized set of processes, best practices, and knowledge resources.
For example, marketing might come up with this great product promotion after conferring with various internal stakeholders―but to make that promotion successful, there has to be a heck of a lot of coordination across demand generation in marketing, internal sales reps, order fulfillment, billing, product and brand management, among others. Execution is as essential to maintaining brand equity as are the strategies themselves.
Aaker highlights the need for better knowledge sharing in his fifth recommendation. The reason silos are counterproductive is that they result in a lack of transparency. Without engagement and information from each marketing-related function, executives don’t have the comprehensive perspective to make good strategic decisions.
And that is where the contact center, especially those resting on and bolstered by Unified Communications (UC) infrastructures such as Microsoft Lync, becomes so critical. Tools such as rich presence, IM, screen sharing, and back-office integration enable collaboration within the contact center and across the organization.
Since the contact center has the most direct interaction with customers, this function is a crucial component of any coordinated marketing effort. On a daily basis, customer service reps reinforce the core brand of the company as well as collect feedback on how its products and marketing are being perceived.
So, yes, decentralize in idea generation but centralize the execution of those ideas to your customer base around the contact center. The CMO can facilitate the formulation of go-to-market strategies and campaigns―and the contact center can facilitate their successful operational rollout to the market.
Life is better when you have Lync capabilities in help desk scenarios
by Mike Butts on June 1st, 2011
Being an Aspect employee, I hate to use this forum to honk too much for an Aspect solution. However, I think I owe it to all help desk and IT decision makers to share my experiences in an effort to improve your productivity and effectiveness.
I had the good fortune of being the sales force automation (SFA) manager for a global organization where my team was responsible for deploying, maintaining, and supporting the hardware and software that the global sales force used on a daily basis.
I think back to those days and how much more support we could have provided if we had access to Aspect’s recent release of Aspect Contact 2011, a Microsoft Lync–based platform designed for small contact centers and internal help desks.
Aspect Contact utilizes a full range of Microsoft Lync unified communications capabilities, such as multichannel inbound access (voice, IM and email), presence, screen sharing, and remote desktop access. Additional functionality includes the solution’s advanced automatic call distribution, centralized administration, reporting, and expert escalation.
Our help desk staff could have been much more effective at troubleshooting tough technical problems if they could have viewed an end user’s application versus having the sales person explain their problems over the phone. Or even better, our help desk personnel could have used remote desktop access to take control of the person’s laptop to deploy fixes or changes. Remote desktop access capabilities alone could have mitigated frustration for both end users and help desk staff while lowering the burnout rate for help desk personnel.
Job burnout is always a major concern for help desk managers, since their technical resources are on the front line answering questions and almost always hearing negative comments (the nature of the job). I wish my team could have used this state-of-the-art solution to make their job easier and more fulfilling while reducing staff turnover.
Our SFA team, utilizing Aspect Contact, could have devised advanced inbound service requests based on end user profiles (for example, executive team gets special treatment), help desk skills, service type, subject matter, and availability. On really challenging issues, they could have increased first-contact resolution by finding and collaborating with subject matter experts on issues they could not easily resolve, thus eliminating call backs and more frustration.
I personally spent much time, money, and effort traveling across North America and Europe to train our salespeople and internal users at manufacturing facilities. While I enjoyed racking up hundreds of thousands of frequent-flyer miles and seeing beautiful cities in Europe, it would have been much more efficient for me (and the company) to schedule consistent training sessions utilizing Microsoft Lync’s online meeting and desktop sharing capabilities.
Aspect Contact’s real time and historical reports could have also helped us make better informed decisions to enhance internal team productivity.
I suggest IT decision makers consider Aspect Contact in your help desk applications if you have deployed or are planning to deploy Microsoft Lync across your organization. The decision is really a no-brainer, since this cost-effective solution can transform your help desk from a cost center into a strategic, high-value department.
Til next time.
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.