This year, the UC Summit devoted a special session to UC in the contact center, with Blair Pleasant, Don Van Doren, and myself presenting our views on new value-add opportunities for channel partners and independent consultants to generate new revenues from clients. My particular focus was on the impact of multi-modal mobility on customer interactions with both self-service applications and access to live assistance in various modes when needed.

See my slide presentation on the subject of Mobile Customer Interactions

Customer service responsibilities have always included both live assistance and automated self-services in various modes of communication. The rapid consumer adoption of multi-modal smartphones and tablets has increased the use of self-service applications, as well as customer accessibility for pro-active automated time-sensitive notifications. Both inbound and outbound customer automated contacts can be UC-enabled for different modes of contextual access to live assistance, depending on the dynamic needs of a mobile user.

Survey Confirms Shifts in Customer Service Interactions

A 2012 Consumer Channel Preference Survey confirmed the overwhelming preference by consumers to use Web-based self-services as a starting point over traditional call center agents. However, if there is a question or problem that arises, then a connection with live assistance will be required.

The use of multi-modal smartphones makes both capabilities readily available to customers, making self-services a practical starting point for most mobile customer services. This will both reduce customer service staffing, while increasing customer satisfaction in gaining quick access to information and self-service transactions.

Conceptually, mobile online self-services make a lot sense. However, the implementation, integration, and ongoing support of such applications are too complex for most organizations and will require third-party services. This is the opportunity for channel partners and consultants to get involved in the migration from traditional telephone call centers to the next generation of “Multimodal Interaction Centers that can accommodate mobile customers.

So, while UC can improve productivity for internal personnel within an organization, it may be even more important for customer service activities.

Cloud Services Will Facilitate Role Of Channel Partners and Consultants

Although not specifically discussed in my presentation, it is intuitively obvious that integrations and change management of self-service applications can be most cost-effectively performed in a “cloud” based environment. That would include both “private,” “public,” and hybrid clouds.

Even as internal desktop software applications become “virtualized,” so too will mobile customer applications be most efficiently and flexibly handled in “cloud” environments, rather than just in premised-based systems. Channel partners will also be able partner with each other in order to integrate with various vendor technologies as needed.

UC Summit Attendee Feedback

What was most interesting was the response received from the UC Summit attendees. In a poll of the attendees, the session on Contact Center opportunities was rated “most highly valuable” by most of the respondents. On the other hand, during my presentation, I asked for a show of hands of how many in the audience were actively involved today with self-service applications like IVR.

The response to my question showed only a few people doing much today. However, the high potential interest in the future of UC-enabled customer services, means that the channel partners and consultants are ready and interested in becoming involved with implementing change in the contact center to accommodate mobile customers. This would also require a shift in the technology to support new multimodal agent needs as well, e.g., social messaging, video, and the flexibility to change interaction mode dynamically.

To see all the slide presentations of the “Contact Center session at the UC Summit, go to:

http://www.ucstrategies.com/uploadedFiles/UC_Summit/2013/NewOpportunitiesinContactCenters_PleasantRosenbergVanDoren.pdf

This change will be particularly welcomed in business communications, where the limitations of PSTN telephony and voicemail did not allow end users the functional capabilities they needed. In particular, external users were required to place a phone call just to leave a voice message in an organization’s employee voice mailbox. As a way of consolidating message management for recipients, “unified messaging” (UM) provided shared message storage, notifications, and conversion of voice messages-to-text options for message retrieval. UM capabilities were therefore always considered a major communication application component of UC.

Mobility is a big driver for multi-modal messaging

Now that consumers are quickly adopting multi-modal mobile smartphones and tablets and can handle other forms of messaging (email, SMS, social posts), it’s time for voicemail to join the “Mobile UC” club. However, we shouldn’t still call that move by its old name, “unified messaging” (UM), which only provided limited benefits to message recipients and nothing for message senders.

The old UM has always been focused on simply making it easier for a message recipient to be notified about and easily retrieve all types of business messages, including email and voicemail, in the recipient’s choice of media. With rapid consumer adoption of mobile, multi-modal smartphones and tablets, along with video messaging and new forms of social networking, it really is time to expand the functional role of UM in the context of such flexibility to support a message originator’s options as well. (I blogged about this over five years ago!)

This will not only benefit end users who want to communicate more flexibly with different media, but will also have a strong impact on automated business applications for initiating notification contacts with individual end users and customers. Although the industry has been moving quickly in developing the different pieces of UC, the market is still confused because we are still using old terminology. This is particularly evident as organizations try to migrate from legacy technologies to the future of cloud-based, UC-enabled business communications and think of UM as being just about email and voice mail consolidation for storage and retrieval.

Since telephony and associated voice messaging technologies are changing, both from an infrastructure perspective (IP connectivity, “cloud” applications), as well as user functionally and UI flexibility, the old perception of UM must change as well. That would mean being able to send messages in any mode desired by the sender, as well as retrieval and response in any mode by the recipients. Because mobility implies constraints on which medium of messaging functionality can be used, UM must provide dynamic flexibility for both the sender and recipient interfaces, including the mode of “message waiting” notifications (MWI).

So, What Do We Have To Change?

• First of all, separate the needs of a contact initiator from that of the contact recipient/response. With UC flexibility, asynchronous messaging modes can be done independently in text, voice or video for input or output.                                                                                                                         
• Second, include messaging contacts from automated business process applications, not just from people. That has been going on for years primarily with email, and has quickly moved into social networking. Authorized access management and screening will be required as email and social posts are displacing snail mail and TV for advertising.
• Third, allow individual recipients to easily control all forms of call and message notification (MWI), so that their multi-modal smartphones or tablets won’t overload them unnecessarily when they are busy. That would require both call/message-screening options, based on various factors, including caller/sender ID, subject of contact, urgency indicator, etc. (I call that “Unified Notification Management,” which is a recipient function.)
• Fourth, enable direct message creation media options, including voice and video. We don’t have to have a real-time connection to initiate and send a voice or video message. This has already started to happen, but just needs to be consolidated under the “UM” umbrella. It is not necessary to involve “presence” management for sending asynchronous messages.
• Fifth, (maybe this should be first?), provide for “universal addressing” for all modes of messaging, so that the sender simply has to identify the individual recipient, not any particular mailbox or phone number for each medium. To separate personal from business messages, there will obviously also have to be a “dual persona” identification and authentication requirement for addressing.

Finally, all forms of messaging must be “UC-enabled” in order to dynamically escalate from an asynchronous message to a real-time connection that will, indeed, be based upon presence status and availability information. However, unlike legacy telephone answering voice messaging that started with a failed call attempt, I see multi-modal messaging and chat becoming increasingly more common, easy starting points for contacting people, with the option to escalate easily and efficiently to real-time voice and video conferencing connections.

There are quite a few important interoperability and integration details that will need attention in order to support the basic capabilities I describe. One of the implications of bridging the gap between a message sender and recipient, is that messages may be needed to be screened and converted from one form to another (including languages?) before they are delivered/retrieved by a recipient. For inbound customer contact interactions, message screening will also include routing to appropriate agents or experts; for outbound notification messages to mobile users, the “Unified Notification Management” facility should be available from the recipient’s service provider.

Where and how that can all best be implemented in the new world of mobility and cloud services, will be an evolving challenge. VARs, SIs, and Consultants will play a key role in helping organizations transition to integrated Multi-modal Messaging as part of the BYOD revolution.

http://www.ucstrategies.com/ucsummit/2013/

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

You can read more on this subject in my recently published white paper at:

http://info.echopass.com/rs/echopassaccount/images/CustomerandtheCloud_WP.pdf

If you are Consultant, VAR, or System Integrator, there are new roles for you to play in the evolving world of Mulit-modal Interaction Centers.

Customer services used to be locked in together in different technology platforms that were difficult to integrate. As a result, only big organizations could afford to invest and support implementing all the pieces involved with legacy telephony call centers. Because, of contact center application complexity and costs, many SMB organizations could not afford to implement such contact center technologies by themselves. Adding to the challenge of customer services has been the advent of “Mobile UC” and multi-modal live assistance and self-service applications.

As confirmed in many recent market studies, mobile customers are now expecting:

• More access to mobile online self-services
• Pro-active mobile notifications and alerts, rather than calling in or checking online
• Greater flexibility in choice of user interfaces (voice, visual)
• Options for multiple forms of “smart” access to live assistance when needed

While UC-enabled business communications focused initially on internal organizations and collaborative contacts, the SMB markets were pretty much stuck on old CPE-based call center telephony. Now, however, “cloud” based applications are making big waves in all customer service applications.

Companies like Interactive Intelligence realize the importance of the SMB market, and are moving to make it easier for this segment to access contact center capabilities through the cloud. Interactive Intelligence recently introduced CaaS Small Center^SM, aimed at organizations with between 10 and 50 contact center agents. For a practical rundown, on Interactive Intelligence’s track record, listen to this very enlightening interview with Interactive Intelligence’s Jason Alley by Jim Burton. As Jason mentions, CaaS Small Center offers significant value in four main areas: improved ability to deliver a great customer experience; lower TCO and reduced impact on the customer’s internal organization; expense protection and a safer migration to the cloud; and long term investment protection. Caas Small Center is a packaged suite that can be customized based on customer size and customers can upgrade it as their business requirements change. Similar to Interactive’s larger CaaS offering, the service includes multichannel routing and queuing (voice, email, fax, text, and the web), IVR, multichannel recording, supervision and reporting, quality management, real-time speech analytics, automated customer satisfaction surveys, and Salesforce.com integration.

Cloud Offerings for the Big SMB Market

I have always felt that customer services will really be the same for small or large organizations. The main differences showed up in areas such as:

• How big your market is
• How much live assistance and expertise will be needed by different customers
• Software tools for running operations smoothly, training customer-facing staff,
• Management tools and metrics to insure customer responsiveness satisfaction (“Experience!”)
• Customization of self-service applications for different types of applications, especially “mobile apps.”

I was glad to see Interactive Intelligence going after the SMB market, since such businesses need most of the same technologies as their larger brethren – they just need them for different volumes and numbers of agents. There are clearly more SMB operations than there are larger enterprise organizations, which means more opportunity for vendors. With “consumer BYOD,” the opportunities have increased for offering the expertise of channel partners and consultants supporting “public,” private,” and hybrid clouds environments.

While such communication functionality is applicable to interactions with customers, the relationship with a customer is not really the same and the benefits are different. So, even though the basic concepts of UC are similar for all types of communications with people, there will be differences in the “use cases’ and the business process applications that will exploit CEBP contacts with people (notifications, alerts).

What organizational teams do to “collaborate,” will not be the same as what customer-facing staff will do with customers, even though it is all about person-to-person contacts and information exchanges. The big difference, of course, is that within a business group, there is common agreement and use of communication technology across the board. With customers, there is no such agreement and, with new mobile communication devices, customer contacts must now be more personalized and flexible. Even automated proactive notifications will have to be individually controllable by the consumers who receive and respond to them.

Mobile consumers, in effect, are no longer a consistent group of customers, all having the same kind of mobile endpoint device. Even more important, however, is the fact that each individual mobile user will be dynamically changing their contact accessibility needs all the time. That means, UC flexibility must also be dynamically controllable by mobile customers as recipients, regardless of what contact initiators do, especially when it comes to “unified messaging.” So, whenever a contact attempt is made to a mobile user with a smartphone or tablet, that recipient must be able to dynamically control the mode of notification, as well as the modes of retrieval and response. (That’s why I always describe UC as being “multi-modal!”)

There are many ways for collaborative teams to exchange information and even to work simultaneously in real time on a common informational target (e.g., diagramming a process, editing a document, etc.) So, we see “collaborative” work including all modes of interaction between people, including situations where team members are focused on dealing with a customer support situation.  However, while a “team” may collaborate between themselves in providing customer service, that doesn’t mean that they are “collaborating” with the customer!

While there are different modes of contact with people and interactions with self-service applications available to mobile consumers who have smartphones and tablets, each mode is a different “channel” from the user interface and endpoint device perspective. The fact that the network connection (wired, wireless) is the same or different for any type of interaction makes little difference to the user experience (unless it is too slow!).

How Remote Customer Service Is Changing

Customer service is changing dramatically as consumers become more mobile and thus become both more contact accessible as well as have greater direct access to online information and services. Organizations, whether large enterprises or small businesses, will all be affected by the impact of multi-modal smartphones and tablets on traditional telephone-based customer interactions.

As confirmed in many recent market studies, mobile customers are now expecting:

· More access to mobile online self-services

· Pro-active mobile notifications and alerts, rather than calling in or checking online

· Greater flexibility in choice of user interfaces (voice, visual)

· Options for multiple forms of “smart” access to live assistance when needed

The contact center of yesterday must start planning now to accommodate the new technologies that support such interactions for both mobile customers and customer assistance staff, wherever they may be located. Migrating contact center applications for mobile customers will be most cost-efficiently facilitated by moving to “cloud” based hosted and managed services, but “Customer BYOD” needs will also require self-service applications to be redesigned for device-independence and offer more flexible choices for user interaction interfaces.

Telephone calls are not going to disappear, but the traditional need for voice conversations is being subsumed by other forms of inbound and outbound contacts, including social network postings, text chat, and video calls. As reflected in a recent market study, customers prefer interacting with online applications first, before requiring access to live assistance.

Customer Service Experience Is Becoming More Critical For Business Performance

Providing good customer experiences will be key to customer support, satisfaction, and retention. As applied to self-service applications, it will make a big difference in handling increased mobile consumer needs by minimizing the need for live assistance. So, providing a unified view of all customer contact activities will be needed in designing both personalized self- service applications and providing live assistance on demand. This is where the benefits of “cloud” based applications and contextual data storage will cost-efficiently support the dynamic needs of multi-modal customer service management.

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

However, mobility based on the huge adoption of multi-modal smartphones and tablets has opened up the customer service arena to greater complexity, both for the customers and for the customer service staff. This is especially true for self-service applications and “mobile apps” which, if not carefully designed, could lead to consumer frustration and increased contacts for live assistance.

The point is that customers may not be just calling for business issues, but just need help in using the self-service applications that are more easily accessible from their mobile devices. This help may be in the form of walking the customer through the online application procedure or fixing some parameters on the application. This will be applicable for both business applications as well as for communication applications.

UC-enabled “Click-for-Assistance” Ideal for Mobile Users

One of the virtues of UC-enablement for online applications is that it facilitates access to live assistance. However, that access is not necessarily instantly accomplished, nor is it necessarily required. A recent study by Adcom Group for Virtual Hold Technology focused on financial services and consumer needs for assistance while using mobile self-service applications.

Although financial apps are among the most popular smartphone apps used today, reflecting that more than 50% of surveyed smartphone users use them, 70% of respondents complained about problems using those apps, and 80% said they want to request customer assistance from within the app they are using. Clearly, because such mobile users can be contacted in any way at any time, there is no reason to connect them into call queue to wait for a connection. (Only the request has to be queued!)

The kind of problems users found with mobile financial apps included:

• Dropped Internet connections
• Apps “freezing”
• Problems opening and logging into an app
• Difficulties with initially setting up an app
• Missing or still pending transactional data

These problems cause customer dissatisfaction and drive the need for assistance. The question is, what kind of live assistance needs to be provided?

“Help Desk” Customer Support in the “Cloud”

In the past, customer assistance could be provided by connecting with a consumer’s desktop PC, sharing control of an application. With mobile devices, using a “cloud” environment should prove more efficient, since the mobile devices themselves won’t store the applications and relevant data like a desktop PC. (Even those are becoming more “virtualized!”)

When mobile, multi-modal customers need live assistance, what they really need are the following:

• A simple way to quickly initiate a request for assistance, with a choice of response contact will be preferred, as well as time urgency.
• Their contextual information, i.e., identification, contact information, log of their current application activity, etc. must be attached to their request so that the proper type of assistance is provided and that the responding agent is fully aware of what the customer situation is without having to ask a lot of questions first.
• The customer should be given an immediate confirmation response, along with any indications of when and how that response should be expected. This may be an important consideration for what I call “Unified Notification Management,” where an expected incoming contact will be quickly recognized and brought to the attention of the recipient.

All the information required for efficient live assistance has to easily accessible for both the customer and the live assistance provider. To this end keeping such contextual information in a “cloud” environment makes a lot of sense, especially when the final form of assistance itself will require shared data access.

There are now so many ways that business operations can interact with consumers, that it really is necessary to differentiate contact functionality beyond inbound and outbound, or by type of interface medium (voice, text, pictures, video). Multi-modal mobile devices allow end users not only greater choice in the modes of initiating and receiving contacts from people and automated business applications, but UC enablement also allows end users to dynamically change modes as needed. So, if live assistance is provided initially by a text message and is responded to via chat, there is no reason that it can’t be extended to voice or video.

The real bottom line for mobile access by customers to online self-service applications will be to satisfy customer needs directly, quickly, and easily, without the expense or delays of live assistance. However, it will be important to properly label the different types of such assistance, in order to align routing and staffing needs accordingly. So, let’s use good, old “Help Desk” for customer technical support of mobile, online, UC enabled apps.

Around 1964, computer “time-sharing” allowed remote users with “dumb” terminals to use computers “interactively” in real time, rather than in batch mode. This was the beginning of the Internet and online applications, but the advent of desktop PCs killed the “”time-sharing” service concept and shifted the role of online applications to premise-based servers for wired desktop users.

Now, we are seeing hosted/managed “cloud”–based software applications for both wireless information access and person-to-person communications with mobile devices rapidly displacing premise-based application server hardware systems, along with the need for IT staffs to develop and maintain such application software. The timing of this transition is opportune because of the rapid consumer adoption of multi-modal mobile smartphones and tablets, and the consequential need for integrating (UC-enabled) business process applications with flexible and personalized mobile interactions for BYOD (“Bring Your Own Device”) usage.

The question now is – what role should IT groups play in making the transition from premise-based, desktop application software to “cloud”-based, multi-modal, mobile apps? It’s not a question of “if,” but of “how” and “when.”

Is The “Cloud” And Business Innovation A Threat Or An Opportunity For IT?

As innovative communication and application services replace both premise-based legacy hardware and software for business process activities, the diminishing control and responsibilities for IT staff appear to be threatening, according to Saugatuck Technology. At their recent 2^nd annual Cloud Business Summit in New York City, the changes to IT’s role in any size organization was discussed with invited enterprise CIOs and CTOs.

While there may be a shift in who develops and maintains application software, as well as where that software will be physically located, there will still be a need for expertise to oversee the selection and usage of all applications to insure proper and effective results. Whether that expertise resides internally or is provided through third-party management services, is a question that must be answered on an individual organizational basis.

Basic “cloud” services, whether private, public, or hybrid, offer a networking platform that is location- independent of the actual software applications and the data they use and can be accessed and integrated from anywhere. Such applications can be for multi-modal person-to-person contacts, online (self-service) business applications of all kinds, and, of course, process-to-person CEBP contacts for alerts and notifications. That makes the ‘cloud” applications not only useful for virtualizing desktop usage, but more importantly, ideal for any mobile user with a smartphones or tablet. It really will be the specific business applications and the individual end users who will be authorized to selectively use those applications that will be the challenge for managing an organization’s various “cloud”-based usage activities.

The transitional changes in IT roles are laid out in Figure 1 of Saugatuck’s report. It is a good starting point to consider in planning for IT organizational change to what Saugatuck calls the “Boundary-Free Enterprise”Ó. Those transitions involve two key objectives: moving computer applications from location-based hardware to “virtualized” software, and making all forms of contact with people more flexible and interoperable through UC-enablement.

A key insight from the Summit discussions for the future responsibilities of IT management was:

“Users first. The widespread scale and scope of easily-adopted, Cloud-enabled, individual productivity capabilities shifts power and influence more toward Business users, not Business organizations. Specific Business processes and functions are the initial means of Cloud incursion into the enterprise.”

“Users” now have to include ALL users who can have access to online information, not just internal staff, but business partners and consumers/customers as well. Of course, mobile BYOD and its impact on communicating with people, is also part of the game change involved in both “cloud” application services and wireless networking access. So, by definition, moving to a “cloud” environment will also mean UC –enablement and CEBP integrations for any business applications serving mobile users inside or outside an organization. This will be particularly important for customer interactions resulting from “consumer BYOD.”

For more Cloud Business Summit perspectives on “cloud” applications and it’s impact on IT organizations, you can find additional commentary from this Saugatuck web site.

I have been using the industry term “dual persona,” to describe the way that a single, mobile device can be used to separate personal contact activities from business/job related contacts and information access. For a very detailed description of what “dual persona” entails for mobile application management, check out these two blogs here and here.

However, the more I think about the consumer’s need for mobile access to information, self-service mobile apps, and lastly, access to live assistance, there really is a need for more than two (dual) mobile personas. Why?

Every User/Consumer Is A Customer Of Many Businesses And Services

Although business users must separate their job/role responsibilities from other personal communication needs, the latter really must be broken down further into relationships as customers with a variety of different business services they need to interact with. That brings the cloud-based, “multi-modal interaction center” into the picture to support customers with UC-enabled, mobile, self-service applications to minimize the time and costs of handling traditional telephone calls to legacy call centers.

Since each customer relationship must be personalized for the individual end user, the mobile consumer will need to be supported by different UC-enabled self-service applications provided by their different service providers. Whether it is from providers of health care, banking, insurance, government, retail, etc. services, each provider will have to control selective and contextual (“smart?”) accessibility by their different customers to information and assistance. Thus, we really have a need for a separate “persona” for each customer.

The question is, where will “persona” information reside – on the mobile device or in “cloud”-based business portals?

Inasmuch as online application portals have already evolved as practical points of inbound customer contact from PCs, it would seem logical that they can now be expanded to support both mobile, multimedia user interfaces, as well as proactive outbound notifications to end users through CEBP integrations. That combination of capabilities will provide a logical progression of self-service applications to integrate with UC-enabled live assistance. Giving mobile customers such flexibility will certainly enhance customer satisfaction and minimize support costs.

Making The Change To  Cloud-based “Multi-modal Interaction Centers”

Even while the mobile technology developers are putting all the pieces together for next- generation contact centers and services for multi-modal, mobile consumers, the challenge for CIOs is to start getting ready for the impact that technology will bring to customer service business and operational management. Although we may start off by making things more efficient and effective for consumers/customers, we also have to prepare for its impact on customer-facing staff and remote home agents.

Here are some basic issues to consider:

• What kind of “click-for-assistance” contacts will come from what kind of customers?
• How will “contextual” screenpops change with UC enablement?
• How will a customer authorize/control automated outbound notifications from CEBP-enabled applications?
• How will different customer assistance modalities be assigned to customer-facing staff and what happens if a “click-to-talk/video” option is exercised from a chat session?
• How will “always on” mobile customers exploit non-real-time assistance and “call return” options?

Note that these have nothing to do with what kind of mobile device a customer is using (customer BYOD).

Since most organizations don’t have enough experience to know all the answers yet, one of the big benefits of cloud-based services is that it is a practical way to trial new self-service applications as well as learning what skills live staff assistance will need in a multi-modal environment. I have addressed this approach in a recent white paper.

This shift in how and where software and data will be stored brings with it many challenges for organizations that are used to controlling all of their applications and data on premise-based hardware systems with more controllable, wired connectivity. Now that “consumer BYOD” is starting to displace or replace telephones and online PCs with wireless smartphones and tablets, what should organizations do with all their apps and data stores to accommodate all the end users, both inside and outside of their organizations?

“Clouds” to the Rescue!

Fortunately, the solution to that issue has already become available in the form of “cloud” computing, alias “network” access, to “virtual” data storage and applications. Options for using public, private, or hybrid “clouds” are being offered by all the big technology providers, allowing selective migrations of both business and communication application services to end user groups who have different operational requirements.

This is very fortunate for business organizations that are challenged to provide complex multi-modal “unified communications” to their end users. Because most of it is now becoming software-based responsibilities that few IT organizations have any practical experience with, it is an expensive proposition to consider doing things in-house as before. Even if all that software were “free,” it would still be a daunting task to use it effectively and maintain the never-ending changes on an ongoing basis. So, here come “cloud”-based customized and managed solutions to the rescue.

The challenge of “cloud”-based applications of all kinds is proving to be a great opportunity for the old VARs or sales “channels.” Not only will smaller organizations, who have little or no IT staffs, be interested in exploiting mobile contacts and access to information, but even the larger enterprises and government organizations will need help in satisfying the many needs of customers and internal end users.

So, Whose “Cloud” Service Should You Use?

Now that vertical markets have begun to appreciate the need for UC-enabled applications and CEBP, they still have to understand exactly how they will be able to benefit properly from using the new technologies, They have to know where they are going before they can abandon the past. Nowhere is this more critical than with customer contact centers, which generate revenue and ensure good experiences for customer satisfaction and retention. In my view, UC can really pay off the most with its ability to satisfy mobile customer needs more flexibly and cost effectively than the old telephony call center game.

When it comes to playing any “cloud” services game, it is critical to use a service provider that is reliable, experienced, and specialized in the application functions you want to UC-enable in a “cloud.” I recently highlighted this concern in a new white paper on contact center applications that you can read at the site of one of the leading contact center “cloud” service providers, Echopass.