Jeff Holton, Director of Technology

Social Media Integration was one of the things I highlighted as a trend for 2011 in a previous blog post. Many of our partners are now launching social mining software that integrates into customer service operations to make their businesses more effective across different departments and functions.

Twitter has now reached more than 200 million users. And with more than 25 billion tweets sent in 2010, that’s a lot of conversations going on. According to Advertising Age, people tend to tweet about brands and more specifically, consumer displeasure. Many companies have now hired full-time employees to monitor their brand on social media and reach out to these pleased, or in most cases displeased tweeters – even driving this capability into their contact centers to better improve customer service and their overall brand. And Twitter is just one example of where this takes place.

We need to filter these conversations out to the right people in our organization to address them, because let’s face it, responding and solving the issues takes a larger team than just your hired “social media expert.” Avaya’s Social Media Manager sifts through information gathered about your product/brand from various online communities and pulls out questions, problems or even compliments that you may want to address. These can then be routed to any employee of your choice (ex. Marketing, Sales, Support or Customer Service) along with the public elements of the person’s profile and their information from your own customer database.

You are now a proactive customer service organization. By reaching out to a customer that has most likely not complained to your face, you’ve shown you care and have improved that individual’s perception of your brand. If you already have a customer service operation in place, you can easily integrate this into your existing process for your customer service interactions. It gives your customer service team just one more tool to provide exceptional customer service.

Jeff Holton, Director of Technology

Yesterday, we took a look at the biggest communication technology trends in 2010. Today, let’s see what’s in store for 2011.

Integration
Integration is going to be a theme and discussion that we see and hear all year in 2011. This could be the integration between a customer’s existing Telephony System and IM/Presence platform for click-to-dial capabilities and presence. It could also be integration of a Telephony System, IM/Presence platform, and videoconferencing network to allow dialing between all systems and presence capabilities.

Social media integration in contact centers is another trend that many companies should be investigating for 2011. Customers are posting on Twitter, Facebook and blogs about the products that we sell and our brands on a daily basis. By integrating social media feeds into contact centers, companies can mine social media platforms for specific data and be able to act immediately based on their business criteria they have setup. This allows companies to be more responsive to customers’ needs and requests.

Having the knowledge to be able to integrate all of the technologies together and also fit our customer’s specific business requirements is a high growth area for SKC that we continue to invest in.

Interoperability
One of the biggest issues facing the Collaboration industry is interoperability. There are all these exciting new pieces of technology and software suites to make up our collaboration space, but without common standards and certified interoperability we can’t be guaranteed a new investment won’t cut us off from communicating with the rest of the business world. Until now, manufacturers would pair up and test their products against each other one at a time, but now there might be a more efficient solution. Some of the major players in this space have teamed up to support making interoperability a little more pervasive and a little easier to attain as a group effort.

HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Logitech/LifeSize, and Polycom have joined together to found the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF), a group dedicated to enabling standards-based, inter-vendor UC interoperability. A growing number of companies are joining these players in the forum including Acme Packet, Aspect, AudioCodes, Broadcom, BroadSoft, Brocade, ClearOne, Jabra, Plantronics, RADVISION, Siemens Enterprise Communications, and Teliris.

The forum–while not developing its own standard–will work to deliver interoperability based on current standards, developing interoperability testing, and certification of UC products to ease customer integration and increase adoption. They plan to tackle video and Telepresence solutions first and are currently exploring the XMPP and SIMPLE standards for IM and H.323, SIP and XMPP/Jingle for voice and video.

2011 promises to be one of the most exciting years for the collaboration space, with companies focusing heavily on integration and interoperability between all products, which allows customers to choose a solution for each business need rather than a manufacturer.

Jeff Holton, Director of Technology

2010 was a great year to be in this segment of the technology industry. It seemed that a week could not go by without something exciting happening. Every customer, prospect, and manufacturer that I met with in 2010 discussed collaboration. In 2010, Collaboration became the new UC, which included a wider range of technologies that some companies are or were just beginning to investigate.

Desktop Video
The adoption of desktop video collaboration technology increased in 2010, which enabled organizations to capture the benefits of increased productivity through more effective meetings. This can translate into more rapid implementation of corporate strategies and faster time-to-market through increased decision-making. Ease-of-use and not having to leave one’s office or desk was another driving factor.

Social Media
For a lot of IT Directors or CIOs, social networking suggests users are pounding away on Twitter and Facebook and hogging network bandwidth with YouTube video streams. Upon further research, IT managers are realizing the concepts that such services embody are central to improving collaboration both within the organization, as well as with customers and partners. As businesses look to become more effective across different departments, functions and processes, social computing in and around the enterprise will become more widespread. While there’s no right way to do anything in social media, there are distinct tolerances, cultures, and characteristics of some communities for things like promotions, sales pitches, tone, human presence vs. automation, and responsiveness. Understanding those things first can help set you and your teams up for success and respect, rather than the reverse.

IM/Presence/Data Sharing
This includes the ability to instant message, view availability and collaborate with users. Presence status can be set by a user or automatically based on calendar, login status, and more. Users can individualize access levels for different contacts to share information with them. Data collaboration, which uses file transferring, application/screen sharing and white boarding, ensures seamless communication interchange between employees. These features provide communication mediums to enhance responsiveness, decision-making, and customer service that further increases the business efficiency and productivity.

Be sure to check back later this week for a look into what’s in store for 2011.

Jeff Holton, Director of Technology

Social media has taken over the online landscape in the past decade, offering consumers an outlet to produce content, connect and then share it. There are plenty of blog posts, websites and even companies devoted to helping organizations take advantage of social media and the opportunity it provides to interact with customers. With social media feeds and other tools, keeping track of what is being said about your company is a little easier.

Avaya recently announced the release of their Social Media Manager to their product portfolio. The program takes social media feeds and looks beyond just the buzzword traffic by listening, filtering and looking at the actual content of the messages. It then passes those onto the appropriate contact center agent. Filters can be topics or even language detection so that the item gets routed to the agent with the right language skill set.

By automating the process of filtering through messages and finding the relevant and actionable items before passing them on, the Social Media Manager improves productivity. For example, someone might tweet about a flight delay, but if it’s due to weather, something out of the control of the airlines, then it probably isn’t worth the airline taking action. In another situation, a person may tweet about their hotel only having six cable channels, causing them to miss a certain show. Another local hotel could pick up the tweet and offer a special rate to switch.

With social media becoming an ever-growing part of conducting business, firms should find the innovative efforts made by Avaya to be more and more useful in managing social media presence and responding to customers’ needs.