CRM - June 2008 - (Page 42)

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS The UC Glossary Knowing the lingo is the key to communication, even the unified variety. Here’s a very limited selection of key terms. ■ Presence is a status indicator that conveys the availability of a potential communication partner. Presence may indicate whether the partner is already using the phone, in a Web conference, or working remotely—and may also suggest the best mode of communication to reach the partner immediately. ■ Unified messaging (UM) is not synonymous with unified communications. UM is an element of UC, involving the delivery of various forms of messaging data to a single device. Unified messaging frequently includes delivery of some or all of the following: phone service, voicemail, email, calendar, pages, and fax messages. ■ Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a telephony term for a set of facilities used to manage the delivery of digitized voice information over the Internet, rather than through the traditional circuit-committed protocols of the public-switched telephone network (PSTN). VoIP and Internet telephony avoid the tolls incurred through ordinary telephone service. ■ Private branch exchange (PBX) is a private telephone network used within an enterprise. PBX users share a certain number of outside lines for making telephone calls external to the PBX. e attention, A product labeled “UC” may get mor . but it can also confuse the marketplace there are lots of other things to spend time and money on?” Lazar continues, “It’s hard to make a generic argument saying, ‘You would save 20 minutes a day you would have spent looking up a phone number.’ That argument falls flat.” The absence of a clear return on investment will continue to be a roadblock to UC adoption. Only when UC is applied to business processes such as sales and customer contact can real dollar figures be measured: When Engage deployed Siemens OpenScape in its contact center, for example, the company saw a 194 percent return on its investment over a six-month span. Another roadblock is the idea of “ripping and replacing”—the wholesale tearing-out of existing infrastructure in favor of all-new equipment. Some UC vendors require Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) in place before they can hook their offerings into other UC applications. Recognizing that companies with expensive and relatively new private branch exchange (PBX) telecommunication systems would likely find that prospect unappealing, midmarket vendor Objectworld recently announced a UC strategy that works with pre-existing PBX systems. solution. The goal is to integrate different elements and work with what’s best for you—but the real promise of unified communications is how it’s embedded in relevant business processes. UNIFIED SYSTEMS, DISPARATE CHALLENGES “The [return on investment] and the cost justification [are] what’s hindering the adoption of UC,” says Nemertes’ Lazar. Companies, he says, are asking, “Why should I make that investment when 42 WHAT’S COMING TOGETHER NEXT? Despite the rise in awareness surrounding UC, and the increasing number of companies beginning to think about deploying some sort of UC solution, many analysts remain skeptical of its immediate value. Brent Kelly, senior analyst and partner with Wainhouse Research, describes UC as a work in process and suggests that the technology’s penetration may not yet have reached a tipping point. “Clearly not everyone is doing it,” he says. “But there are enough doing it [so] that I am aware of companies in many verticals that are adopting it. It’s interesting the small and medium-sized businesses are able to adopt it [more easily] because they don’t have as many systems to deploy.” The consensus among analysts seems to be that the future of UC lies in the application of and integration with business processes. Companies interested in starting down the UC path should first look for a business solution that can benefit the most from a UC strategy—and then see how that effort can be expanded across the enterprise. Take Virgin, for example—where Fort says the hope is to incorporate voice into more business applications: “We’re looking at the [instore] digital listening stations,” he says, “looking at a way…[to] use our data network [to] let the customer communicate with [a] sales associate who isn’t in the building…. If a customer is specifying an order, if they have a question, they just have to look [to see] is the buyer there and what way to reach them.” By unifying those communications, Virgin gets to keep the buying process a seamless whole. “We’d like that embedded in the order,” Fort says. “There’s less decisionmaking and it keeps the [customer’s] stream-of-consciousness going.” Siemens’ Howard calls UC the dial tone of the 21st century—five years down the road, no one will have to worry about how to define UC; by then, it will be no more exotic than email or phone calls. As Wainhouse’s Kelly says, “No one asks to justify having a phone or an email account. Everyone just knows that they are a productivity tool that you need. I see UC as part of that class of tools that you just need to have.” Contact Editorial Assistant Lauren McKay at lmckay@destinationCRM.com. www.destinationCRM.com CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JUNE 2008 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - June 2008

CRM - June 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Making Mashup Masterpieces Trouble in the Air CRM on Twitter Is SaaS Ready for Its Contact Center Close-up? CRM: In the Public Interest Required Reading Lollipop Loyalty Best Practices Series: CRM & eCommerce eGain NetSuite Infor Longwood Software Vovici The Second Coming of 2.0 Believe the Hype About Hosted Contact Centers All Talk So Hot It’s Cool Linksys Gets Shaken, a Community Is Stirred The Risky Risk Business Awana Hears a SaaS Sermon Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Scouting Report Pint of View

CRM - June 2008

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