1. Immerse the Agent in the Experience

To me this means giving the people the right tools to do their job. Allow all resources to be available, web, CRM’s etc. in whatever form or mode of transport they choose, SMS, IM, Social, Call, Email etc. Giving power to the agents usually means a better experience for them. Gone are the days of the receiver to the chin.

2. Bring Full Context to every session

In Every Collaborative Session: Collect, grow, and leverage information about the end customer and their environment to improve the quality of every interaction. Working towards the next stage.

3. Orchestrate the Experience.

Proactively manage all interactions across all media and modes including agent assisted or automated including warm handoffs. I like how this helps people learn. Supervisors should coach and quality monitor, watch the channels, moderate. This new approach focuses on making the agents experience a positive one.

4. Manage, learn and apply.

Closed loop process for leveraging historic and real time insights to manage operations and continuously adapt. Meaning bring a black belt level of quality control to the table.

This is where it can get interesting. The quality management process that a call centre faces can be troublesome. Technology and people, and turnover can lead to questionable training and learning mechanisms. So here’s a problem solver.

Avaya WFO (Workforce Optimization) records, reports and allows you insight into quality management. Find out what problems customers are facing right now, and manage scripts and training to combat it. The world is now real time, it should be managed in real time. Explore Avaya Aura Contact Centre, WFO and Social Media Manager to get the most out of your Multi Media Contact Centre.

Nortel Data has been riding the “reliability” factor that Nortel Networks is famous for, the voice products were extremely reliable, boasting the Five Nines. More importantly than that, is the market penetration that these products had especially in Canada. The Canadian government, one of the largest purchasers of the Nortel Data gear has helped drive this product line to where it is today, cheaper, as resilient and as reliable as its more expensive counterpart.

So Why Avaya Data?

1. Price
The Info-Tech research group has released a study in which it compares three common deployment scenarios and how they fare with the properly scaled products from Avaya and Cisco. IN ALL COUNTS, Campus WAN, Campus LAN and Energy performance. Avaya has up to a 54% savings in CAPEX (initial cost) vs. Cisco. These studies included CAPEX, ongoing maintenance and power consumption.

2. Greening the Enterprise
Energy Savings is almost 7X that of Cisco. Over the long term this represents significant cost savings.

3. No Overhead
You are paying for the Cisco Marketing Machine, don’t think you are escaping it. Avaya Data products are as reliable (lifetime warranty) as the Cisco gear, and considering the NMS (Network Management Software) can support any Networking products, you are getting an open standards solution, not proprietary. Avaya has carried these products forth in an effort to provide a complete Convergence solution and that is exactly what you are getting, without the flash, and cash.

BrantTel is actively promoting and selling the Avaya Data portfolio, it will remain in the toolbox for a long while longer. Thanks Bay Networks!

The Flare experience is a “software only” solution, yes, software only. This makes sense considering the availability of Android based devices currently in the marketplace, and there will be more to come.

Avaya has really thought this one through, focusing on the user experience, and the benefits to a mobile communications device, not the hardware….ah, RIM, maybe you should consider the same approach. No one really cares about how many USB ports you have. Hey Jim at RIM, remember when you created push email, that was a user experience that permeates with crackberry users to this day.

The Flare experience

What it’s not: Watch how fast it can process, render graphics, and output to a large screen TV.

What it is: A software experience that puts the user at the centre of collaboration options. Let’s deep dive:

1. It’s about people: Drag and drop conferences, IM, email, manage voicemail and make calls on one screen (no more numbers to dial), see all communications (email, IM etc, from one person in a display string)

2. Modern: Includes social networking functionality for today’s multitasker, and support for commercially available Android apps.

3. Intuitive and Efficient: brings together address books from Exchange, Gmail, Facebook etc.

It has all the typical hardware perks you’d expect from an Enterprise device, ie. HDMI, SIP compliant, Stereo sound, Bluetooth, Mouse, keyboard and modems etc.

BUT

It’s not about the hardware, it’s about using a tool to make communicating with internal and external customers as easy and efficient as possible. It’s ALL about the experience. Watch this product make headway, and eventually (hopefully) become available as a software only solution.

From a user perspective this is a fleeting thought, “well if the building gets hit by lightning”, I’ll just go home and forget about it for the day…..huh….not so fast.  Today’s business continuity means more than people, it means their processes, their tools and their ability to resume business operations when disaster strikes. Let’s just say this is more the problem of the IT department than any other, HR plays a key role, operations too, but all come back to rely on the “IT wizards” to get it fixed.

So here’s how I’d like to mix a product in with this rant.

The most recent DR scenario that I really liked was this Hot Hot scenario. Let me explain.

CoLocated servers, both active, load balanced, with all critical voice components replicated across sites, with both sharing the load, OK, nothing new. Imagine this scenario using the brilliant Avaya one-X Portal product, web based call control, conferencing, presence etc.

This is the cool part, it’s all on the internet, NO VPN required, how is this accomplished, Session Border Controller, in essence a “firewall” for voice, mixed in with Avaya SIP and presence services and you have a fully functional web based IM, presence and voice solution. You could have a company wide conference call minutes after your main building went down.

The other part I like is no extra appliances, no VPN plus firewall, one less component to manage, keep up to date and replicate.

Hot Hot on the Interweb is the way of the future, Avaya’s got the goods to deliver it, and I know of at least one savvy company that’s doing it this way. Investigate your voice DR strategy and imagine the possibilities.

Moreso, it’s about Mobile Integrity. Let me explain.

No Integrity.

Sure here’s your blackberry and a softphone client for your PC and good luck out there. If you need support from the office just give us a call from wherever you are. We won’t know if you’ll be in a meeting unless we check your calendar (if you keep it up to date), or we don’t want to call you if you are at lunch with a client, but good luck, we’re here if you need us. And don’t forget your monthly quota is $1M so you better get to it.

ps. Sorry about trading all the voicemails, we never know where you are or what you are doing so I guess it’s just the nature of the beast. On the fourth voicemail I left you, you’ll see that some client is all heated up and you’d better give them a call. They called in here 3 times looking for you, that was two days ago.

This is a classic theme, roadwarriors everywhere with little to no connecivity back to the office besides a cell phone that is nothing but pure IT cost.  Here’s how you can put an end to this scenario.

I call it, MWI.

The Mobility part of it is easy. Let’s talk about integrity.

One-X Communicator/One-X Softphone has built in presence capabilities so you will know if that roadwarrior is in the home office. This is your first level of integrity, presence.

Think about how fast that customer call would have got to this field employee if they knew what they were doing on a second by second basis. ie. GREEN BEAN, IM, “CALL THIS CUSTOMER RIGHT AWAY”.

On the road is another perfect example, with the One-X mobile client, the mobile employee can initiate calls through the One-X client, and thus pass on presence information back to the presence server so that can be fed through to the One-X Communicator on everybody’s desktop.

Here’s how it could play out.

So here’s your blackberry and your PC softphone, we have the One-X client on your phone which you will use to make business calls, it relays important presence information back to us in the office so we know when you are on a call or not, so now, if I need to get hold of you, I can just see what your status is in my One-X Communicator, and I’ll just wait until you are free then I’ll call you with that important customer information.

Folks, this is a simple scenario, but all rules hold true.

This is what MWI means, with Integrity, so we provide all the tools to work from home, in the office and on the road, but now we know what your status is all the time, so we now know how to reach you and by what means.

If you are in your home office I may call you, send an email, or an IM if your status is green (Available), we can chat. Or if you are on the road, I’ll know if you are available for a call with the presence information passsed on to me from One-X Mobile.

This is what Mobile Integrity is, the ability  to use mobility in a controlled fashion to gain productivity, not just connectivity.

Next rant I’ll get into One-X Portal and it’s value, more MWI there for sure.
CD

The day was kicked off by Frank Mirecki (Director of Sales and Technology) and Chris Falco (President BrantTel Networks), and the first speaker, Avaya’s own Tracy Fleming, gave a comprehensive look into the Avaya Roadmap and the featured Architecture provided through Avaya ‘Aura’. I’ll try to summarize some of Tracy’s key points.

1. Look at your telephony infrastructure differently, software based systems running on the SIP protocol is where architecture is headed.

2. Consider all forms of communication in your thinking (ie. Deskphone, Cellphone, Softphone, Chat, Presence, Conference).

3. Don’t look at infrastructure as something you maintain, look at it as something that makes your business thrive in a competitive environment.

4. User Centricity replaces Device Centricity

5. Features in the SIP Architecture can be overlayed on any SIP enabled PBX.

6. Simplify your environment, manage the core, let the core manage the fringes.

Tracy explained this in much more detail (I can assure you!), but the core messages were clear. Avaya Aura will be the go forward product in the Avaya/Nortel Roadmap.

The second half of the morning featured an independent opinion presentation by Henry Dortmans. Henry used his time to try and explain to the audience how to get to where you are going, but you first need to find out where you want to go. His 10 key thoughts on how to move forward gave the audience the instruction they  needed to take back to their office and evangelize on how they can get their communications system working for them. For more on Henry go to www.henrydortmans.com.

Lunch was lavishly set in the Lobby of the Toronto Centre for the Arts, and the Engineering teams from Avaya and BrantTel were showing off their wares. Full demonstrations were available to the attendees and this gave everyone the ability to “touch and feel” the technology. Well done all engineers!

The afternoon session was started by Amir Hameed where he explained what you can do in Unified Communications right now, giving the audience some ideas on how to incorporate their telephony assets into a larger UC strategy for their company. This was important because the Avaya UC products (One-X) can seamlessly work on both an Avaya and Nortel phone system. This gave the Nortel audience a glimpse into the future of unified communications for their platform.

Finally the day finished with a deep dive into the new Avaya data product portfolio with a presentation by Brian Carlson. He explained how to get more from data gear then just a name (the name that comes to mind begins with a C), and how it’s overrated and overpriced. Brian explained where the real value comes from with Network switching.

An open audience Q&A was valuable as it gave the attendees a chance to ask any question they wanted, and was great for the Avaya/BrantTel folks to hear what the end user communities concerns were.

We drew for the grand prizes (3 Garmin GPS’s) and the event was complete.

Here’s a quick summary for those that missed out, we covered all the bases.

1. Core roadmap

2. Stop, think, about what you are doing

3. How to get value from what you have right now

4. Why you should think differently about the new Avaya

On behalf of BrantTel Networks, I’d like to thank all the attendees, the Avaya engineering team, the presenters, executive management and Toronto Centre for the Arts for helping us put on a great show.

If you’d like to find out more about this, email me. marketing@branttel.com

Many UC implementations fail because organizations use the wrong set of business requirements when determining the ultimate solution. What the IT department thought end users wanted and what they actually needed were often two different things. Many organizations find themselves changing mission-critical business processes to align with the functions and features that a UC platform can deliver rather than aligning the UC system with how the business operates and how users will put it to task. Although many of the leading UC platforms offer similar features and functionality, they do so in vastly different ways. These differences need to be taken into account when determining user and business requirements.

2. Understanding end-user capabilities — We needed a sailboat, you gave us a rocket ship

When technology is too complicated or cumbersome for end users to embrace, the result is simple — they don’t use it. Technology should be designed to make users’ jobs easier, not harder. Just because a UC system has more bells and whistles than users could ever need, such features may not be what they actually want. Understanding what end users will actually use, as well as the limits of their comfort zone, is critical to the successful adoption of UC across the enterprise.

3. Solution sizing — My eyes were bigger than my stomach

How much UC does the organization really need? The short answer is just enough to get the job done. The solution has to align with how the business operates and how UC will be used. UC is an overlay to enterprise organizational processes and is designed to help organizations operate more efficiently and effectively by letting people communicate and exchange information across numerous devices. UC also involves highly complex components and solutions, most of which have a “no return” policy. Organizations should buy only what is immediately required and add on components as needed. The right vendor or partner can help organizations understand what they need and what makes financial and technical sense. The most efficient and effective way to roll out a UC system

is in phases. According to Bob Hersch, Accenture global managing director, “A phased approach to creating a blueprint and executing the plan — combined with sound advice from solutions providers — will bring the best results. The whole implementation process should take anywhere from 15 to 22 months, depending on your network readiness, extent of projects and planning expertise. Move too hastily, however, and your organization may fail to secure enough return on investment and even expose itself to unnecessary risk. The idea is to spend only on the infrastructure and functions that bring value. Unified communications and collaboration solutions therefore should have a tag that reads ‘Don’t plug this in until you know what’s on the other end.’”

4. Vendor and partner selection — It takes two to tango

Selecting a vendor for its UC implementation is one of the most important decisions an organization will make. Vendors and partners have a tremendous amount of influence on which solution is ultimately implemented. Organizations typically evaluate 2.66 vendors before choosing one. Ideally, they should evaluate four vendors to get a solid assessment before making their final selection.4 But, at the end of the day, organizations, not vendors, have to live with the consequences if the implementation isn’t successful. Because UC is a complex solution, selected vendors should have deep expertise and be recognized leaders by the manufacturer. According to Info-Tech Research Group, Avaya and Ciscoare the only two market-leading UC platform providers as of 2009. The research firm argues that it does not consider IBM and Microsoft® leaders in the UC space because they do not offer the “span of additional feature sets that appeal to many prospective customers, including network security infrastructure, contact center and vertical solutions, or the ability to interoperate with leading solutions from other vendors and promote and facilitate third-party development.”5 Although Mitel, Siemens, NEC, ShoreTel and Alcatel-Lucent are seen as competitors in the UC marketplace, Info-Tech does not consider these organizations leaders based on key evaluation criteria.  Organizations need to consider their vendor or partner choices carefully, because the end result of that selection could prove vital to the overall success of their UC implementation. According to Info-Tech Research Group, “The fact is that for most enterprises, the selection of the product itself should be secondary to the strength and vision of the vendor, and the knowledge and expertise of the integrator.”

5. Wrong platform choice — All that glitters is not gold

A key challenge to deploying a UC system is in limiting the amount of chaos organizations face as they adopt unfamiliar technologies. Elizabeth Herrell, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., says problem areas include system interoperability, infrastructure readiness and user training. Failing to fully address each of these points, she notes, could lead to crippling enterprise communications failures. “UC adoption is not a single solution but a process,” Herrell warns. “Without a clear understanding of how UC benefits the entire user community, many of its benefits may not be achieved.”8

6. Cost of investment — Champagne taste on a beer budget

While the upfront costs of UC systems may appear manageable and within budget, it is usually the longer-term costs that eventually put a UC project into the red. For example, a UC platform designed for a midsize enterprise with 1,000 users will require 10 servers in a Microsoft environment, five servers with Cisco and two with Avaya — an 80 percent cost difference in hardware alone. Add on the cost of hardware maintenance, system administrators and redundancy needed to keep systems online above the 95 percent required threshold, and an organization could be looking at a sizeable investment long before a single piece of software is installed. Many organizations don’t use the full array of features available in the most popular UC platforms, but they still may end up paying licensing costs for features they don’t use because of the way manufacturers bundle software licensing in “all or none” packages. Knowing the front-end costs (hardware, software, licensing) as well as the back-end costs (administration, maintenance, service delivery) up-front can go a long way toward understanding the bottom-line costs of a UC implementation.

7. Return on investment — A penny saved is a penny earned

Determining the return on investment (ROI) for UC platforms can be complicated. The metrics and measurements used are often arbitrary because of how the business chooses to measure its UC implementation’s expected return. However, ROI can be found in Internet Protocol (IP) transport savings, reduced mobile phone charges, increased employee productivity and cost savings inherent in a modern communications platform. Some metrics are more difficult to measure than others, so organizations need to find those that make the most sense for their business.

8. Total cost of ownership —A fool and his money are soon parted

UC systems are complex environments with complex underlying systems. Many of the costs associated with purchasing, owning and operating a UC platform are unknown until the system goes live and employees begin using it. Today, only a few leading UC vendors — Avaya, Microsoft, Cisco and IBM — offer complete enterprisewide solutions. Most of the ownership costs are not even discussed during the sales cycle primarily because sales representatives typically don’t focus on how IT will support the UC system after implementation. However, organizations with limited IT resources and users who are not technology savvy may quickly discover that their IT department is spending an inordinate amount of time answering questions and teaching users how to navigate the system, all of which add to ownership costs.

9. Change management — Didn’t you get the memo?

Many transformational activities fail due to poor change management processes. The speed at which business transformation occurs today demands reliable and well established change management practices. The right hand needs to know what the left hand is doing if they are going to work together. An effective change management program begins with a well-crafted communications strategy. Let everyone know what’s going on and when. Provide a clear understanding of the difference between individual and organizational benefits of implementing a UC platform. Who gets what and when is critical when laying out a business outcome road map and deployment schedule. Set expectations regarding what types of changes users and the business should see after the UC platform is rolled out. If people know what to expect, they are more likely to be flexible when things don’t go as planned. Provide user training. Users who don’t know how to use the new tools will become frustrated, causing adoption to drop, complaints to rise and a less-than-ideal transition to the new UC system.

10. Executive and IT sponsorship —all bark and no bite

A lack of sponsorship is one of the most important reasons why UC implementations fail. The technology could work flawlessly, costs could stay well within budget, delivery could occur on time and as planned, and users may be ecstatic about the system’s new features, but if management doesn’t like the new platform or IT doesn’t support it, the overall perception will be that the project failed to deliver the expected value to the business and its users. Simply installing UC does not mean people will use it — there has to be a mandate from the top that this is the direction the organization is taking and people need to get onboard. Without clear direction, the UC train will fly off the tracks at the first turn around the bend.

One of the hottest topics in mobility today is the massive amount of applications that can be used by the IPhone. Everything from dinner menus to the paths and orbits of planets. Never before has there been so much choice and variety to the consumer, or businessperson. Did you hear that..

The IPhone is quickly becoming a business user device, not that I’m saying it’ll power past the Blackberry, but what I mean is that it may have a place in the business world, especially if it can deliver feature rich, customized applications for your company. Let’s take an example.

I own a small drain cleaning company, essentially a contractors version of Roto-Rooter, I travel to different customers houses, and businesses, and I run the entire business myself. Being a small business, I rely on transactional business to pay the bills, and since I don’t have any admin support, it’s all me all the time. Invoicing is tedious, costly and I don’t collect everything that I’m owed.

I need to collect money on the spot when I finish a job, to ensure that I get paid and that I don’t have the extra printing/mailing and record keeping. I take cash, but that is rare.

With the IPhone, this business owner can download the ez swipe credit card processing application, where they can now accept credit cards on the spot, or even better, with a simple paypal account, you can have the funds transferred into this businesses account.

OK, so it seems that the problem has not been totally solved, but has been helped along, now this contractor only accepts credit cards on the spot, and gets paid for all of his work.

This is a simple example, however, with the amount of CRM ,or ERP apps available on the App Store, you can connect your Oracle or Salesforce.com backend right to your field workers, so they can look up inventory, status of jobs, delivery of equipment etc. This can ensure more booked sales, when answers are at the fingertips of your salespeople, and ensures quality of work for your field teams, where the right information gets to the right user, to make business move faster.

The point of all this! You knew I’d end up spinning this somehow……………

Avaya has released a free version of One-X Mobile Lite, let me deep dive.

One-X Mobile (full) version is the Symbian and Blackberry OS client that sits on your mobile phone.

Here’s the basic features:
1. 4 digit dialing internally and access to your corporate network (so it seems like your mobile is really your deskphone the way it handles dialing internally)
2.    Seamlessly transfer between mobile and deskphone (sometimes called extend call)
3.    Calls made from the mobile device, show your deskphone caller ID (another seamless feature)
4. Voicemail – no longer do you have to listen to both your voicemails, the call gets routed back to the deskphone and your internal voicemail), no more confusing cell phone voicemail.

There are many other features that are business driving, you can see the entire list here.

http://www.avaya.com/usa/resource/assets/brochures/mobile%20worker%20-%20one-x%20mobile%20-%20product%20brief%20-%20lb3104%20-%20final%20(12-5-08).pdf

Now the finale……

If you have IPhone users on your Avaya Enterprise system, you can download and use the One-X Mobile Lite application, for free. The features are not the same to the enterprise class One-X Mobile, but they are almost there.
So this is what I mean about the consumer and business coming together. Mobility is one of those issues that appeal to both sets, and hey…when your user community is saving time and being more productive for free, with their fancy IPhone. You can simply laugh and say, “There’s an app for that.”

Cheers.

Let’s think about this situation. We have a certified Plumber, and a Licensed Electrician, both are expert tradespeople, their skills are in demand and they both contribute to the completion of a project (in this case, the building of a house).

The Plumber is proficient with a monkey wrench, plastic and copper fittings, soldering etc. The Electrician uses voltage meters, wire cutters, a variety of screwdrivers and a lot of wire, boxes and other equipment. These two professionals don’t need to rely on each other for anything, so it seems.

What do they have in common? Both do extensive driving to different worksites, both use their trucks as their offices and both rely on specific supplies and tools to do their jobs. This is the point folks.

If you are considering rolling out a feature rich tool heavy UC solution, make sure your employees are ready. Here’s what I mean.

Like the Plumber and the Electrician, find the lowest common denominator amongst your staff, and begin there.

I’ve seen situations where tools get rolled out to the employee base, they are trained and then expected to use the tools, but nowhere has the need ever been defined. Employees need to feel like part of the solution, we are rolling out this new Unified Communications solution to make your job easier, and here’s how. Promote evangelism within, assign mentors and leaders to promote the tools and the benefits they bring to the workforce. Have some fun with it.

If the Plumber and the Electrician suddenly had a helper to run back and forth from the truck for them, they’d be pretty happy once they got used to it, but as has been proven, they’ve been doing their job without one for so long……

Cheers,

CD

Here’s why this platform is the game changer.

Proprietary code, applications and interfaces have been the Achilles heel of IT/IS departments around the globe. No one wants to support proprietary systems, because they are based on some individual’s perception of a standard.

Nuff said for those supporting 3rd party DB’s, etc. Sorry Help Desk.

Now, Avaya Aura.

Eliminate multiple interfaces, consolidate administration (remember when Active Directory was created, that was HUGE), and integrate through a known standard (ah la H.323, 802.11 b/g/n), now were getting somewhere.

So Aura will standardize over the SIP protocol (not the Cisco/Nortel Endpoint SIP protocol either), this is based on a real standard. This is timely, here’s why.

For larger organizations, the swapping out of a communications solution is a massive task to take on at one time, not to mention the cost. Since the recession we’ve seen companies hold on to EOS, EOL equipment just for this reason. Holding on to obsolete equipment is a business risk, plain and simple. Aura is here to begin your path to greater freedom and improved business continuity.

Designed to allow for the gradual displacement of disparate telephony systems, while still giving the enterprise all the benefits of centralized admin, security and interoperability among disparate telephone systems. This is the core benefit of Avaya Aura, the ability to manage multiple systems, multiple sites under one umbrella, with the option to migrate all of them at your own pace.

More on this for sure.

Cheers,

CD