Harnessing Social Networks
This issue of the Enterprise Connect eNews is sponsored by Network Equipment Technologies
With the growing popularity of Unified Communications, businesses looking to migrate to Microsoft Office Communications Server are faced with a problem. How do they extend the useful life of their existing SIP Phones. Now, with SmartSIP from NET enterprises’ can extend existing SIP endpoints for use with Microsoft’s OCS. SmartSIP is an enterprise application built using Microsoft Unified Communications Managed API (UCMA) to address the interoperability of legacy SIP endpoints and Microsoft unified communications.
Enterprise Connect eNews: Harnessing Social Networks
Siemens Enterprise made an announcement this week following up on their splashy VoiceCon demo of integrating Twitter with OpenScape; the new integration folds social media input into the contact center system, and is reviewed by Sheila McGee-Smith on No Jitter this week. Earlier on, we had coverage on social networking integrations from Avaya and Cisco (discussed by Brian Riggs) and Interactive Intelligence (discussed by me).
A common thread through these integrations is the value that social networking integration offers in helping enterprises respond proactively to events that may be developing among customers, which might in the past have gone unnoticed. The idea is that if a bunch of people are tweeting, for example, “iPhone” “antenna” and “problem,” you, as a customer-focused company, can hastily move to address the problem by calling a press conference in which your CEO points out how dumb your users are and how, in any event, your competitors’ products suck just as bad, before grudgingly agreeing to a trivial concession aimed at fixing the problem. Or, if you’re not Apple, I guess you’d take that data you gathered from the social networking input and actually try to fix the problem without the intermediate press conference step–and let users know you were doing so.
But of course this only gives the enterprise visibility into the world inhabited by social networking users, whose numbers may be growing, but who still don’t represent the entire customer base for most enterprises. And not all those who are on social networks use them to talk about products or services they buy or need or want. So gaining visibility into the world of social networks is just one area where such proactive campaigns can work.
One sliver of this week’s big Avaya announcement had to do with a contact center capability in which an enterprise could use speech analytics to ascertain that a certain “event” was occurring within its customer base—basically the same idea as the social networking triggers—look for certain words that recur and tie it all to CRM software that lets you go out proactively to other customers whose geographic location or other profile elements match the sources of the calls with the recurring terms. Then you can design pre-loaded proactive contacts that can be sent out to everyone who might be affected, according to the criteria you’ve set up.
Social networking is the hook in many of these contact center latest announcements, but just knowing what’s going on in the world of Twitter or other sites is not very useful. It’s being able to tie that notification into some action within your business systems that makes this a valuable function. And that’s the essence of Unified Communications.
This Week’s UC Weekly
Systems Integrators Again Key as UC Moves to the Cloud
Just over two years ago, we posted “VARs and SIs: The Arms and Legs of Unified Communications.” That forecast of the importance of VARs (Value Added Resellers) and SIs (Systems Integrators) for Unified Communications (UC) has proven to be right on target. Now, we’re seeing the logical extensions of that value in major industry moves.
The big news is that Dimension Data announced this week an agreement to be purchased by NTT for US$3.2 billion. This is in the same size category as Cisco’s acquisition of WebEx ($3.2B in 2007) and of Tandberg ($3.3B), both of which have been industry-shaping moves.
So what’s the meaning of this?
Posted in Implementation, Management, Tech Trends, Unified Communications |
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