My Collection of Nothing

Attending CiscoLive in San Francisco

I am attending CiscoLive in San Francisco this week. In an attempt to keep my co-workers and others who could not attend the conference this year “in the know,” I have created a blog to record the event. The blog contains video that I have shot using both my Flip Mino HD and my new iPhone 3G S.

Please check it out at contactcenterenterprise.com.

Guest post on workshifting.com

Head over to workshifting.com to read my guest blog post, which attempts to answer the question “How do you ask your boss for a raise?”

I’m really proud of this post, because it is my first guest blog post on another site. Thanks to Justin Levy and the workshifting.com team for the opportunity.

A day (two actually) without the intarweb

Tuesday, May 26th was one of those really frustrating days where nothing seemed to go my way. This badness started in the morning when I figured out that something had gone horribly wrong with my high-speed internet connection. I could connect to the internet and every now and then I could open a web page, but I could not send email and most of my IM’s wouldn’t go through. Worse was the fact that my home phone didn’t work, since it is a Vonage phone and depends on my cable modem from Comcast to function.

This is not a situation that I have had to deal with extensively in the past, with only 2-3 days without a network connection in the past 5 years (barring hurricanes where there was no power for multiple days). That’s a pretty good track record and a testament to the general reliability of the cable service in my neighborhood. I am also quite meticulous about having every piece of electronic equipment in my home on either a UPS or a quality surge protector. That includes all of the networking gear, so that I don’t lose network connectivity if the power goes out briefly. In South Florida, a good rain storm will cause brown-outs and brief power outages, and I hear the alarms on my various UPS’s go off about 3 times a week.

What was interesting about this experience (besides scouring Google Maps on my iPhone for a Fedex Office or Starbucks location with Wi-Fi nearby) is that I actually had an opportunity to test out Comcast’s customer service and tech support for myself, after reading about their recent surge in CSAT scores and focus on Twitter as a service channel.

I began by calling their main toll-free number and waiting in queue for an agent. This took about 15 minutes, including the wait time and the discussion of the reason for my call. I was told that a tech would come to my house between 11am and 2pm. Surprisingly, they had someone available to come to my house on the same day my issue was reported, and within a 4-6 hour timeframe. This was actually good news as far as I was concerned, since I had expected to wait until later in the week for the service call. Then, to my further surprise, the Comcast tech showed up earlier than they said on the phone. He spent 30 minutes testing my cable and talking about my problem, and then said that the cable signal was fine and that he couldn’t do anything more to help me.

This is when I turned to @ComcastCares on Twitter. I have read so much about the Twitter presence for Comcast and it seemed a perfect opportunity to try it out for myself. My first message was just an open musing that was not a direct message to Comcast, or a reply to them. I just posted my thoughts to my Twitter stream to see what would happen.

Oh @comcastcares, what happened to my high spd internet?dslreports says upload is 24Kb today. Can’t work. Called cust svc. Please DM me.

My mere mention of Comcast via Twitter was answered almost immediately with what seemed like a generic response:

ComcastBill @andymahaney can i help?

What followed was a series of Tweets giving further information, followed by a request from @ComcastBill for some information via direct message to confirm my identity. Ultimately, Bill recommended that I replace my existing Linksys cable gateway with cable modem and he recommended a couple of brands. I took a trip to CompUSA, bought the modem, set it up, and my problems seemed to be resolved.

This “resolution” was only temporary. Within a few hours my service was down again and remained down until after 1am on Thursday, May 28th.

I resumed Twittering to @ComcastBill and @ComcastBonnie about my dilemma. Neither of them would confirm any specific problems in my area. They even shrugged off my repeated tweets about the multitude of Comcast-branded vehicles roaming my neighborhood. It was apparent to me that other people were having problems too. Maybe they can’t see that sort of thing easily or perhaps it’s policy to only reveal the scope of an outage after a certain number of people report issues. Maybe they just didn’t want to speculate. I can’t say.

I doubt that my cable modem had anything to do with this issue, but I am not planning to return the new modem because I have been gradually replacing the various components of my home network over the past few months, upgrading all my routers and switches to gigabit devices.

Where does that leave me with Comcast? Let’s review:

1. For whatever reason, my service was down for 2+ days. Can’t say if it was weather or Comcast to blame. I’ll assume the weather is the culprit. Since this is Florida and hurricanes are on the menu, Comcast should have their infrastructure designed to handle some rain. -1 point
2. I waited on the phone for a total of about 40 minutes over 2 days. Not the end of the world, but not good either.  -1 point
3. Comcast sent a tech to my house on the same day I reported an issue. He showed up early (wow!), took his time, was very nice and knowledgable. I was really impressed. +1 point
4. Comcast was highly responsive through Twitter. They seem to “get” this channel and I appreciate that they were able to provide me with some assistance.  +1 point
5. I am now finding out that the help I got from Comcast via Twitter and via phone was really not terribly helpful and it likely had nothing to do with what eventually solved my problem. It also cost me $50 for a cable modem I didn’t absolutely need.  -1 point

So there you have it. 2 of a possible 5 points. I think Comcast did a great job offering options for customer service. Their customer service was “worthless but very pleasant”. The interactions on Twitter clearly show that Comcast is committed to social media in a way that most companies still have not pondered and only a handful have mastered. Comcast seems to have mastered the channel, but they need to work on resolving the problem more quickly and accurately on the first try - or at least be better at recognizing a cluster of reported issues and linking them together to form a more comprehensive picture of the outage. First interaction resolution (rather than first call resolution) is equally important, regardless of the interaction channel.

Comment: “RightNow, Salesforce Offer Services To Track Customer Complaints On Twitter, YouTube”

Comment on this article by Mary Hayes Weier on InformationWeek’s Cloud Computing blogs, found via @D_Hong on Twitter.

Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is a step in the right direction for the enterprise adoption of social media. Web 2.0 companies like RightNow and Salesforce that are already experts in cloud-based computing and CRM have found a way to use social media to enhance their existing offerings in a way that is both meaningful and quantifiable for companies. I have not seen a demonstration of this technology yet, but the article mentions that several of the oft-referenced Twitter-darlings, like Comcast and Dell are already using the technology. From the article:

Here’s how it works: You set RightNow Cloud Monitor to search for key words, in 33 languages, in Twitter and YouTube, such as, “XYZ Corp.,” “phone,” “junk,” “crap,” “mad,” “angry,” and the ever-popular “sucks.” After retrieving the tweets or videos, an XYZ customer agent can respond to the individual or create an incident report and put it into the RightNow workflow (RightNow, by the way, is offered in the software-as-a-service model.) Then a statistically based natural-language processing system applies a scale for how positive or negative the emotion is in each incident, which lets XYZ rank the priority in which it deals with each incident.

RightNow is planning future support for Facebook and LinkedIn, and is looking at how it can apply the service even more broadly, such as chat rooms. RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte tells me that some customers have been using the product for nine months, and it’s ready for use by the company’s full customer base.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com will offer a similar application for its CRM service this summer that monitors Twitter. Comcast, Cable, Dell, and European telecom company Orange are among the customers that have signed up for it.

The integration of Twitter in a meaningful way with Salesforce.com is of particular interest to me, because the computer telephony integration (CTI) products for Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) have a Salesforce.com CRM connector. This means that when Salesforce begins offering the service later this summer, existing contact centers running UCCE can begin to leverage Twitter (and hopefully other social media) without having to develop their Twitter strategy from scratch. They can simply manage and track the Twitter cloud as an extension of the Salesforce CRM product. The extent to which the Twitter integration is able to be leveraged by customer service agents using the CRM connector and how it will impact contact center reporting is my first and most pressing question.

This is a HUGE first step, and I look forward to learning more about the offerings from both RightNow and Salesforce.

One additional comment on this passage from the article:

So let’s get back to the aforementioned creepy aspect of all this. If a company contacted me on Twitter following a post, I think, initially, I might be taken back a bit. But really, this is in no way a violation of privacy. When you tweet, you’re tweeting to anyone and everyone. That’s the nature of Twitter. There is no privacy there. Same with YouTube. You don’t get to choose who responds to what you have to tell the world.

I find this particularly interesting because it so directly contradicts the expectations and disappointment expressed by Catherine Ventura from The Huffington Post, in an article that I commented on recently. On one hand we have a blogger for The Huffington Post getting, well, huffy about not getting a response to her Twitter post about a “horror story” with AT&T. On the other hand we have a blogger from InformationWeek discussing how scary it would be to have her Tweets tracked and analyzed by large corporations with whom she does business - but ultimately she admits that the prospect seems inevitable if you use a social media service.

Two very different views of the same subject. I think it illustrates an even larger challenge that is yet to come for enterprises hoping to leverage social media. How much is “too much”when it comes to monitoring and tracking your clients and customers?

I am a Sr. Principal at eLoyalty (a Cisco Partner). The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent eLoyalty’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Comment: “The ROI from Twitter: Don’t bother telling your CFO”

This is a comment on a article on blogs.ZDNet.com by Tom Steinert-Threlkeld.

I think this article’s title is dead on, at least for now, about the ROI that one might expect from Twitter in the enterprise. From the article:

In the question and answer period, after Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein delivered their tips, one of the questions was: “How do you quantify the benefit of Twitter to a CFO?”

O’Reilly’s response: “I wouldn’t bother.”

As I have mentioned in previous posts on this blog and on my Twitter feed, the metrics and tools of measurement for customer service (or any enterprise interaction) via Twitter still remain to be seen. These tools, methods and metrics may be under development in some code bunker somewhere or secured within the walls of a Fortune 500 company with time and money to invest in such matters. They certainly have not become mainstream.  To put it in terms of a familiar meme:

1. Get Twitter account
2. Hire social media guru
3. Monitor Twitter 24/7 for company name
4. Respond to every mention
5. ?
6. Profit

Do you see the problem here? I do.

Public companies have a responsibility to their shareholders to perform due dilligence before they make decisions which might materially impact the financial performance of the company, and thus the investors’ chances of deriving a return. In order to complete this due dilligence, these companies need solid financial data upon which they can calculate return on investment (ROI). The marketing department may see Twitter and other social media as exciting new viral marketing channels to reach out to a specific target market that includes connected individuals, but to quote the article (and almost every other article and blog post on the subject):

Don’t just blast out press releases and promotions. If everything you send tries to sell something, you’ll be ignored.

Okay. So maybe one-to-many marketing in the traditional sense doesn’t work on Twitter. So what does? From the article:

1. Create more value than you capture. This is not about what you can pull out of a stream of ideas, but what you can put in
2. Amplify others. This is not about you. It’s about the best ideas – and bringing them to the surface, for those who care about the subject.
3. Pass it along. Act as a curator of what’s important, funnel the best links and messages from people “who have something to say” to your followers. And you’ll probably get more followers. Because you’re a Tweet stream editor, now.

Now wait - this is all starting to sound very altruistic; like maybe we should break out in a chorus of “Kumbaya.” These suggestions, while appropriate for the casual user of Twitter who is hoping to increase their status amongst their peers, seems to be directly at odds with the primary goal of most for-profit corporations. What American, capitalist, profit-driven corporation can find more than passing PR value in adhering to this advice?

I put some faith in Tim O’Reilly’s experience in these matters - but I agree with the implication in the article that the only real ROI from Twitter right now is for the social media gurus that are touting their wares. In fact, the article mentions that a major theme of the O’Reilly Publishing presentation was about a new book on the subject. So in essence, O’Reilly is saying that there is no ROI from Twitter for now, but you can capitalize on the hype if you just buy my book on the subject. This seems a strikingly familiar dynamic. O’Reilly stands to collect significant ROI from their book on the subject of Twitter, without ever really giving away the secret sauce that companies need to turn Twitter into a profitable venture for traditional industry.

In these economic times where budgets are stretched thin, employees are subjected to rounds after round of layoffs that raise the blood pressure, and millions of people are losing their homes, a service like Twitter truly has some appeal. I think that the place for Twitter in our hearts and minds is already solidified. Twitter is a great equalizer, allowing people to be involved in the news, their community (online or physical) and connect with celebrities and causes in new and exciting ways. Twitter has already sparked conversation about opening a new channel for customer service and customer interaction in general - and this is good news for an industry like mine which needs an infusion of “Web 2.0″ to jump start the next set of waves in the contact center - following up on the previous sets, like CRM, CTI, Virtualization, and more recently Unified Communications (UC).

I’m looking forward to being part of the solution. I am actively encouraging my peers and my managers to embrace Twitter and find new ways to utilize it for business. The response has been very positive, and I feel like many of the benefits of Twitter for a highly distributed workforce are real - considering that capital costs of using Twitter so far have been $0. When you use Twitter on a daily basis, you begin to see its utility very quickly. I think that many of the blog posts and articles out there are incorrectly hanging the word value on Twitter at this point. I hope to explore the utility of Twitter and begin to formulate ways to create value for business from Twitter over the coming months. Look for more on this topic in future blog posts.

I am a Sr. Principal at eLoyalty (a Cisco Partner). The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent eLoyalty’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Comment: Sprint Links Up with the Enterprise

My comment on this article by Eric Krapf, Editor on NoJitter.com.

One of the last barriers to enterprise Unified Communications (UC) appears to finally be coming down. Sprint has announced that they will support presence status for mobile phones on the Sprint wireless network. Sprint Mobile Integration will allow companies to extend their Cisco Unified Communications Manager or Avaya Communication Manager out to enterprise mobile users with support for presence. From the article:

Sprint is touting the service’s ability to avoid desk phone deployment for highly mobile workers, who can use their mobiles and stay on-net; Dan Jacobson told me an enterprise could even consider the Mobile Integration service as a way to avoid deploying a PBX or any other premises system at small offices–you just give everyone a mobile and they hang off the Sprint network that’s tied to the main enterprise system.

This has two significant effects from my point of view.

1. This represents a huge potential shift in the designs for branch PBX deployments for large distributed enterprise PBX systems. Currently these branch deployments require locally based routers (voice gateways) in case the WAN fails and someone needs to place an emergency call, as well as adequate WAN bandwidth to support the voice calls that will terminate to or be generated from each branch location. There is a potential savings in hardware (phones, routers, switches, etc.) and deployment time for large branch deployments.
2. This capability may the first part of the “missing link” that enterprises are waiting to see in the UC market. There is so much talk of “federation” and platform integrations, as well as B2B presence sharing. With the increase in mobile users, work-at-home users and outsource relationships it will be critical that carriers step in to fill the gap between enterprises.

The next major step will be to support additional presence states, beyond just “Available” and “On The Phone” at the carrier level, and across carriers. Imagine if you never had to dial someone again, just to hear a voicemail message and wait for them to call you back. Comprehensive, universal presence would allow you to see when people in your contact list are available, busy or out of range and plan your contact with them accordingly.

Skype does this today, and is one of the fastest growing telephony services in the world - all on the carrier’s own networks. It only makes sense for Sprint and others to offer the same flexibility to their customers. It will be interesting to see if the other carriers offer competing products and whether Sprint will secure new business as a result of this offering.

A question to my readers: Will presence be the death of voicemail? I’ll have to cover that in a future blog post. Feel free to comment.

Response to: “AT&T operators should answer more social media calls”

This is a response to this article that I found through a retweet by @tfamous from @D_Hong:

I certainly won’t argue the “image value” of recent appearances of social media in customer service, but articles like the one from The Huffington Post’s Catherine Ventura fail to recognize the costs associated with introducing a full-blown new channel for customer service. From the article:

“Is anyone from AT&T on Twitter?” I tweeted several weeks ago, “I have a horror story.”

The silence was deafening, despite the fact that there are at least six Twitter accounts that feature AT&T’s blue-striped sphere as their avatar. Granted, with a foreboding Tweet like that, I might not have wanted to respond either, but I’m a customer, so AT&T should have been paying attention.

I have to admit I was perplexed that that the AT&T sphere is not participating more actively in the Twittersphere. – Catherine Ventura, The Huffington Post

At a company like AT&T, where there are millions of customers that need support and customer service each month, the implementation of a new customer support channel is a major strategic decision which could cost millions of dollars to implement. Any corporation undertaking this sort of effort will want to do so  in a way that is supportable, sustainable and consistent. But more importantly, as I mentioned in my previous post on the subject of Twitter, there is an emerging shift from reactive customer service to proactive customer relationship building through social media that is practically demanded by Ms. Ventura under the terms of her customer relationship with AT&T.

I am reading every day now about the use of Twitter in the context of customer service. I have a very techno-centric view of customer service due to my experience in the contact center technology field and I recognize the challenges that non-telephony, real-time interactions will present in the contact center - especially for large corporations.

My view of the “[insert social media site/service here] for customer service” dilemma is that multi-channel contact centers are simply an albatross to many large corporations. Different companies that I have worked with over the years have implemented email and web collaboration with varying levels of success, largely due to a lack of strategic direction prior to the implementation. A properly planned and executed multi-channel integration can reap significant ROI and improve customer satisfaction, while half-measures are almost certain to be an ongoing challenge from a service level and customer satisfaction perspective.

I’ll point to a great article by Richard Grigonis, Executive Editor, IP Communication Group on TMCNet.com about Unified Communications in the Call Center. This article brings up a multitude of valid points about UC in the contact center and throughout the enterprise, and I think many of these points translate directly to the challenges of social media for customer servce. From the article:

“The point is, how much do you let your agents do with this technology? In the past, contact centers were fairly ‘locked down’ with your people and what they did. How much more do you let them work with this and in this way, because it starts to change all of the metrics that affect how you want to run your business. So you must think through your metrics concerning how you want to run your business before you go and implement all of these new things.” – Jim Kraskey, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, Calabrio

Social media as a channel in the customer service contact center is so new that it still has the “new car scent” hanging about it. Most companies have not completely figured out how to leverage technologies that have been available for years, like email and web chat - with great effectiveness. In order for companies to attach themselves to the social media as an interaction channel, someone must develop reliable and defensible metrics for social media interactions and the tools to track and compare them to the better established customer service channels. The success stories you read about every day from the social media gurus reference “success stories” like @ComcastCares pale in comparison to the deafening silence of the vast majority of corporations with well established customer service departments. At this stage, Comcast is still building its social media discipline. Their efforts started as an experiment - a cautious “dipping of toes” into the new media channel waters. The hype around Twitter has brought these experiments to the public’s attention through overwhelming media attention and continuous recycling in the “Twitterverse.” I applaud the companies that have found early success providing customer service via social media. Surely their example, their lessons learned, and their ultimate ROI will all be subjects of discussion for years to come.

I am a self-proclaimed gadget geek, techie and early adopter when it comes to my personal life. But - to Ms. Ventura at the Huffington Post - corporations have budgets, staffing issues, accountability, legal issues, and much more to contend with before they can fully embrace social media. Can you blame AT&T for protecting their brand by securing strategic accounts on Twitter before they are fully ready to provide customer service through those channels? Or is there some unwritten #tweetiquette on this subject that I am unaware of?

I am a Sr. Principal at eLoyalty (a Cisco Partner). The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent eLoyalty’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Lunch Hour Review: Polycom VoiceStation 500

I spend a huge portion of my day on the telephone, predominantly on conference calls. For the past year I have been using a Panasonic multi-handset DECT6.0 cordless phone with speakerphones built into each handset. Honestly, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the voice quality and often found myself struggling to be heard, especially in conversations where one person tended to dominate. In these instances the Panasonic just wouldn’t let me interject clarifications or corrections at the appropriate moment. This was a major source of frustration, and led to a search for a good conference room phone, similar to those used in most offices.

I do not have a digital phone system at home, so I needed a conference phone that supported an analog line (actually a Vonage line in my case). As I researched PolyCom phones, which have always been my favorite conference phones, I happened upon the PolyCom VoiceStation 500 on Amazon.com. This phone works with analog lines, but the most exciting feature is support for Bluetooth phones and direct connection from your computer. In a single product I could have my Vonage line, my iPhone and even my computer all connected to a single device for conferences. I placed an order immediately.

Image of PolyCom VS500

First impressions:

The VS500 is very easy to install. It comes with a power “brick” which has three ports, a few cables, and the familiar three-mic base unit. To install, you plug in the brick, connect the included cable with RJ-45 ends to the brick and the base unit, and connect your analog phone line directly to the brick. Both power and voice are carried on the single RJ-45 cables, thus reducing the number of cables you must drape across your desk or conference table. The phone looksgreat, with a grey top and darker grey lower section, built in keypad, mute, and volume controls. The top of the VS500 has three LEDs which shine a bright red when the phone is muted, and green when a call is connected (unmuted) via the analog line or when the analog line is ringing. There is also an analog auxiliary port in the brick, in case you want to connect a fax, modem, or handset behind the conference phone.

Likes:

• Bluetooth connectivity
• Clarity of speaker
• Superb volume range - I can hear it from the other side of the house at maximum
• Multiple microphones with 7-10 foot range without shouting

Dislikes:

• LEDs do not light up when talking on a call using Bluetooth - Blue LEDs would have been cool to distinguish from an analog call
• Re-establishing Bluetooth connection for a paired device that was out of range - sometimes gives me trouble
• Cannot use the keypad on the VS500 to dial the mobile phone - not too bad since my iPhone sits in a cradle next to the VS500

Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 5

1and1 has a sense of humor

Have you ever had one of those moments where you were on hold or in queue for a contact center and the music was so good that you didn’t want anyone to pick up? Yeah, neither had I - until today.

I called my webhost (1and1.com) this morning to discuss my hosting package, and while on hold with their sales department I was treated to the ultimate in contact center hold music. What song could possibly engage me so thoroughly you ask?

This song.

For the uninitiated, this song is from the closing credits of the video game Portal by Valve Corporation.

Thoughts on Twitter

I am beginning to use Twitter, along with several free services that augment it, for keeping up with topics that are trending in real-time related to my job. No matter where you turn, you seem to see, hear or read something about Twitter these days. Large corporations are taking advantage of search tools to monitor every mention of their company on Twitter and respond in real-time to those mentions, whether good or bad. Ostensibly, this has the effect of fostering a closer relationship with those customers and potentially reducing customer service costs down the road. A simpler explanation is that customers are reacting positively to this new real-time customer service model, as evidenced by Bloomberg’s report on Comcast’s rising customer satisfaction scores. (Could the hiring of 15,000 new customer service reps since 2007 or proactive network monitoring be the reason for the improvement, or is Twitter really responsible?)

I can understand why Twitter is perceived as a revolution for customer service, but I also understand very well how the traditional contact center is organized and managed. If you think about it, Twitter is fostering a reversal of the model for customer service that has been developing in the contact center space for more than a decade. Read the rest of this entry »