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Nostra damn it!

At this time of year, during the festive season, we begin with predictions – which rarely fully materialise – and we end with resolutions – which promptly get broken.

Both are done with the best of intentions, but “gang aft agley” like “the best-laid schemes o’ mice and men.”

With the (Gregorian calendar) New Year approaching, you’ll see predictions from and for almost any industry sector you care to mention. It’s the traditional thing to do; like a compelling event.

I’m compelled to predict that the arrival of 2016 won’t be ignored. Here are some more persuasive predictions from Aculab, which you are free to heed or ignore. Perhaps you will make a resolution to revisit them – to check if they’ve “gone agley” – during the year ahead.

The flow of data will not abate

We are part of an increasingly connected world. For better or worse, we are all LinkedIn as you might say. In recent years, we’ve seen the phenomenon of social media or the Internet of Folks (IoF). In the coming year, the Internet of Things (IoT) will continue to develop and gain our attention.

A consequence of the IoT is the generation of data on a massive scale. That is reminiscent of a Parkinson’s Law derivative, which states that “Data expands so as to occupy all available bandwidth and storage.” If that were to happen, the Internet would grind to a halt. But fear not, I’m not predicting that for 2016.

The thing about data is that it’s of no value until and unless it’s analysed. You need to locate the signal(s) from within all the noise. That is particularly true in contact centres, where businesses should expect to do more this coming year. Data will spring from an increasing number of customer engagement or customer interaction channels. And that includes incoming and outgoing communications.

Most businesses won’t cope with all that data coming their way. That’s why the Cloud is so important. My predictive advice for 2016 is not to invest in data storage, any more than you should invest in on-premises contact centre solutions. Some things are best taken care of in the Cloud – including communicating with real folks.

Average handling times (AHT) will increase

In the contact centre world, the trend has gone beyond multi- to omni-channel communications. It cannot be denied; that is the only way. There is also a trend towards increasing self-service effectiveness, as many companies look to reduce customer effort and focus on first contact resolution.

You would think that would have the effect of reducing AHT. You would be wrong. That is, if you’re thinking of AHT in relation to agents. By definition, self-service channels don’t involve agents. Unavoidably, as routine contacts are increasingly handled through self-service, the AHT of more complex interactions – those involving agents – will increase.

The future of customer contact will involve the extremes of highly personalised agent service and the increasing use of automated systems. However, that is not to say that automation plays no part in agent service. On the contrary, it is essential to reaching the right agent, which is where seamless transition features such as skills-based routing are applied.

The skill most in demand will be that of dealing with complaints, which will contribute to the increase in AHT. The advice for customers is, if you have a complaint, call the business. The advice for businesses is that your telephony channel will continue to be seen as the channel that gives the best service and best handles complaints.

Voice will remain a key technology.

Following on from the above, it will not be a surprise to read that the majority of customer interactions occur by voice. The figure is somewhere around 88 percent, in Europe at least. That is ahead of other, prevalent channels such as e-mail, snail-mail (as amazing as it sounds), fax (believe it), social media (e.g., Facebook and Twitter), web chat, video, and WhatsApp (or equivalents).

The prediction for the coming year is that the use of channels such as web chat and WhatsApp will increase, but that voice will continue to be the predominant channel, with the highest percentage of contact centres using the telephone compared to any single, alternative interaction channel.

The advice for developers and users of contact centres alike, is that when looking at new solutions, you should offer or select something that is flexible enough to accommodate both traditional and new channels. That is, create an omni-channel environment.

If you take all of these predictions and advice, you will be encouraged to look at cloud-based alternatives for your contact centre solutions. If you are a developer, you will be encouraged to look at cloud-based telephony software stacks and APIs. I predict it will be so.

And to prove that I am truly far sighted (and that you should pay attention to what I say), one day we will have robots communicating using ThatsApp, whilst bemused humans will be crying, “WhatsUp?”

I’ll leave the last, prophetic words, to The Bard:

“But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!“

Happy New Year!

Magic Quadrant for Contact Centre as a Service, Western Europe

Whatever you may think of the accuracy or otherwise of predictions made by industry analysts in general, it’s clear that Gartner has gained a good degree of credibility with its regular, industry specific ‘magic quadrant’ analysis.

I recently came across Gartner’s offering entitled Magic Quadrant for Contact Centre as a Service (Western Europe) (¹). Despite the rather clumsy acronym of CCaaS, it’s makes good reading – if you’re mentioned in the report.

Well, Aculab isn’t mentioned in the report. However, that’s hardly surprising as Aculab isn’t offering a CCaaS product per se. But we are involved.

What is pleasing (and not surprising) is that Aculab’s technology is being used by 40 percent of the contact centre service providers identified in Gartner’s report. We’re certainly happy about that. We’re particularly pleased, because our underpinning technology – telephony media processing resources – is being used by providers in the magic Challenger, Niche Player and Visionary quadrants.

It’s clear from Gartner’s CCaaS market report that IT leaders and customer service organizations have a range of competitive, cloud-based offers to consider in place of more traditional, premises-based contact centre infrastructure. That is music to our ears. Why is that?

That’s because – by inference – it confirms Aculab as being involved in those competitive offerings. And it’s because, rather than being seen merely as “those guys who make DSP boards,” Aculab can be viewed as a partner, whose current, highly relevant products add value to acclaimed offerings in a key market sector.

CCaaS solutions offer the same functions and capabilities as ‘bricks and mortar’ contact centre infrastructure. The functionality is used in the public and private sectors by a wide variety of customer and employee service and support centres, and by inbound and outbound telemarketing services for such things as collections and subscriptions.

The underlying technology that Aculab, as a specialist provider, contributes to the CCaaS providers includes functionality related to the following:

• Automatic call distribution (ACD) and computer-telephony integration
• Interactive voice response (IVR) and self-service portals
• Operational support applications, including recording and analytics
• Outbound dialling and live speaker / answering machine detection
• Support of virtual operations (multi-tenant and multi-instance) and remote agents
• Elasticity to dynamically add and subtract users

Gartner’s magic quadrant report has narrow criteria for inclusion, which makes being a dot on its graphic an achievement, of which the named providers, justifiably, can be proud. However, the benefits to be gained from using a CCaaS solution are no secret known only to members of an exclusive magic circle.

If you are a contact centre solution provider of any description, you can benefit from Aculab’s added value, which will contribute to the business benefits your solution offers your customers.

Note 1: https://www.gartner.com/doc/3151325/magic-quadrant-contact-center-service

Note that Gartner’s research publications consist of the opinions of its research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact, and that Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications.

It will stay cloudy forever

Use of the cloud is now well established. So much so that, according to the latest research by the Cloud Industry Forum (¹), the overall cloud adoption rate in the UK stands at 84 percent. That’s an impressive figure.

What is even more impressive is that normally stingy financial controllers have been persuaded that ‘pay as you go’ is more attractive than ‘buy once, use often’.

One of the primary reasons for ignoring a seemingly obvious financial reality is that, especially for small businesses, the lack of capital, or the will to borrow, is a real difficulty. If you won’t fork out £000s for a shiny new system, you are nevertheless likely to pay £0s on a recurring monthly basis. The op-ex option is simple, controllable, and budget-able and ends up being a ‘no brainer’ for many businesses – 84 percent of them it would appear.

So why should it be otherwise for developers and solutions providers?

Shipping boxes

For developers and solutions providers, the traditional model is to gather software and components in a server, and to ship that platform to a customer who buys once and uses often. Vendors benefit greatly from that, because the ratio of value vs. cost is heavily in their favour and accordingly, they are able to gain substantial, per sale revenues. However, other than an eventual technology refresh (if you’re blessed), it’s a case of sell once and move on.

Two factors mean that paradigm cannot be sustained.

For one, the marketplace is far more competitive and the buying community is tuned in to a keener awareness of value for money. As a result, competitive pressure is forcing vendors to reduce their margins, which has a knock-on effect across the board.

Secondly, shrinking hardware lifecycles of servers and components, means developers are forced to incur the cost of re-qualifying major elements of their platform more frequently than ever before. At their level, buying once isn’t an option, because what they once bought is no longer available – it’s been replaced by a new model.

The end is nigh

Both factors mean developers are seeking concessionary prices from suppliers for regular, cap-ex platform purchases. It also means they should be looking for economies in all aspects of what they do.

The costs involved in continuing to ship ‘boxes’ are many and varied. The costs involved in being able to ship the same product in a ‘similar box’ are revealing. The costs of procuring once and shipping often, during the 5-7 years lifecycle expectancy of a typical communications platform, have been superseded by those involved in procuring often (to enable continued shipping).

When seeking economies, developers must surely prefer to avoid recurring costs associated with these activities:

• Sourcing replacement servers and compatible components
• Performing platform (re-)qualification &/or productisation
• Producing software and documentation updates
• Ensuring ongoing support and deployment familiarisation
• Marketing new variant introductions and end-of-life programmes
• Dealing with warranty issues on obsolete platforms
• Accommodating vendor enforced hardware and software changes

Follow the leader

The alternative is to adopt a cloud model and offer the benefits of their platform as a service i.e., stop shipping boxes and start selling services. If the market has shifted substantially to favour cloud-based solutions – 84 percent is a compelling statistic – perhaps it’s time for developers to follow suit.

All of the functionality inherent in the servers, components, and 3^rd party hardware and software that developers buy, in persisting with the traditional model, are available as cloud-based alternatives. So instead of offering a ‘buy once, use often’ solution, give ’em what they prefer – ‘pay as you go’.

There are several models for ongoing, monthly charges. There will be more than one that suits the business philosophy of a given developer organisation. As a service provider, developers need to strike a balance between commitment and risk in determining their charging model. The number of alternatives suggests the market is willing, and the risk, where it exists, can be mitigated readily by fair usage policies.

Note 1: http://cloudindustryforum.org/news/827-uk-cloud-adoption-rate-climbs-to-84-finds-new-research-from-the-cloud-industry-forum

API days

API World musings

Attending API World in Santa Clara, CA., last week and communicating, for various reasons, with people in Europe and Australia, it struck me as strange to be wishing one person good morning while I wished another good night, in the middle of the afternoon.

Of course, that’s just the way it is, but I couldn’t help feeling, for a moment or two, that each of us was in our own parallel universe, existing simultaneously, but experiencing different realities.

Cloud computing produces a similar effect, but unlike steampunk, it’s a real future available today.

Cloudy with > a hint of APIs

The reality for some is a world free of clouds, while for others, cloud is their only reality.

Are we to consider those inhabiting a non-cloud reality merely to be in a different time zone or in an alternative universe?

If cloud adoption continues at its present rate, laggards may soon wish they were in the alternative future. Steampunk might be a good read, but it doesn’t cut it as a practical option.

Cloud technology has materialised through virtualisation, but it is no virtual reality. It has engendered a plethora of APIs, enabling developers to mash up all manner of integrated applications.

That’s the real message from API World, right there.

The API message

APIs play a fundamental role in application integration, enabling developers to work with multiple applications for a unified business purpose. The eco-system of APIs is a classic case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts as it permits developers to invoke myriad functionalities and exchange data between multiple back-end applications.

API is the collective acronym for a technology that enables developers to create new products and services across a plethora of digital channels, including smart devices, M2M, and the IoT. APIs also facilitate the rapid modelling and profiling that tech-savvy businesses demand. As such, they are synonymous with start-ups and entrepreneurship, encouraging developers to launch new and innovative businesses.

Whose APIs?

If you’ve understood the message, you’ll realise there is no one right answer to the question of whose APIs. That’s because, for any given requirement, you’re likely to need more than one API. Each API provides an interface to its own underlying technology.

Given that you will need a mash-up of several API enabled technologies, the most sensible place to access them is in the cloud. The alternative of implementing a raft of third party APIs, in house, in your own data centre, is surely counter intuitive.

When it comes to communications enabled business practices (CEBP), you’ll need to add voice, fax, messaging, text-to-speech, WebRTC, etc., to the mix. Already, across industry verticals, an increasing number of enterprise applications now incorporate CEBP. As communications evolves to become a more contextual experience, called upon in relation to circumstances and events, the choice of telecoms APIs will remain an important decision.

That being the case, you should select APIs from a provider with a relevant heritage; one that offers deployment proven, industry benchmark technology.

Get with the programme. Never mind steampunk or parallel worlds. Cloud APIs are the future today, and it’s to your detriment to be behind the times.

A new cosmic dawn

Intel has seen the light. I’m not talking light at the end of the tunnel here, because it can’t be said of Intel that it’s scrambling its way forward. It’s more like the light of revelation. What it saw were the myriads of power-on LEDs, like a constellation in the night sky, lighting up the data centres of hyper-scalers Amazon and Google. The cosmic dawn took a long time coming. Intel’s epiphany moment has arrived in rather less time.

Ok, that’s enough hyperbole. What I’m referring to is Intel’s $100M capital and engineering investment in Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company. Hot on the heels of a slew of announcements, including Cisco’s purchase of Tropo, Intel’s involvement is further conclusive proof – as if any more were needed – of the inexorability of cloud computing.

There is a trend. A recent article in the New York Times (¹) indicated that five of the six companies that Cisco has acquired (or announced its intention to acquire), this year, are involved in cloud computing.

Intel is, by a wide margin, the biggest chip supplier to the enterprise computing market. The light that Intel has seen – in a flash of inspiration like the proverbial light bulb of Eureka! – is an incandescent truth. That reality is best illustrated by the following: what do you do when the market for your chips is changing from very many companies, each buying lots of product, to very few companies, each buying lots more product?

The inherent danger for companies like Intel, in such a market, is that a supplier becomes more vulnerable to the purchasing decisions of fewer, but consequentially more influential, buyers. The best way to mitigate the inevitable is to be part of it, rather than fight against it. That’s why Intel has invested in Mirantis and OpenStack.

The underlying message being endorsed so heavily by the actions of Amazon, Google, Cisco, IBM, HP, and now Intel, is that enterprise computing is outmoded, whereas cloud computing is new-fangled.

New-fangled doesn’t equate to quirky, geeky, niche activities. It means current, modern and up-to-date. Cloud computing is pervasive. It is tantamount to being omnipresent in our daily lives. Computing in the cloud is so popular that people don’t even realise they’re using it. They don’t even take it for granted. What is taken for granted, are the services it enables.

What companies like Intel don’t take for granted is the status quo. If you are a provider of communications technology and/or services, you can do worse than take note of Intel’s example. If you don’t, what you can take for granted is that you will run into problems. You don’t want to leave it too late to find a solution to those problems.

Cloud communications, like cloud computing, is not a problem, it is a solution.

PS; if you’re looking for the light switch, it’s over here: http://cloud.aculab.com/

Note 1: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/technology/intel-to-invest-heavily-in-software-that-enhances-cloud-computing-capabilities.html?_r=0

The best better way

Lately, I’ve been reading about what some people are calling ‘no stack’ start-ups. What on earth is that, you might ask.

Interestingly, the label seems to mean that instead of an emerging company trying to build everything it needs from the ground up, it should focus on its core competence and use third party services for the underlying functions and technologies it needs. It seems to fit very well with the popularity of entrepreneurship and the “faster, ever faster” time to market demands of the 21st century.

Note that the ‘stack’ in question is that composite range of functions, which include the technology, infrastructure and operations, needed to run a successful business. In effect, it can amount to the entire IT function of a business. For any company, let alone a start-up struggling to get off the ground, those IT costs can amount to a significant investment. Apart from the capital costs, IT takes time to implement and, unless it forms part of your skill set, it takes a whole lot of effort – and a whole lot more of your time and budget – to manage and maintain.

To put those costs into perspective, 75 percent of IT budgets (1) are consumed by recurrent costs, which, as a percentage of corporate revenue, have grown 50 percent since 2002. So for many established companies, spending just on ‘keeping the lights on’ is an issue. What chance then does your average start-up have?

Ideally, when entering the marketplace, where its sole focus should be on innovation, no start-up is going to want to have to struggle with that level of escalating costs merely to become established and compete. There has to be a better way.

That better way is shown by the ‘no stack’ message, which is: do not be a jack-of-all-trades. Instead, start-ups’ sole focus should be on what they do extremely well; what they do better than anyone else. The final point of this tri-part mantra is to utilise other services for everything else – for the things at which you don’t excel.

Is it as simple as that? In this era of platforms, mashups and APIs, it’s fair to point out that there are dangers inherent in building your business on someone else’s API. If you rely on say a social media platform API, the danger is that somewhere down the road, the API permissions will be removed. Of course, it depends on the provider and what it sees as its core business.

Thankfully for start-ups looking to add telecommunications features to their services, the provider has a vested interest in mutual success. When you think about it, the platform and API is the core business of the service provider. That means it has the stated intent to stick around and continue to offer its services. It will be striving all out for success in the same way as your start-up. It success will depend on the successes of all of its customers – on each and every start-up that integrates its APIs, including yours.

In the ‘stone age’, the food chain involved manufacturers, importers, distributors, resellers, and retailers. In the ‘no stack’ Internet age, entrepreneurial start-ups can sell more directly – goods or services or content – using mashed up third party service functions to help them reach and satisfy their customers.

Think about it for a moment. Your priority is to capitalise on what it is that you excel at, and grow into a meaningful business. Your focus will be on your software, and on your marketing and sales activities. How much of a distraction is it for you to take time out to develop, manage and maintain – also and instead – all the services (on which you rely) that you get from third party API platforms? Would you want to do that?

Clearly, the benefits of being a ‘no stack’ start-up are established. Cut down the development work, cut out the capital costs, and carve your way to market in a fraction of the time than otherwise it would take. Be leaner and meaner – follow the better way.

Note 1: "IT Costs – The Costs, Growth And Financial Risk Of Software Assets". OMT-CO Operations Management Technology Consulting GmbH; May, 2013.

Rampant cloud communications

Since my blog post triggered by the announcement of the acquisition of Tropo by Cisco (completed in May), comes a fresh endorsement of the legitimacy of cloud-based telecommunications platforms.

I came across a study by IDC¹, a premier global provider of market intelligence and advisory services, offering yet more evidence – as if any were needed – of the global demand for cloud communications platforms.

According to the report’s author, Mark Winther, Group Vice President and Consulting Partner, Worldwide Telecommunications, providers of cloud communications platforms are “leveraging cloud economics” in order to “create low-cost and richly contextualised IP communications.”

The IDC report forecasts stratospheric CAGR figures for global revenues, rising from the present hundred-millions to several billions, in a mere three years time. However sceptical you might be about the accuracy of such numbers, they are usually correct in their orders of magnitude. So the communications market is on the growth path after some years of sliding revenue and a lack of innovation by the industry as a whole.

The growth is being driven by cloud communications platform providers, such as Tropisco (mentioned above) and Aculab Cloud.

According to IDC, the appeal of these cloud communications platforms is “an ability to prototype an application in a day and bring an application to production scale in a few weeks as well as do this for a fraction of the cost of traditional telephony systems.”

If you fancy some of that, contact us here at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; we’d be happy to help you take your fist steps down that path.

By leveraging a carrier interconnect model, cloud communications platforms such as Aculab Cloud can deliver voice, fax and text messaging at rates substantially below traditional carrier retail rates.

And the best bit?

All the telecommunications resources you need are available – and scalable – on demand, where and when you need them, and for as long as you need them (no more, no less).

Furthermore, for application developers, corporate enterprises, and Internet start-ups, the cloud model offers a rapid market entry without the fuss and bother of technology capital investment. That means you can focus on your creativity and innovation, and let Aculab Cloud take care of the telephony nuts ‘n’ bolts.

Note 1: Get the IDC report, entitled Worldwide Cloud Communications Platforms 2014–2018 Forecast: The Resurgence of Voice and SMS.

Media servers have had their day

Media servers have played an important role in enabling many of the real-time – and non-real-time – telecommunications applications with which we are all familiar. Those interactive applications include many things we take for granted. They include network announcements (e.g., the ‘speaking clock’), voicemail, IVR, unified messaging (which has morphed into unified communications), and outbound diallers (think campaigns and collections).

Media servers provide a range of low-level functionality used to underpin many applications. Their functions include echo cancellation, DTMF digit detection and generation, loudest speaker detection, call recording, and the ‘front-ending’ of text-to-speech (TTS) and speech recognition servers, with such essential features as ‘grunt detection’ and ‘barge-in’ (nothing to do with Marines on exercise).

These days, with a plethora of smartphone apps generating increasing media traffic in telecommunications networks, you could be forgiven for thinking that media servers can only grow in importance. The trouble with that is a bit like poor man’s origami; it’s twofold.

For one thing, lots of functionality is taken care of by the smartphone. For example, in a speech enabled navigation app, you don’t need a TTS server, or a media server to playback its synthesised speech. That’s because the app relies on a synthetic voice on the device, not on a TTS engine and media server in the network. Nor is a media server needed for the GPS signal used by the app.

Most of the traffic involved is data associated with downloads and regular updates, either to the mapping application or to the TTS voice engine on the smartphone, and none of that requires a media server.

The other thing is that the technology behind media servers is outdated. Traditionally, they have been based on boards full of digital signal processors (DSPs). More recently, they have been implemented on servers with licensed software, which offers functionality akin to that provided by DSPs. Along the way, they have been controlled via complex, low level C APIs or intermediate markup languages, such as MSCML, MSML, and VoiceXML.

None of those technologies are sustainable in a world where many real-time telco applications are no longer revenue generating, merely revenue protecting. I fear subscribers don’t associate service providers with cool applications, and what reduces subscriber churn – or increases their numbers – is free cinema vouchers and early access to tickets for concerts and sports events.

Nowadays, increasing numbers of businesses are relying on cloud-based applications. In the United Kingdom, over 80 per cent are using cloud in one way or another¹. That is significant adoption and means the concept has been well and truly accepted. What price then an old fashioned media server that doesn’t lend itself to a cloud environment? Even when you consider software-based alternatives, there are still issues associated with scalability and licensing that mean capacity and ‘just in case’ over-provisioning are issues in much the same way as they are with hardware-based media servers.

When you have a cloud-based application involving aspects of telecommunications, the only logical place to lodge the functions equivalent to those offered by a media server is in the cloud. It stands to reason. When questions are asked about scalability, the cloud is the only reasonable answer.

DSP boards are scalable at significant iterative cost. Software alternatives benefit from ever increasing processor power, and are scalable in servers and on virtual machines – provided you’ve purchased sufficient licences and can deploy/redeploy them quickly enough for purpose. In each case, however, you must make a purchase dependent on your estimation of how much (or how many licences) you will need.

With cloud, there is no such dilemma. The resources you need are available on demand, when you need them, for as long or short a time as you need them. The scalability issue simply disappears. In reality, it’s someone else’s problem. You can rely on that. It’s the beauty of cloud-based resources.

With a cloud-based approach, you needn’t worry about installing duplicated banks of media servers or redundantly paired racks of servers running pre-licensed software in a data centre. Neither do you need to concern yourself over things like brokering media resources; something the unnecessarily complicated IMS has defined along with media resource functions and media resource controllers. Those things are not needed when you’re using the cloud, because of its inherent resilience and scalability. It’s all very well being able to control upwards of 30,000 sessions at a time, but if you haven’t got the underlying media resource functions – scalable and at your fingertips – brokering is a moot point.

A cloud telephony resources platform manages its own, multiple resources and offers redundancy, resilience, and persistence across different locations, different countries and different continents. The user – enterprise or telco – does not need to concern itself with how many media sessions are needed, nor with their availability. Concerns over where to route media service requests and whether they are being handled efficiently simply do not figure. The cloud platform takes care of that.

A further benefit of cloud-based resources is they make time to market so much more of a non-issue. Instead of presenting APIs in languages such as MSML and VoiceXML, which surely no one wants to learn, cloud platforms offer RESTful APIs and APIs in popular, general purpose programming languages, such as Python and Java. Those are the languages with which today’s web developers are familiar and wish to use. When they are coding an application using APIs from several sources (a typical mashup scenario), a familiar programming language is a fundamental desire.

Traditional media servers have had their day. The days of cloud-based telephony media resources are here – today and tomorrow – and that’s the future.

And it’s good night from Beattie

A couple of months ago, I wrote this blog about the demise of the PSTN. I wrote that people have been forecasting such an event for many years now; well over a decade.

That post was prompted by lots of pertinent news activity in Europe over the last 12 months or so. The newswires reported several telecom operators, including Deutsche Telekom, announcing their intention to terminate ISDN access.

This post was prompted by BT’s announcement of a firm date for switching off its ISDN service.

The essence of what BT has made public is that it intends to migrate all of its customers on to a single IP core network, replacing all legacy networks and platforms, by 2025. By then, BT envisages all of its voice customers will be served using VoIP.

So it looks like the death knell of the legacy PSTN has been well and truly sounded, or the end of the world as we know it. I wouldn't give the seers too much credit though. They got it right, but never predicted the timeframe with any degree of accuracy.

Okay, you might argue about the death throes, given that BT has provided 10 years notice. However, in order to achieve its goal, BT will have to begin the process of migrating all of its customers off the ISDN network sooner than you might think.

Expect end-of-life notices to be issued, service by service, city by city, region by region, starting soon. Which means businesses will need to revisit their telecoms strategy sooner rather than later.

As I’m sure BT is only too aware, the options are not restricted to its IP voice offerings. There are lots of alternatives from which to choose.

The options for businesses range from a forklift upgrade, replacing legacy systems with an all-IP solution, through to the installation of gateways between legacy PBX equipment and new SIP trunking services. Of these examples, the former is strategic and the latter purely tactical.

Other strategic options include considering cloud telephony APIs, which have lately achieved a new level of credibility (see recent post). Such platforms can be used to integrate voice, readily and in a fundamental way, with many business processes and applications.

Regardless of your market sector or focus – healthcare, education, public safety, finance, government – now is very much the time to think strategically about your next generation communications.

Whatever you do, make sure it’s not too late in the day.

Cloud API platforms get seal of approval

Whatever else you might think about Cisco’s announcement¹ of its intent to acquire Tropo, one thing is clear. And it is that suddenly, real-time communications cloud APIs have been given a seal of approval.

Up to now, despite the altruistic marketing efforts of Twilio, it can be said that cloud telephony APIs have been looked upon somewhat sceptically, in some areas.

Now, with the news from Cisco, an undoubted worldwide leader in IT and networking, the technology has been fundamentally endorsed.

Credibility for cloud APIs has been achieved overnight, with Cisco’s reinforcement of the messages Aculab Cloud has been putting out there, alongside Twilio, Tropo, and others, for a few years now.

Take a moment to read through these sound bites:

• Easy-to-use APIs
• Minimal development effort
• Communications platform-as-a-service
• Next-generation communications platforms
• Embed real-time communications within applications
• Integrate voice, fax, text-to-speech, WebRTC, and SMS with business applications
• Readily create new communications services
• Generate new sources of revenue

Sound familiar?

We’ve been saying these things for some time. Now is the time to sit up and take notice.

If you’re still building enterprise and service provider solutions using hardware such as trunk cards and voice boards, think of this: the technology you’re using is a quarter of a century old.

Now is the time to look to the future. Now is the time for next-generation, real-time communications platforms, with easy-to-use APIs.

As Robert Burns once wrote, “Now's the day, an’ now's the hour.”

Cisco may be one of the biggest players, but that fixture certainly isn’t the only game in town.

If you are a software developer partner producing adjunct, third-party solutions for the likes of Avaya, Cisco, Unify, et alia, what is it that makes your product stand out?

Are you offering an independent, non-partisan alternative? Are you offering integrated, compatible solutions? Are you offering a credible, cost-effective option for those who do not want to buy from the ‘big guns’?

Do you need an independent cloud-based component – a communications platform-as-a-service – to integrate with all or any of the major vendors’ cloud collaboration platforms?

If you or your customers are looking for simpler, easier, more cost-effective ways to integrate voice, fax, text-to-speech, WebRTC, or SMS within your business applications, it’s time to take a look at Aculab Cloud.

Note 1: Source; Cisco Platform blog – http://blogs.cisco.com/news

Toll free number capability in 40 countries

Did you know that Aculab Cloud has the ability to support toll free numbers in forty countries worldwide?

That’s pretty extensive for a cloud telecom API platform, some of which only support a handful of countries. So if you have an application that would benefit your customers by having toll free inbound calling capability, and you need to roll it out across Europe, the US or Asia, then keep reading.

The inbound coverage page shows the countries we support.

In some countries we will provide just the main toll free number prefix, but in others we support multiple number prefixes. For example, in the UK we support 0800 and 0808 numbers, and for the US and Canada we support the prefixes 844, 855, 866, 877 and 888.

For a toll free number there is a setup and monthly rental fee (although in many countries the setup fee is zero), and then a per minute charge for incoming calls applies to the number. When setting up the number in your account, you have the choice whether to accept incoming calls from landlines, from mobiles or from payphones. The rates to accept calls from these three number types can vary significantly, with the cost to accept calls from payphones being the highest. If you are looking to keep your incoming toll free call charges down, then simply un-ticking the payphones option when setting up the number will mean you get charged a lower rate for calls to your toll free number.

If you are interested in toll free number use, please contact us and we will be happy to discuss the details with you.

It’s comms, Jim, but not as we know it

People have been forecasting the demise of the PSTN for many years now; well over a decade.

Of course, the trouble most product managers have in making such predictions is inaccuracy. It’s almost ten years since shipments of IP lines overtook TDM lines and it’s over five years since any equipment manufacturer (what we used to call TEMs) spent any development dollars at all on TDM-based development. And still what we like to call the legacy network persists.

Maybe now, however, we’re closer than ever before to the end of ISDN.

I say that, because there has been a lot of pertinent news activity in Europe over the last 12 months or so. The newswires have reported several telecom operators announcing their intention to terminate ISDN access, in favour of its replacement with SIP trunking.

In Germany, for example, Deutsche Telekom appears to have made public a strategic program (Telekom Deutschland 2018 – TD18) to switch off all its ISDN connections in 2018. The telco intends to replace them with universal IP connections. Swisscom may be likely to follow suit.

If such a strategy becomes widespread, many businesses will be under pressure to future-proof their telecoms installations. And that pressure will come from what is really a very short timeframe.

If you think 2018 is far in the future, think again – it’s only 22 months until we celebrate the festivities heralding that New Year.

In plain language, all manner of businesses and enterprises and organisations will have to do some serious thinking over the next few months about their strategic plans for communications.

The options for businesses range from a ‘fork lift’ upgrade, replacing their legacy system with an all-IP solution and a direct connection to SIP trunking, through to the installation of protocol converters or gateways between their existing PBX equipment and the new SIP trunk offerings from telcos and service providers.

The former is deterministically strategic, whilst the latter options are more short term and tactical. However, in that latter case, if your connection to the PSTN is SS7-based, gateways are probably still a medium term solution and, therefore, a reasonable investment.

Regardless of your market sector – healthcare, education, public safety, contact centre, vertical market private enterprise – now is very much the time to think strategically about your next generation communications.

If you are say a vendor or service provider, you may want to talk about IP-based telephony resources for your solutions. There are many hardware, software and cloud-based options to discuss. For those considering gateways, several options are available.

Whatever you do, act now, before it’s too late.

Contact centre technologies – issue twelve

Hello, from Aculab call central.

In this post, the twelfth as a total, I’ll look at another aspect of contact centre technologies. You’re welcome to post any questions in the comments section below.

In the most recent posts, which you can view here and here, I looked at two areas in which the benefits of using call progress analysis (CPA) in conjunction with diallers are often judged. This post changes the emphasis to look at another function of telephony resources; the enabling technology you use in your contact centre solution.

Standards compliance

Anyone looking to develop a business application to serve the contact centre sector will be aware of the need to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and the associated Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) standards.

As many credit card transactions are conducted via telephone, whether through the legacy PSTN or over a next generation, IP-based network, the processing, storage and transmission of payment cardholder data naturally occurs during telecommunications. The way you handle that data will have a bearing on how compliant you are.

Essential resources

An essential technology for developers of contact centre applications, in terms of handling sensitive cardholder data, is the suite of telephony resources you get from a vendor such as Aculab. Those software resources (firmware and algorithms) are packaged for various purposes. One purpose to which they can be applied is to help you to meet the requirement to ensure that PINs are neither stored nor accessible by an agent during and after the authorisation process.

Call recording

As conversations between calling (or called, in the case of an outbound dialler application) customers and call centre agents are often recorded, it is imperative that PINs are not retained in the stored, recorded file. The dual-tone, multi-frequency (DTMF) digital signature that represents a customer’s PIN is present in the audio voice signal and must be eliminated from (or suppressed in) the recording.

Integrated technology

In a telecommunications environment, which means any call centre, the answer is to implement DTMF elimination, otherwise known as DTMF clamping, in your solution. That can be achieved by integrating telephony resources software, typically by means of the vendor’s API. The result will be a seamless, built-in system option that can be readily activated by the end user organisation. If you’d rather shy away from such activity, the alternative is to employ an intermediary device, such as a gateway, as part of your solution.

The end of the series

That’s all for now in this scintillating sequence of posts, but be sure to look out for the follow-on series; coming soon. Be sure to post your questions and queries in the meantime. Auf Wiedersehen!

Contact centre technologies – issue eleven

Hello, from Aculab call central.

In this post, an eleventh even, I’ll look again at the benefits of diallers. You’re welcome to post any questions in the comments section below.

In the last post, which you can view here, I looked at how the benefits of diallers and customer interaction solutions are viewed in relation to lost agent time. This post continues that theme by taking a look at the second of two areas in which the benefits of using call progress analysis (CPA) in conjunction with diallers are often judged. That is connection accuracy.

Wait time

As you read in the last post, the real culprit in terms of lost agent time is wait time. That isn’t time spent waiting for post-connect detection of an answering machine, which must be less than two seconds to comply with regulations, but is insignificant in terms of a time cost. It is waiting time between wrap-up and the next live connect, which is the concern of a dialler system, rather than an aspect of CPA.

CPA accuracy

With the accuracy of detecting human speech versus answering machines varying widely, call centre software developers need to be careful about their selection of CPA technology. There is a view that 80-85 percent represents the industry average for accurate determination between machines and the human voice. Some vendors would have you believe that the number of falsely detected voice connects would cost ’000s of dollars in lost agent time per year (see the previous post for more on that aspect).

What they are trying to say is that, 15-20 percent of the time, CPA software can be hoodwinked into determining that a call is answered by a human, when in fact it was answered by a machine i.e., the machine’s rendition of speech is so ‘human like’ it’s going to fool the detector.

In truth, the state of the art in CPA software means that if a call is answered by a machine with a typical greeting along the lines of, “Hello, this is Mr. Smith. I am sorry I am unable to take your call right now, etc.” the detection rate will be at or near 100 percent.

The important issues

In reality, the important error rate in CPA technology typically comes from falsely detecting an answering machine or voicemail greeting on calls that are really answered by a human. That is exactly the reverse of the commonly promulgated line and is why ‘false positives’ are an important metric (see an earlier post for more on that).

False negatives (it’s a machine, but CPA decided it was a human) aren’t really an issue (as indicated in the previous post), but false positives have a twofold negative affect. Yes, productivity can be impacted, but the loss of a sales opportunity through failure to connect with the called party can impact a collection agency’s bottom line far more than the short time needed for the agent to wrap up a call in the converse scenario ever could. Secondly, for the individual on the receiving end of an abandoned call, it can be a major cause of inconvenience or anxiety. That latter is a key issue and why abandoned call rates, as a percentage of live calls, are subject to regulatory limits.

The perverse view is that regardless of false positives resulting in dropping calls that should’ve been connected, the dialler will automatically continue to dial and connect further calls. If there’s no waiting time, agents are productive and, if it is a person on the line, there’s a revenue generation or collection opportunity.

Make the right choice

The ultimate advice is to choose your CPA provider well. If you do: i) your agents become more productive; ii) agents speak to humans more often than not, consequently, they get more revenue opportunities; and iii) you maintain or enhance customer satisfaction, because you avoid false positives and abandoned calls. That’s got to be good for business.

Check back next week for another thrilling instalment in this sequence of posts. Arrivaderci!

Contact centre technologies – issue ten

Hello, from Aculab call central.

In this post, the tenth of tonnes, I’ll look at how the benefits of diallers and customer interaction solutions are viewed. You’re welcome to post any questions in the comments section below.

In the last post, which you can view here, I looked at some of the benefits of using diallers, in general. This time, I’ll take a look at the first of two areas in which the benefits of using call progress analysis (CPA) in conjunction with diallers are often judged.

Comparisons

Judgements are made by comparisons involving: i) lost agent time; and ii) connection accuracy. Those judgements are often presented by some of the more prominent vendors of contact centre solutions as a kind of gospel – almost a sacred text.

Comparisons invariably focus on post-connect CPA, however, it should never be overlooked that pre-connect signalling detection is equally, if not more, invaluable for a dialler system. Good pre-connect CPA is vital for fast and accurate decisions to continue with a call attempt.

The widely promulgated theory of lost time assumes, for the sake of its argument (which is designed to prove that diallers are essential), that all calls are connected and agents have the task of determining who or what is on the line. It also assumes that the handling time for an agent to wrap up a falsely connected (i.e., it’s a machine on the line) call is 30 seconds.

That being the case (so the theory goes), multiply the 30 seconds by a large number of machine answered calls per day (choose your own number; it’s as much as 60 percent of all calls), multiply the result by 261 agent days per year, multiply that by ’0 dollars per hour and you end up with a ballpark number in the ‘00s of ‘000s, which sum is then presented as the huge cost (saveable if you use a dialler to screen calls) of handling unproductive calls.

But…

Unfortunately, the theory is flawed as it focuses on the polar opposite of what really matters, never mind that it can’t possibly take 30 seconds to wrap up a call answered by a machine.

You don’t use a dialler to save wrap-up time on falsely connected calls. You use a dialler to: i) avoid wasting valuable agent time dialling numbers; and ii) reduce wait times between calls. Waiting time is that between wrap-up and the next live connect, which incidentally, is the concern of a dialler system and not an aspect of CPA.

Agents can only take a call when they’re free. When not free, they’re as productive as can be. In reality, the number of calls made is not a constant; it’s neither static nor linear, but related to the number of available agents. As an agent becomes free or additional agents log on, the dialling rate goes up. The beauty of diallers is that they adjust the dialling rate to be able to connect a call immediately an agent is available.

Focus

Furthermore, it’s surely better to focus on productivity gains than cost reduction. I suggest an increase in the collections or revenue per agent figure would be a far more sensible metric on which to concentrate.

Perhaps the purveyors of perceived wisdom are not as wise as they’d like you to think.

Stop by again next week for another instalment in this useful sequence of posts. Ciao!

Contact centre technologies – issue nine

Hello, from Aculab call central.

In this post, the ninth of not a few, I’ll take a more general look at diallers and their uses. You’re welcome to post any questions in the comments section below.

Recap

In the last post, I summarised how several important factors that impact on the effectiveness and success of outbound dialling campaigns fit together in a coherent model. Those factors are: i) tones detection accuracy; ii) live speaker detection accuracy; and iii) call connection time. This time, I’ll take a look at the use of diallers in general.

One way or the other

Notwithstanding the variety of pacing algorithms for predictive diallers, the key question is not so much “How many calls do I have to make to get a live connect?” as it is one of when to dial in order to be able to present a new connect to an agent as soon as they s[he] is free.

If you are choosing a dialler, this sequence of blog posts may help you to compile and present some searching questions to the vendors on your short list.

If you are developing your own dialler, the information in this sequence of posts may help you to choose the right technology partner.

Dialler benefits

No customer relationship strategy or collections agency would be effective without the ability to proactively contact customers, prospects or debtors. For outbound applications, speed and accuracy in detecting network tones and identifying a live speaker are important, both for sound, competitive business reasons and in order to comply with strict regulations.

Increasing the amount of time agents can spend talking to live contacts (reducing wait time) and meeting the target for abandoned calls set by the user are the common goals.

Other strategies

Inserting intermediate steps, such as contact verification, can be beneficial to the contact centre. The idea is to enhance the effectiveness of the application by only providing verified, ‘right-party’ contacts to an agent or account representative.

That can be achieved by using interactive voice response (IVR) and speech technologies – text-to-speech (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR). Telephony resources on voice boards or via host media processing gives you access to such features and functionalities.

When a system is connected to a real person, an IVR uses a combination of pre-recorded messages and TTS to announce the contact's name and ask for the account holder. That activity is used as a means of verifying that the correct person is on the call.

Apart from credit/debit card activation, emergency broadcasts, and medical and other appointment reminders, using ‘outbound IVR’ or interactive voice messaging (IVM) can also be used to cost-effectively get answers to non-revenue generating questions, or to set up payment arrangements with some account holders. Isn’t technology wonderful?

And there’s more – don’t miss it

Check back next week for another instalment in this sequence of posts. Bye for now!

Contact centre technologies – issue eight

Hello, from Aculab call central.

In this post, the eighth of even more, I’ll summarise some of what I’ve covered in recent posts. You’re welcome to post any questions in the comments section below.

In recent posts, I took a look at three important factors, which impact on the effectiveness or success of outbound dialling campaigns. Those factors are: i) tones detection accuracy; ii) live speaker detection accuracy; and iii) call connection time.

Here is a summary of how that all fits together.

Summary stages

Call progress analysis (CPA) capabilities, including live speaker detection (LSD), are readily available with voice boards or host media processing software to developers of call centre solutions.

Those capabilities are deployed in a four-stage sequence during a dialler managed outbound campaign:

Stage 2 – Telephony resources with pre-connect call progress algorithms detect and report network tones to the dialler application, which makes decisions based on the information presented.

Stage 3 – Following an off-hook condition, post-connect call progress algorithms are used to indicate to the dialler whether the call was answered by a live speaker or a machine.

Stage 4 – Throughout stages one to four, the dialler’s high-level contact centre software application manages the call and ultimately connects the called party to an agent, within the regulation timeout.

Key considerations

For contact centre software vendors, the key considerations to weigh up when selecting telephony media processing resources to perform pre- and post-connect CPA are: excellent ‘out of the box’ accuracy; and the ability to configure or fine tune various parameters associated with tone frequencies, noise levels and time periods.

Additionally, with call connection time and abandoned calls being key measures, it is important that a fast and accurate result can be presented to the call centre application.

Choose wisely and be compliant.

Next post coming soon – don’t miss it

Check back next week for more, when I’ll be looking into some more issues of interest. Ciao!

Contact centre technologies – Issue seven

Hello, from Aculab call central.

In this post, the seventh of some more, I’ll continue delving into the scourge of abandoned calls in more detail, looking at reasons for call abandonment. You’re welcome to post any questions in the comments section below.

In the previous post, I took a look at the second of three important factors, which impact on the effectiveness or success of outbound dialling campaigns. Those factors are: i) accuracy in detecting tones; ii) live speaker detection accuracy; and iii) call connection time.

In this post, I’ll look at the third and final factor and why it’s important.

Time critical

The overall time taken to place a call and connect it to an agent is critical. The time between the phone going ‘off-hook’ or someone saying “Hello?” and a connection being made to an agent is a critical metric. That’s because a lengthy delay, with silence on the line, will determine whether or not the called party hangs up the phone.

So for diallers, there is a critical balance to be achieved between the use of call progress analysis (CPA) software and the value or benefit to be gained from its use.

Three factors

Without CPA, the dialler is faced with connecting every call that is answered, regardless of by whom or what. With CPA, if the dialler application takes too long to connect the call to an agent, there is a high risk of call abandonment.

A third complicating factor is the dialler itself. As diallers are designed to drive calls for maximum agent utilisation, call presentation can sometimes get ahead of agent availability. So the balance must be three-way. That’s almost an oxymoron.

Anathema

The anathema for any self-respecting outbound contact centre is to have customers hanging up, because of what they perceive as silent calls. That’s when they ‘hear’ the infamous ‘dead air’ i.e., there’s no-one on the line. Customers don’t often tolerate that kind of nuisance.

Whether the customer hangs up or the dialler fails to make a timely connection, the call is classed as abandoned, which is never good. Too much of that and the contact centre operator may face stiff penalties for non-compliance to strict regulations.

Rules

The United States’ Federal Trade Commission’s Telemarketing Sales Rule states that an outbound call is abandoned if a person answers it and the telemarketer fails to connect to an agent within two seconds of the person’s completed greeting. It’s the same in most countries.

Tighter rules

In the United Kingdom, the rule is tighter. The Persistent Misuse Statement enforced by Ofcom, demands that, in the event of an abandoned or silent call, a recorded information message, containing at least stipulated information, is played no later than two seconds after the phone has been picked up. This applies to any call answered before an agent is available, so in that case, the connection timer starts as soon as the phone goes off-hook.

Get it right

The best defence against regulatory violations and fines is an effective compliance plan. Most good dialler systems include tools that help the contact centre maintain campaign compliance. Don’t forget to check back next week for more, when I’ll provide a summary of what’s been covered so far.  Ciao!