The video gently nudges the issue about how callers are at the mercy of rigid and badly designed voice apps.

Sadly, in real life there are lots of badly designed voice apps where caller are faced with no choice but to use the apps no matter what.

My personal experience with a few commercial apps is that I felt I was trapped in the voice system trying to do things the system’s way. All of us know that a bad voice app could be detrimental to caller adoption, potentially affecting customer loyalty.

I am not going to dwell on VUI best practices. A lot has been said about VUI best practices and is essential to all voice apps. But companies that spend thousands of dollars on designing cutting edge system fail to take into account customer feedback –which is the most critical part to the success of the app. Companies miss out on simple things like Wizard of Oz testing and caller surveys which help gauge caller perceptions and system adoption.

There are a few independent companies such as (www.vocalabs.com and Sterling Audits) that help you methodically audit and benchmark usability of your customer service. Those of you who want to follow the scientific benchmarking approach I would recommend following two books: Gourmet Customer Service and “How to Audit and Benchmark Your Voice Response System”.

So in closing, referring to a quote in the video, remember that if your users are complaining about your automated applications they are probably already in hell.

It happens all the time.

I call a customer service line, navigate through a series of menus, provide all the relevant information – all along a comforting voice assuring me that I will be “connected to right specialist” – and when I finally reach an agent, I have to answer the same questions all over again.

It is frustrating.

It is waste of time for everyone.

A well integrated voice system that can deliver a “well-primed” caller to the agent can shave off 2-5 minutes of precious agent talk time – thus improving agent productivity.

But the real benefit is improved caller satisfaction and reduced aggravation as a result of not having to repeat the same answers to a live agent.

Organizations strike a balance between agent staffing levels and customer satisfaction by rolling out rich, data-aware voice applications to pre-screen and prepare the calls that are then delivered to agents.

However, the infrastructure complexities and costs involved in implementing such utopian ideas can alienate most organizations.

Come to think of it, in today’s world of instant messaging, on demand audio/video downloads, ubiquitous wireless hotspots, why do we still have antiquated telephone systems that can’t transfer phone data to an agent’s desktop?

That’s all there is to it.  Really!

So where does the data get lost? The underlying problem lies with the fact that we can’t attach data to a telephone call itself.  It has to be sent via a separate network (usually IP) and the data and the call needs to be synchronized to reach the right agent at the right time.

Today, CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) solutions perform the magic of providing transport of call data to agent’s desktop.  Most CTI solutions in the market are proprietary and can get expensive if the enterprise has multiple call centers with disparate systems from multiple vendors.

This gets further complicated if the calls are outsourced to an offshore location. However, a few technologies are reducing the cost and infrastructure barriers to implement a CTI solution. These systems use clever techniques to hold the call state in the network throughout the duration of the call — irrespective of where is call is terminating (local call centers or offshore centers). This allows associated call data to be stored centrally and can be accessed from any web browser.

On top of that, this kind of network architecture requires zero infrastructure investments at premise level.Things look brighter on the horizon as well. With SIP-VoIP along with SIP call control extensions (such as ECMA TR/87) tomorrow’s telephony system will be able interoperate more easily on open standards.

Using SIP, it will be much easier to associate call information to the call which stays with the call as the call gets forwarded to various SIP endpoints. After the underlying CTI plumbing is taken care of, this kind of architecture open a door to a whole suite of cool features that can be implemented cost effectively.

Typically, if you talk to any one who has worked on CTI implementation, more likely the person will talk in terms of key-value pairs. That’s the extent of information richness of the traditional CTI applications. Some of the sophisticated CTI solutions that can be implemented are:

Call Analytics: Imagine agent getting a screen-pop with a brief snapshot of how has the caller navigated during the automated call. Agents at a glance can figure out what options the caller has chosen in the speech app, how long he has been on hold, reason for calling.

Caller Analytics: While the call analytics provides rich information about the current call, the caller information can be tied to CRM systems like salesforce.com or Oracle to figure outhow often this caller has contacted the company, reasons for calling, customer preferences, and customer life cycle stage.  Based on this information, agent can then provide personalized service to the caller.The possibilities are endless.

Once the CTI infrastructure hurdles are overcome, it takes little effort for companies to improve customer satisfaction and make sure I never have to say “But I just gave you that information!“

The customer wanted a CTI-integrated, fully-redundant hosted speech solution to automate just a part of the call flow, with the existing call flows still being serviced by the respective IVRs.

And… all of this in the TDM world!!!

The sheer complexity of the solution boggles the mind. We were discussing crisscrossing tie-lines, bridging calls back-and-forth, with CTI servers at multiple locations. It was just too complicated. Of course, we figured it out, but it’s a very complex solution.

I was fantasizing how much easier things would have been if the IT group was open to (and had justified budget for) a VoIP based solution. Nowadays, even though most IT groups have some plans to roll out VoIP based solutions, many don’t have a comprehensive plan to migrate contact center infrastructure.

An all-IP solution for contact centers comes with the promise of universal routing, pre-treatment of calls, centralized voice portals, reduced infrastructure costs. Imagine not having to deal with terminating circuits, “take back and transfer” costs and expensive CTI infrastructure.

The key thing to remember is that companies must have an enterprise-wide vision to rollout the all-IP solution. In my experience, most companies start-off with a pilot projects with specific purpose and then future projects become dependent on the choices made previously. I have seen VoIP plans getting quickly derailed due to inability of legacy hardware to be upgraded or due to interoperability of the hardware/software choices from various vendors.

To start out on the right foot, it is crucial to align with the right IP open standards at the enterprise level. This will pave the path to the future possibilities via interoperability of newer applications. SIP has been becoming a dominant standard in the VoIP market place. Its popularity can be attributed to lower complexity, higher extensibility and better scalability.

Most IT organizations start off by first converting their corporate phone systems to an IP-PBX, followed by interconnecting call centers over VoIP thus avoiding take back and transfer and toll costs. This is usually followed by upgrading contact center software.

Today IP-based contact center software can also act as an IP-PBX thus negating the need for separate solutions. Some of the latest contact center software offers “virtual” contact server features to manage multiple contact center locations and a pool of remote agents into a single global real time queue. Gone are the days when agents at one location would sit idle due to poor load balancing across centers.

To further make the VoIP value prop appealing to the SMB market, some of the carriers are now offering SIP trunking capabilities which can provide carrier based SIP call routing to other IP or PSTN locations without the on-premise gateway hardware. This can really make linking new outsourced call center facility for those peak needs much faster and more cost efficient.

On the CTI front, most companies will admit that rolling out a multi-site traditional CTI solution is hard and expensive. I think SIP is going to make a huge impact on reducing the costs and complexity of rolling out multi-site, CTI-enabled call centers. Lately, a few SIP-enabled integrated contact center products and new protocols are emerging that show the promise of multi-site, multi-vendor integration, leveling the playing field. Imagine having a hosted call routing app that can pre-treat the calls, gather basic information and route these partially automated calls to any call center, any home agent or any outsourced location over VoIP along with a screen-pop with relevant captured information. All of these without a million dollar price tag.

Now that’s a compelling value prop to migrate contact center infrastructure to all-IP platform.