WHITEPAPER. Why New Stuff Like Web Apps and WebRTC Will Change Your World!

Transcription

1 Why New Stuff Like Web Apps and WebRTC Will Change Your World!

2 The challenge is that this pace of change is increasing. A good example of this is the way that Netflix is changing the viewing behaviour of one of the worlds largest consumer markets. By Keith Ward CTO of PSS Overview Disruptive innovation changes behaviour and currently we are experiencing a tidal wave of new technologies and customer behaviour that is changing the business landscape more radically than at anytime over the last 10 years. This is because innovation is now merging into a much larger range of functionality all delivered to the same device at the same time. As each innovation extends the functionality of all of the other innovations, there is a funnel effect creating disruptive change. Keith Ward is the Chief Technology Officer for PSS Help, Inc. In this wide-ranging interview with Ken Carson Senior Technology Consultant for the Edenfield Group, Keith looks at the technology at the heart of this change in customer interaction and talks about its impact. He also discussed the structural and organizational business changes that enterprises will need to adopt in order to respond effectively to this perfect storm of consumer driven changes. What do you think are the major changes occurring within the call center industry that are driven by consumer technologies? I think that this is one of the biggest concerns that many operational directors face. Knowing which innovations are important and which ones to focus on keeps many of my customers awake at night. However let me try and explain my view. About 7 years ago, the iphone and the idea of applications running on a mobile device was in its infancy. Many companies were still struggling with providing good web self-service applications. This was driven by the massive uptake of web-based communications that started in the late nineties. It s also true that the transition from desktop to laptop to mobile was a much longer period of time. Today we are seeing the arrival of millions of applications driving self-service on mobile devices today. From a business perspective, mobile literally came out of nowhere and that incredible pace of technological change, not surprisingly caught many organizations off guard. In the US 30% of all prime time viewing is actual people using the Netflix platform and this has happened in less than 2 years. Other innovations like using your mobile to replace your debit or credit card may become commonplace in similar timeframes. Today most consumers want to interact with an enterprise based on what is most convenient for them, and customer power is increasing all the time. It s also true that the definition of convenience can change during the course of a customer s day depending on whether they are at their laptop, driving in their car or sitting at their kitchen table. Consumers take up new innovations more quickly than the technology they replace. As an example, the adoption of Netflix has been significantly faster and more widespread than the arrival of cable/satellite TV services. Ultimately consumers are being driven by ease and convenience. That doesn t necessarily mean talking to person. The consumer may find it more convenient use an application or chat to a person. The key issue is that any customers want to use the most appropriate channel and at any time and it is their definition of appropriate that counts. This is the key difference. 5 years ago it was the organization that decided what appropriate meant. How will enterprises respond to these new technologies from a business perspective? Each customer relationship with each organization is unique. However customers are becoming less tolerant of organizations who operate in silos treating customer service, sales and marketing as different relationships. The challenge for organizations is how to move from these traditional silos to a single customer experience. This is not just about culture but also technology. From the organizations point of view the customer relationship is driven by a set of business rules. Today these rules tend to reside in different systems and are written in different languages depending on which silo is involved. Let me give you an example. In the sales system there are prospects and customers but in customer 1

3 service there are open and closed cases. As a CTO I feel confident that will see these barriers starting to disappear over the next couple of years, driven by the technology advances people are adopting today. For many of my customers who have understood the benefits of reduced costs and increased customer values, this I a major priority. As both a customer and the technologist I find this exciting. More and more I am being asked how to build a single customer experience from all of these disparate systems. However being pragmatic I recognise that many organizations have not yet started that journey. They remain focused on producing minor improvements to the way they ve done business since the dawn of the Internet age. My worry is that this approach will leave them floundering in this rapidly changing world. Ultimately organizations need a single rules engine and a single CRM to support the explosion of new channels while still supporting our old friends the call center, the website and of course IVR. Much of the work that we do for customers focused on these challenges is around the interfaces between systems. This is why we have developed the tool kits and interfaces like our WebRTC. They are designed to provide the glue that turn siloed experiences into more valuable long-term relationships quickly and cheaply. Is this the only challenge? I wish it was! But in some ways the technology piece is the easiest part. Organizational structures and operating models are not aligned to take advantage of what the technology is now capable of. Business practices that have been enshrined in boardrooms for decades have to be re examined. In light of the significant degree of organizational changes you suggest, how will they come about? Those changes will have to originate in the C-suite. Leaders will have to get their organisations to embrace these new customer technologies and they will have built the correct organizational structure then the rest of the organization has a path to achieve that goal. That requires an enterprise to move away from a silo-type of organization and drive the organization to a more fluid organizational structure. There will continue to be technology surprises like Twitter. That is a perfect example because it went from thousands to millions to hundreds of millions of users in virtually no time. Due to the rapid growth of the medium and the way customers could interact and influence, many organizations were caught by surprise and made mistakes in how they tried to interact with consumers in the channel early on. History will undoubtedly repeat itself with new, very fast moving technologies. In fairness, there is not a large organization in the world than can react to, learn and understand the engagement model of any technology that emerges within a timeframe of less than a year or even just a few months. The next new technology that emerges and provides consumers with a high degree of convenience and empowerment will be adopted far faster than Twitter. Twitter s growth will seem glacial in comparison. Enterprises will need to create an eco-system of fluidity, of core capabilities, core knowledge and all of the IP that makes up an organization. In essence, create a collective and apply that collective, apply the business rules to next big thing that comes along. Put in simple terms they will start to act like consumers. Customer Power (which is the term for the self organising behaviour of consumers into groups) is enabled by this explosion of innovation. Embracing that kind of culture is counter-intuitive. Companies that take this approach will be able to react and engage much faster than those that operate in silos. With a multi-tiered organizational structure, the next new technology can simply attach to the edge of the enterprise. Now an organization can apply all of the rules, the thinking, the knowledge and understanding that was built for social media, the web and all of the customer interfaces / touch-points that came prior. If an enterprise remains in a purely reactive mode, then the next new technology requires yet another silo engagement model as well as all the time to learn the technology, understand the rules of engagement, build a set of rules for it, learn how to be part of it and then have the legal group review and approve everything. Conversely, if legal had been part of the group building and defining the core business rules in a tiered structure, they could feel comfortable knowing the same rules would apply to any new technology. Is there a new technology right now that could dramatically change the way consumers interact with companies and also evolve almost overnight? We are in the grip of a wave of disruptive innovation. Recently we sponsored a piece of research that suggests that the pace and nature of innovation is increasing and will continue to do so. So the real question has to be is there an innovation that impacts the use of other innovations to create a new disruption. 2

4 WebRTC (Real Time Communications) is a technology that is emerging faster than anyone could have predicted. Highly innovative applications are starting to be built and they will have profound implications for the contact center industry. It is an extremely empowering technology that is being built into mobile apps, web apps, browsers and essentially any device that can connect to the web. Simply put, WebRTC allows an omni-channel portal to be opened from point A to point B. Once the connection has been established, virtually anything can pass between those two points; video, data, voice, applications and almost anything else one can imagine. It s a transformative technology that offers consumers the two key elements that drive extremely rapid adoption: empowerment and convenience. As more and more innovations all connect together the sum of what they can do is out pacing the individual innovations. However, WebRTC is just a piece of the bigger influx occurring right now, which is the emergence of web apps. Today, you can run almost any application through a browser. In the past, if you wanted a spreadsheet, you bought one and installed it. The concept of downloading and installing an application is going away and this is true today for the desktop and increasingly true for mobile devices. If a consumer wants to interact with their bank today, they still have to go to an app store and download that bank s mobile app. With a web app, the consumer is not constrained by the functional limitations of the mobile app. An HTML5- based browser allows the consumer to access virtually any banking information they want through the bank s web app. More significantly, with WebRTC built in to that browser the web app allows the bank to see exactly where the consumer is in the app. Click-to-call can bring up a video chat and the bank representative can see exactly what the consumer is looking at and respond appropriately. The entire interaction will be initiated and driven by the consumer. As this change occurs, smart phones will become a lot smarter and mobile app stores are likely to disappear because consumers will find web apps more convenient and more empowering. The functionality of downloadable apps will progress more slowly than those of web apps. Because of this organizations that are currently investing in downloadable apps are starting to develop transportable code which future proofs their investment. This is an example of how powerful the forces of innovation are at the moment. Downloading an app from an app store is a relatively new practice that smart phone owners now do as standard behaviour. We have only been doing it (on mass) for a few years. WebRTC may see the end of that behaviour within a relatively few years. People will be talking about how Back in the day they actually downloaded separate apps and young people may stare in disbelief. It will seem as alien to them as writing a letter. The challenge for organizations is not just to keep track of these innovations but also to understand their impact. How is PSS helping customers prepare for these extraordinarily rapid transitions? Firstly we have a commitment to our program of thought leadership, which is focused on understanding the impact of innovation on both organizations and their customers. Our latest piece of thought leadership is called Bigger Than The Inter.net which contains both a movie version and access to exercises that help organizations better understand managing innovation. Firstly we have a commitment to our program of thought leadership, which is focused on understanding the impact of innovation on both organizations and their customers. When PSS are building applications and capabilities for our enterprise customers we are proactively planning for the integration of new technologies. Put simply building future proofing into system design is now a standard practice within our organization although we do speak to many people who are struggling to create the same approach. Another key element of strategy that we are helping customers to execute is what we call Sorting out the plumbing. This means ensuring that existing systems are fit to support new channels as they arise. Looking at the proliferation of new channels this is becoming increasingly important. As one customer recently put it to me if we don t fix the plumbing then our mobile strategy will cost us significantly more to execute. Once again I know that this is almost counter intuitive. The idea that proper support of legacy systems some of which are 20 years old is a vital part of delivering innovation may seem incongruous, however our experience has shown that sorting out the plumbing or more to the point not sorting out the plumbing limits what you can do in your social media and mobile strategies. The ideas around the business rules that we discussed earlier have been driven by white boarding sessions that we ve done with our largest customers. We advise them to create a capability and technology to be able to deliver the next big thing that comes along. We re trying to assist enterprises prepare for the next channel without knowing exactly what the next channel is. 3

5 We also help leadership teams of large enterprises by staffing, managing, maintaining and even enhancing existing call center and IT infrastructure through a service we call business as usual. We keep the dayto-day lights on of their existing infrastructure and provide leadership teams within the enterprise with the time to work with our senior consultants on strategic technology planning and organizational issues. We help empower them to think about new technologies and new strategies while we manage day-to-day operations. We create the space for senior teams to focus on change and innovation, which are rapidly becoming the weapons of differentiation in tough conditions. We also help organizations to understand the impacts on individuals, departments, organizations and markets of changing customer behaviour and technology. There is an old Chinese curse May you live in interesting times and we do. As a technologist an innovator it is the equivalent of living in the candy shop but for most organizations it s more like living in a hurricane. My job is to help organizations to understand the conditions and to prepare and deliver on strategies that help protect themselves from that wind. About Keith Ward As CTO of PSS help, Keith regularly consults with hundreds of large enterprise and Telco companies on their call center needs, next generation IVR, speech solutions and the web services infrastructures that will drive new customer and self-service applications. He is a highly respected commentator on social media and its deployment within the contact center. He has been involved in many projects that helped shape the industry, including the text-based precursor to the World Wide Web and a ground-breaking speech IVR deployment at Charles Schwab. About PSS Help PSS Help is an independent Specialist Systems Integrator and IVR Solution Provider that helps improve customer interactions. 24 hours a day 7 days a week all over the world from the US & Europe to Asia & Australia millions of customers and hundreds of companies use platforms designed and managed by PSS Help. We do everything from delivering their complete customer interactions and experiences to support individual website & contact center platforms and applications. PSS provides competencies around Genesys, Aspect, Nortel, Avaya, Cisco and other major contact center technologies. From legacy support, through transition of existing architecture to innovation with the design and deployment of new solutions. To understand more about how PSS can help your business please contact us at: US: UK: info@psshelp.com W: Keep in touch with PSS Help 4