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Did more video and speaking than writing in August, so this is a short digest. Just two public writeups to share, so hopefully you can read ‘em both if you haven’t already!
MWC Shanghai - Three Key Perspectives, RCR Wireless, Aug. 1
North Carolina Electric Cooperatives Conference - Quick Take and Pix, my blog, Aug. 15
Back in June, I was part of a media contingent for Mobile World Congress Shanghai, and since then, I’ve written and spoken about it in a few places, with more to come. This is the latest follow-on from that trip - a video interview with me during the event, by Nicolas Charbonnier. He’s a well-known video blogger - and posts prolifically about tech, especially endpoints, on the ARMdevices.net website.
Nicolas just published the interview yesterday, and if you want my in-the-moment take on MWC and the 5G space, you can view it via his blog post here, or directly on his YouTube channel. The blog post has a rambling preamble about the interview, and if it sounds like it was generated by AI, you’d be correct - and is cited as such. It’s a bit overdone and isn’t my doing, and yeah, is a pretty good example for why some folks push back on the likes of ChatGPT (that’s a whole other discussion). I’d rather you just watch the interview, and if you do, would love to hear your thoughts!
Had my first trip to Asia recently, and I was part of a media delegation from the West to attend MWC Shanghai (and pretty sure I was the only attendee from Canada or the US). The delegation was sponsored by Huawei, so we also had some tours of their various campuses, all of which was very impressive.
Time was limited at the conference itself, and the stars have finally lined up to share a quick take here. MWC ran during late June, but with limited access to Internet platforms - not to mention the 12 hour time difference - I didn’t do any real-time posting while there. I have a few articles in the works about my trip - and tons more pictures - but for now, I’m going to share some of my photos and high-level takeaways.
I don’t think a lot of Westerners were at MWC Shanghai, as many of the sessions were in Chinese, but audio translating devices were available to follow along in English. Couldn’t get the full gist of what was being said, but the overall themes were clear. 5G is definitely happening, and looks to be at a much faster pace in Asia.
Many of the talks were about industrial and IoT applications, and the benefits are easy to see. From what I can tell, though, these innovations are happening mainly in Asia - and a bit in the Middle East. As such, I took this a preview of things to come in the West, so there’s a lot to pay attention to here.
Was great to see so many use-case driven examples - mining, exploration, energy, manufacturing, agriculture, logistics to name a few - these vendors and carriers are not just throwing things against the wall to see what sticks. Much of what I saw was B2B, but there were a few B2C citings, so the 5G story here isn’t really about getting consumers to post more videos on social media.
I’ll explore some of those use cases in upcoming posts, and for now, will leave you with some photos for a flavor of being there. Disclaimer - speaker attributions may not be 100% accurate. Wasn’t easy to track all the details while there, and corrections are welcome.
Below - weather was very hot and humid, so much more comfortable once inside. Not quite the crowds for a Beatles concert, but it kinda looked that way with the early morning rush to get in. Third photo - one of many reminders why it’s different in China. Checkpoints everywhere - this one segregates attendees from mainland China and everywhere else.
Everyone and everything is on mobile here, but had limited access to my go-to apps/platforms. Eventually, I got on WeChat - it’s great - but not til after MWC. All those folks with sign cards - I guess they’re guides to get people around - 5 exhibit halls, so it’s a lot of ground to cover. Last shot - the palace guards keeping watch over the food - soooo cute!
From the show floor - pavilions for Huawei and China Unicom. Middle - one of many demos from Huawei - Naked 3D. Very cool - one of the few consumer-type offerings there - the baseball seems to be jumping off the screen, coming right at you - 3D effect without the glasses - really need to see it.
Many recurring themes across the talks I saw, but reinforces how far along these companies and carriers are with 5G. Sabrina Meng from Huawei, Xu Ziyang from ZTE, Jemin Chung from KT.
Dingjin Liu from SINOPEC (great review of using 5G for exploration), Henry Ge from GTVerse (using 5G to bridge the worlds of gaming, live sports and AR/VR - very cool), Chaobin Yang from Huawei.
Still catching up from being offline last week, and here’s another ICYMI shout-out.
I recently did a white paper for Enreach about the growing role of mobility for collaboration, and soon after its release, Doug Green interviewed me about it for his widely-followed Telecom Reseller podcast. We get along quite well, and if this topic is of interest, I think you’ll enjoy our conversation. I sure did!
I’ve got another white paper update to share - this one was done for Enreach, a leading EU mobility and platform provider.
Mobility has long been a challenge in the collaboration space, but more importantly, Enreach feels what’s really needed is an integrated approach to manage all forms of enterprise communications. That’s their strong suit, and my white paper examines the trends that drive the need for this approach. Mobility is a big part of the story, but it’s not the whole story.
The white paper was published yesterday, and I hope you give it a read. Here’s the press release they issued with the backstory, along with a link to download the paper. Would love to hear your thoughts, and am sure Enreach will too!
Trust the Future - that’s Mavenir’s current tag line, and I really like it. This isn’t just any future they’re talking about - it’s mainly about 5G, but also Open RAN. 5G has yet to live up to the hype, especially in North America, but both carriers and wireless vendors seem all-in, including Mavenir.
While most see the future of wireless networks being 5G, Open RAN is an open question. Mavenir looks to be out in front with cloud-native Open RAN, and while the rationale is clear to them - and now to me - their competitors seem to like things the way they are, and mobile operators don’t seem ready for it - yet. Mavenir believes it’s just a matter of time, and if they’re right, they could own this space.
The mobile infrastructure space isn’t a core focus for me, but it’s adjacent to a lot of what I follow, and when thinking of VoIP, and possibly UCaaS and CCaaS, I’ve seen this movie before. Mavenir is a pretty healthy company, and a bit of an anomaly compared to the giants who dominate this market - namely Ericsson and Nokia.
This actually puts them in a great position to push the envelope and be disruptive, and that’s exactly the persona they’re projecting. Sure rings familiar to me, at least with the early days of VoIP, when the first wave of startups brought disruption, and posed a real threat to a well-entrenched status quo - that for the most part have come around to VoIP.
Given Mavenir’s global customer base, they have found plenty of mobile operators willing to adopt more open, more flexible and less costly infrastructure. Without naming names, they have 19 Open RAN deployments across 17 countries, and 4 trials going with Tier 1 carriers, one of which gave a full presentation as to what they’re doing with Open RAN.
Carriers have taken on a lot of debt to finance their 5G buildouts, and to counter that, they need innovation and new services to monetize these networks. Mavenir isn’t in the business of building applications, but with Open RAN - along with the rest of their extensive wireless network portfolio - they provide carriers with a nextgen platform to support programmability so they can develop their own apps instead of relying on third parties.
Just as important, BSS is another key piece of their cloud-based portfolio, as legacy BSS cannot really support these new services, and without a proper billing platform, carriers won’t be able to monetize these new 5G networks. Speaking of 5G, Mavenir did a great job outlining all kinds of use cases, and they have a pretty good handle on what carriers are missing to be successful with 5G.
I tend to view things through the lens of communications and collaboration technologies, and there wasn’t much talk about UCaaS or CCaaS. Instead, the use cases were framed around Industry 4.0 and Enterprise 2.0. These terms may sound generic, but Mavenir provided pretty good use cases and monetization scenarios for each. I’d need a separate post to illustrate all this, but in short, these use cases are in line with my Future of Work research, and I think they’re on the right track here, for sure.
That’s my high-level take for now, and to close out, here are some of my photos.
CEO/Pres. Pardeep Kohli, EVP Stefan Canteralli, Q&A session
Test equipment, anechoic chamber (very cool), OpenBeam radio demo
Event was held at the HALL Arts Hotel, in the center of Dallas’s arts district - my kinda place - high end for sure, but very artsy vibe, and after the sessions - when in Texas, you gotta look the part (hat tip, Carlos Aragon, no pun intended!)…
Got one more stop on my run of travel to industry events - to Dallas, for Mavenir’s analyst event. Since early October, pretty much every week up til now, I’ve been going somewhere to one, sometimes two events. Every one has been worthwhile, so while it feels like a grind, that’s how the business goes, and if anything, I’m well-informed about the state of things in my world.
While Mavenir isn’t core to my everyday coverage, their focus is very relevant in terms of how wireless connectivity is becoming a factor for enterprises, and how it creates new opportunities for carriers to offer cloud services like UCaaS and CCaaS. This is the reason why Ericsson bought Vonage, and Mavenir has already been on this path for a while, so I’m keen to get the updates, and will share what I can while there.
I’ve been busy on many fronts for months now, doing all kinds of project work for clients. Many of my short-form writing pieces are shared here and elsewhere on a steady basis. I also do long-form thought leadership, such as white papers and e-books, and these projects take much longer, so you don’t hear about them as often.
A couple of these projects have recently finished up, so it’s time to share them as well. This post is about two writeups I just finished for Cisco for a new offering that got a lot of attention at Enterprise Connect. Both are about Webex Go - their new mobile complement to Webex for UCaaS - one is a white paper and one is an e-book. The white paper isn’t out yet, and its distribution will be more limited, but the e-book is out now, and is publicly available.
The e-book can be found on their new Webex Go website - here. In the upper right of the page there’s a big green square showing the e-book title and a “Read Now” prompt - just click there, and the e-book will be accessible - no download required. Cisco has the right idea with Webex Go, and if you give it a read, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Long-time followers of mine know that every so often I’ll write about topics outside my everyday focus on collaboration, contact center and future of work, and this is one of those times. Given how the semiconductor shortage impacts just about everything we do in our digital lives - both at home and at work - the distance between here and my usual topics of interest isn’t as far as you might think. I’ll leave that for you decide, and otherwise, I’d love to hear your thoughts on a timely subject that is much bigger than tech.
The global shortage of semiconductors that began in 2020 is expected to continue into 2022, and its impact is far greater than most people realize. While closely followed in technology circles and the business press, the underlying causes are not well understood by the general public, and there is a bigger story to consider than a shortage of an electronic components that consumers will likely never see or touch.
Today’s economy is increasingly global, where both production and consumption seamlessly cross borders, and supply chains are highly interdependent. When supply and demand are in reasonable balance, this model works well in terms of consumers having choice, innovation and affordability.
However, when disruptions occur, the fragilities of these interdependencies can become exposed, creating a ripple effect of problems that go beyond commercial interests. The current semiconductor shortage is more than just instructive as to why resilience is so important for global supply chains, but also for how we collectively respond to events that pose real threats to our sustainability as a planet.
This fundamental question lays the foundation for understanding why global supply chain issues are bigger than keeping our economies growing. The importance of semiconductors becomes more evident in the context of digital transformation, a meta-trend that all enterprises are adapting to. Driven by advances in cloud technologies, the products and processes from the analog world are quickly becoming digitized. As such, digital transformation is re-shaping every sector of the economy and every facet of our daily lives.
The end game is for all people, devices and machines to become digitally connected, and the common thread for all of this is the semiconductors which power every electronic device imaginable. As the pace of digital transformation accelerates, so does the demand for electronic devices, and as Figure 1 below shows, semiconductors are used across many sectors of our economy.
Figure 1 – Global Semiconductor Use by Market Sector
Source: 2020 State of the US Semiconductor Industry, Semiconductor Industry Association
Aside from semiconductors being so pervasive in today’s digital world, the complexity of the underlying technology and production process makes this sector arguably more reliant on supply chains than any other in our globalized economy. The manufacturing infrastructure is extremely capital-intensive, R&D investment is never-ending, and the production materials must be sourced from a wide range of countries.
While the US has long-dominated this sector, recent events that gave rise to the semiconductor shortage have made clear that no single company or country can effectively manage the entire supply chain.
No supply chain is perfectly efficient, and when disruptions occur, there is usually just one of them, and the problems can be quickly rectified. Being a pandemic, COVID-19 impacted most global supply chains, and in the case of semiconductors, it was a major trigger event, but not the only one.
While the pandemic can conveniently explain away many 2020 disruptions, it was exacerbated by other forces that also impacted the global supply chains that semiconductors are so heavily reliant upon. The key factors behind the current semiconductor chip shortage are summarized below, and while other elements were in play, it should be evident why this combination represents a perfect storm scenario.
Changing habits and consumption patterns. The pandemic forced an unprecedented shift to home-based working and living that will likely persist for the remainder of 2021. Most households have adapted to this new normal by now, and along the way, we have seen major spikes in demand for PCs, tablets, mobile phones, smart TVs, gaming consoles, other electronic devices, and with that the cloud-based services that make all of these activities possible.
5G roll-out. While it’s too early to tell if or when the highly-touted promise of 5G will be realized, the wireless carriers are all-in, making massive investments in their networks. This is only one half of the equation, of course, and for the associated services and revenues to flow, subscribers need 5G devices. The smartphone space is hyper-competitive, and in the lead-up to 5G, the vendors have been under intense pressure to have their latest models ready now.
Crypto-mining. The Bitcoin space continues to be highly volatile, and while it may be a secondary factor behind the semiconductor shortage, it aligns very well with the digital transformation theme that is central to my analysis here. Digital forms of currency are struggling to displace traditional forms of money, and the effort behind Bitcoin remains significant. Most notable for that effort is the massive amount of both GPU and CPU horsepower required for crypto-mining, adding another layer of hyper-demand during 2021 for semiconductors.
Plummeting demand for vehicles. Compounding all these spikes in demand was this sudden drop, also due to the pandemic. Aside from so many people being forced to work from home, the new social distancing behaviors led to a major shift from in-person activity to online. As consumers, we did far less shopping and travelling, with the net result being reduced demand for buying vehicles. Traditional supply chain forecasting models for this industry could not adapt quickly enough to this unforeseen change, and as the pandemic has eased in recent months, the chip shortage has constrained the ability of auto makers to ramp up production as demand has finally returned.
Geopolitical tensions. Free trade isn’t free, and it’s not hard to understand why sectors like semiconductors are of strategic importance to market leaders like the US and China. Domestic economic policies in these particular countries – Buy American Act (BAA) and Made in China 2025 (MIC 2025) respectively – may serve to protect R&D investments and to some extent domestic employment, but they don’t align well with the supply chain needs that underpin the global semiconductor sector.
Globalization is an entrenched reality for any modern economy, and with the efficiencies that come with digital transformation, trade will largely remain borderless, and supply chain interdependency will only increase.
Given the pervasiveness of semiconductors, the combination of forces outlined herein underscore how fragile supply chains can be, as well as the ripple effects that follow when unexpected gaps develop between supply and demand.
In terms of implications – not just for manufacturers, but also consumers and policymakers – here are two calls to action from the perspective of a technology analyst; not just for semiconductors, but for any sector that depends on global supply chains.
1. Supply chain resilience should be of paramount concern
As we are seeing with semiconductors, there is both controllable and uncontrollable risk – for supply as well as demand – all of which must be considered. Nobody foresaw the pandemic, nor were the repercussions anticipated.
What started as an isolated health outbreak in late 2019 will continue disrupting the semiconductor space into 2022 and likely beyond. Even with uncannily prescient planning, this scenario could not have been entirely avoided, but given the importance of these chips for the global economy, a more coordinated, collaborative approach to supply chain management would have mitigated the fallout.
To be effective, it’s important to note that this approach must go beyond the industry players, who are essentially driven by economic interests. Globalization is not sustainable if defined solely by winners and losers, and business continuity must extend to all, not just the dominant few.
This is where a balance is needed between the innovation of the private sector and principled policy-making of the public sector. To further strengthen – and build trust in – global supply chains, industry-based standards are needed so there’s a common set of rules. Getting alignment across all these vectors can take decades, but as the semiconductor fallout has shown, the stakes are too high for bilateral or even unilateral decision-making to set the course for an entire industry.
2. Globalization is bigger than trade and supply chains
Strong supply chains are vital for international trade to flourish, and the semiconductor sector is a great example, since it is the most complex form of production ever created, and the degree of global interdependence among suppliers is unparalleled. When supply and demand are in harmony, it is easy to take the efficiency of this space for granted.
However, when disruption occurs – and in this case, several forms at once – behaviors change and priorities shift from cooperation to survival. Without strong guardrails to maintain a common focus on supply chain resiliency, the ability of the leading players to formulate an effective global response becomes diminished.
As important as semiconductors are to our digital economy, they are just products of technology. The planet has lived without them for thousands of years, and life will carry on when a successor technology displaces them. Supply chains are critical for this sector, but globalization is more than just creating efficient markets for trade.
The real benefits that help create a better standard of living for everyone come from knowledge sharing and innovation that all players contribute to. In theory, this form of globalization should be easy to do, but as we’ve seen from the chip shortage, the practice is more difficult to achieve. The call to action here is to look beyond the world of semiconductors and consider the global response needed for our survival.
COVID-19 was the first true health pandemic in 100 years, and this requires a different response from an epidemic that is localized to a single country or region. Despite the wonders of modern science to quickly create vaccines, global supply chain issues have proven a major impediment to an otherwise solvable problem.
The challenges presented by climate change are no different, and every corner of the world is being impacted by extreme forms of weather we cannot predict or control. Global knowledge sharing and innovation has never been more important, especially if you hold that view that climate change is human-induced. As these disruptions continue, it should be clear that the only way to develop effective responses is through a collective, global approach.
Best practices that come from making supply chains more resilient can surely be applied to global issues like climate change, world hunger and disease management. There should be little doubt that these problems will only persist, and they pose far greater risks to our global well-being than having to wait a few weeks for the latest gaming console.
It’s a busy month for webinars, and here’s the next one - Wednesday, March 10 at 2pm ET.
Am back for another webinar hosted by Huawei, and it’s about the promise of 5G for carriers to help enterprises with digital transformation. This is a pretty broad topic, and I’ll be joined by two other panelists - Will Townsend of Moor Insights and Strategy, and Tony Rutkowski of Netmagic Associates - along with Sean Kinney of RCR Wireless News as moderator.
Should be interesting, and I hope you can join us - details are here to register.
I’m a market researcher by trade, and have always enjoyed qualitative research, especially focus groups. That was the basis for a project I recently completed with Metaswitch, and fortunately we got the groups done just before COVID-19 shut our lives down.
I’ve always felt focus groups provide the most honest, authentic forum for market research, but I won’t be doing any of those for a while. Too bad, because I have clients who want to do them, but that’s going to have to wait a bit I’m afraid. Online focus groups have been around for ages, but there’s no comparison to being in a room with real, live customers.
For the work with Metaswitch, they wanted to explore the mobile user experience for collaboration, something that has long been a weak point in the UC value proposition. Let’s just say we learned an awful lot about the role mobility plays for both personal and work-related needs. UCaaS can bring a lot of value to managing this mix, and there’s a big opportunity here for service providers. However, unless they can speak to the everyday challenges workers face for mobile collaboration, the potential will not be realized.
Being qualitative research, the report doesn’t have all the answers, but I’ll bet you’ll learn a few things you didn’t know or gave much thought about. Being proprietary research, the report is gated on their website, and there are actually two flavors, and you need to register to get either of them. You can find them in the Knowledge Center of the Metaswitch website, where the full-length report is here, and the express version that they produced is here.
That’s the title of my latest post running on BCStrategies. As a BC Expert, I’m a regular contributor, and this time around, I wanted to share takeaways from a webinar I was on last week. The webinar was hosted by Metaswitch, and we were joined by Poly, and together we reviewed the challenges and opportunities for carriers in supporting end customers as they adapt to work from home.
The main theme for my post is that you need more than a UCaaS platform to make WFH effective, and together, our perspectives make for a more complete value proposition. The post is running now on the BCStrategies portal, and you can read it here.
I’ve long advocated the importance of user experience - UX - for any form of collaboration offering, and it especially matters for mobility, since this is where workers spend so much of their time now. Technology will only get more complex - not less - and it’s easy to overlook the fact that most workers only have a basic grasp of the tools and applications they rely on day-to-day. We’re not all engineers, and most workers are on the wrong side of 30, and that reality is not well-reflected in the usability for most collaboration offerings.
I don’t have a magic wand to fix that, but I have just done some qualitative research with mobile users to better understand all this, and there’s a lot to learn. Since the work was done for a client, I can only share high-level findings here, but even these should be of interest to anyone wondering why mobile UC applications aren’t more widely-used. I’ve summarized that in my latest No Jitter post, and you can read it here. I’ll have more to say about this soon, and until then, your comments are welcome.
My busy June continues with a short trip to London, for Mavenir’s analyst event. I’ve been to two events this week - one day for each, and Mavenir will be a day and a half. It’s a long way to go, but am sure it will be time well-spent, just like it was for the last Mavenir event I attended last fall.
This is “next stop” post #1 for the week. Am at the airport now, flying shortly to Dallas for Mavenir’s Analyst Day event. I’ve had this on the calendar for a while, and it’s my first time attending one of their events. Mobility comes and goes in my coverage, but this will be a good opportunity for a deep dive on the state of 5G and how carriers are embracing the cloud. Even more interesting is how they’re bringing AI to market, and leveraging the cloud for future-forward revenue streams built around RCS and messaging.
More details are here on my Events Calendar, where you’ll also see info about “next stop” #2 right after Mavenir. Watch for another post about that next day or so.
Eventually, I'll transition fully from UCStrategies to BCStrategies, and hopefully this doesn't cause confusion. Two names, two websites, but the content is the same, and so are the people. Am hoping it will just be BCStrategies at some point in 2018, and I'm getting on the bandwagon now.
I stand corrected on my earlier blog post, saying that our podcast about Net Neutrality was the last one for 2017. Forgot about that one, and this one is our lookout for what 2018 holds for the always expanding/ever-confusing world of communications/collaboration/customer care.
Whatever you choose to call it, this podcast is a good roundup of analysts and consultants - myself included - who are all close to the trends shaping this space. I think you'll find it time well-spent, and here's the link to hear what we had to say. Feel free to add your take, and I'll be back to blogging early next week. Happy New Year!
September was fairly quiet on the writing front, but I was plenty busy working on client projects, lining up a busy October for conferences and speaking at events, and more fine tuning for my updated website. That's largely under control now, and I'll have a broader writing digest to share next month.
What are Practical Applications of Contact Center Analytics? - TechTarget, Sept. 28
What Businesses Can Learn from the TacoBot - Toolbox.com, Sept. 28
Apple Business Chat - Tough to Beat on Messaging, Mobility and Brand - No Jitter, Sept. 26
How Device as a Service Makes it Easier to Have the Latest IP Phones - Toolbox.com, Sept. 20
Three Ways How Collaboration Solutions are Disruptive - Toolbox.com, Sept. 11
Habitat Soundscaping - a Fresh Take on Collaboration - Toolbox.com, Sept. 8
Disruption is an understatement to describe the current state of the contact center space, and it goes well beyond Avaya’s Chapter 11 struggles, or the big move by Genesys to acquire Interactive Intelligence. These developments are relatively easy to understand, but as the frame of reference shifts from the “contact center” to “customer care”, other disruptive forces are emerging. Aside from being less easy to understand, they represent new channels of customer engagement that can potentially bypass the existing contact center model altogether.
In the course of my ongoing research, some of these disruptive forces have reached a point where there’s a broader story to tell, and I’ll summarize that in this post. There’s more disruption coming, and I’ll speak to that in due course, either here on my blog, or via one of the media channels I partner with.
Two disruption drivers – mobility and messaging
In my view, much of this disruption is due to the confluence of two major trends in customer care that happen to complement each other very nicely – mobility and messaging. To illustrate, this slide from Mary Meeker’s latest Kleiner Perkins Internet Trends report provides two important takeaways.
First, our engagement with digital media is steadily growing, hitting 5.6 hours per day in 2016. Aside from this being a big part of our day, it also means people are spending less time on the phone, and to provide good customer service, you need to use what they’re using. Secondly, within the digital realm, mobile devices caught up to the PC in 2013, and while PC usage has stagnated, mobility usage has grown 35% since then.
The rise of messaging goes hand-in-hand with mobility, and this presents some fundamental challenges for contact centers since they remain largely voice-centric. Messaging has been widely adopted in the consumer world, not just for its convenience, but also for economics, especially compared to telephony. These drivers aren’t as strong in the enterprise, so the adoption of messaging applications isn’t as common. Not only that, but most forms of enterprise messaging are automated – such as reminders - not person-to-person. The modes of messaging customers want to use to engage with agents aren’t native to the contact center, so there’s a gap here.
Furthermore, with customers showing an increasing preference for self-service and using messaging over voice, contact centers are struggling to keep pace. The above mobility trend seems likely to continue, and if this is where they are when customer service is needed, then messaging will become an important channel of engagement for the contact center.
Enter the new players – another form of disruption
Everything happens for a reason, and both mobility and messaging are impacting the contact center value proposition. While the existing vendors will continue to dominate the landscape – namely Avaya, Cisco and Genesys, but also the leading CRM players – their offerings are not built around these drivers. They’re definitely moving in that direction, but existing platforms and operating environments are well entrenched, making it difficult to adapt at the speed the market is moving.
This isn’t to say that all forms of contact will become messaging-based, or that all forms of customer service will occur on mobile devices, but these modes – these preferences – are too big to ignore or underestimate. With customer experience – CX – being a top strategic mantra, management is going to back the horses that do the best job, regardless of how it’s been done until now.
These shifts – and opportunities – haven’t been lost on other players, who are leveraging them to enter this space with a clean slate and a nextgen approach to customer care. In particular, I’m talking about Amazon, Apple and Facebook – all outsiders to the contact center world, but when viewed through the lens of mobility and messaging, it’s not hard to understand why they’re here. So far, these companies are only having a nominal impact on the status quo, but consider four ways in which they can be disruptive:
1. As outsiders, they can create a new and different CX, built from the ground-up based on today’s needs, wants, preferences, expectations, etc. Like everything else in tech, customer service is becoming increasingly user-driven, and when the tools – and rules – of engagement are in the customer’s hands, that’s what defines CX.
2. With that shift in the balance of power, CX becomes consumer-driven rather than company-driven. Understanding consumer behavior now becomes paramount, and can you think of any companies in tech better suited for this than Amazon, Apple and Facebook? To varying degrees, today’s CX plays to their strengths in ways that the contact center vendors cannot match. Of course, the converse is also true, but I’m focused on where the market is going, not where it’s been.
3. Not only do these companies have the scale to compete against anybody, their footprint and strength as consumer brands translates into incredible market power that can change the game if successful. That said, it’s equally true that if they don’t get enough traction, they can – and will - exit the CX space and move on to other things. These companies all have track records of success and failure, and are more likely to take bold risks to reinvent CX than the established contact center vendors. They have everything to gain and little to lose, and there’s a lot at stake given how hard it is to provide a great CX.
4. Each in their own way is capable of delivering an end-to-end CX that bypasses the contact center altogether. This may be the biggest form of disruption, because they can bring a new value chain to market that is fully within their control and provides an alternative to engage with a company’s contact center operation. I’m not saying this will make the contact center obsolete – not at all. However, they do represent new channels of engagement that may not happen otherwise, and not all forms of CX require dealing with a contact center.
To clarify, here’s a very brief summary of what these companies are doing in the CX space. Each one needs a detailed analysis, but that will be for another time.
Amazon
Their initial entry with Connect was more of a direct form of competition in the contact center space, and while it’s far from complete, they have the market power to jump right in. They know their limitations – or maybe not – and one improvement they just made was to message-enable Connect. This allows agents in real time to identify if an incoming call supports SMS or Facebook Messenger. If so, the session can shift to being messaging-based, including with a Lex chatbot that can easily be escalated to a live agent, and there are lots of scenarios where that would provide a better CX.
Most contact centers aren’t able to manage inbound messaging inquiries, so this is a big step forward to use this channel in cases where customers prefer that. This can also help agents be more productive, since voice calls can only be handled one at a time, but with messaging, they can manage multiple sessions concurrently.
Other features are no doubt coming that will make Connect more messaging-centric, and better able to support more CX. Not only are they motivated to succeed because the enterprise is an attractive growth opportunity, engaging with customers via Connect provides another touchpoint into the broader Amazon universe. In this regard, they’re not competing against Cisco or Avaya – it’s Facebook and Apple they’re trying to keep pace with for consumer engagement.
Apple
This represents something very different, but as with Amazon, Business Chat is part of Apple’s broader plan to play in the enterprise market. Business Chat is tied to their new iOS 11, and for this post, the interesting part is how iMessage allows communication with a business from any touchpoint in the Apple ecosystem, such as Safari, Maps, or even Siri. Now, iPhone users can use messaging to directly engage with a business, or do so via the contact center. The latter is certainly not Apple’s forte, and for that, they have done integrations with the likes of Genesys and Saleforce.com.
Now, add Apple Pay to the equation, and iMessage can facilitate a mobile, end-to-end CX, right through to making a purchase and completing the transaction. Not a word need be spoken, and no need to disrupt the session by fumbling around for your wallet. This doesn’t hold for all customer service scenarios, but it all seems pretty intuitive for Apple users, and that’s the point. Why risk the aggravation of a contact center when you can do all this from the palm of your hand while walking about or even driving? As a sidebar, it’s worth noting that AR/VR with iPhone 8 could, at some point, have a role to play in creating a new, Apple-centric CX.
The CX story here is less clear, but there are important parallels to both Amazon and Apple. On the messaging front, Messenger represents a new CX channel, not only due to its large footprint, but with their Payments application, this becomes a massive e-commerce play. The success of WeChat in China validates the mobile payments opportunity, so it’s not hard to see why CX fits into the Facebook angle.
This is also relevant because Facebook is addressing a global market, and they have an advantage over mobile carriers competing for a slice of the payments pie. In many markets, SMS is costly, but being free, Messenger can capture some of that traffic, bringing customers into Facebook’s CX value chain. To counter that, of course, concerns about privacy have dogged Facebook for years, so a lot has to go right to become a trusted CX channel. Even now, however, I think they’re an important part of this changing landscape.
My main takeaways
While it’s clear how mobility is transforming CX, the impact of messaging is less evident at this point. However, we all know that contact centers are trying to shift the workload from voice to text to keep costs down, manage call volumes, and engage using tools preferred by customers. We also know that there are many contact center scenarios that don’t require voice at all, and this points to the growing need to become more messaging-centric. That’s certainly the common thread with Amazon, Apple and Facebook, and their momentum will continue regardless of how the contact center vendors respond.
On the messaging front, contact center vendors will continue evolving, but probably not as quickly as these disruptors, and their progress needs to be closely followed. Another factor in all this is the way these vendors have evolved. They all have messaging-centric platforms as part of their CPaaS story, but these are independent of their contact center platforms. Those worlds are coming together, but at present, their messaging APIs are generic, and don’t integrate specifically with their contact center platforms, or anyone else’s for that matter.
The missing piece is having vendor-specific APIs, where the messaging platform integrates directly with the contact center platform – that’s what’s needed to fully support this emerging nextgen CX. CPaaS offerings like Fuze and Twilio are going in that direction, but it’s not their core business, and probably will never be. To my knowledge, the only pureplay messaging vendor focused on CX – both for the contact center and these disruptors – is WebText. They’re the partner for Amazon’s new messaging capability, and I suspect more is coming.
If you’re trying to follow where the puck is going, they’re an important company to follow. I’ve seen this happen before, where pureplays have brought the innovation needed to take a market to the next level, such as with Acme Packet with SBCs, or Convedia with media servers. It’s too soon to tell how things will unfold with WebText or the CPaaS players, but I’m pretty sure messaging is going to give voice a good run for its money as CX moves along this path.
I write a regular column for No Jitter, and it's long been a rich resource for the collaboration space. My followers will know that messaging has been a current focus of my research, and Apple's Business Chat has been on my radar for a bit.
I'll be writing and speaking about this topic elsewhere over the next few weeks, and hopefully this post will pique your interest enough to keep tabs on me during this time, and beyond. With that, here's the link to my No Jitter post, and if you like my analysis, I'd love to hear from you, and so would the folks at No Jitter!
Things continue to remain busy in the early goings of 2017; fulfilling client work, new projects/clients, speaking at conferences and lining up new things for Q2. During March, I produced 21 different forms of content, including articles, a webinar, a conference presentation, and preliminary research for two new white papers. My website remains a work in progress, but everything can be accessed there. To give you a sense of what I was writing about last month, here are some highlights.
Monage 2017 - Chatbot Challenges and New Life for UC, UCStrategies, March 27
How Workers Use Collaboration for Digital Transformation, Toolbox.com, March 23
Monage, San Jose - Quick Thought and Pix, my blog, March 23
Have Mobility and Messaging Trumped Business Voice Communications?, TechTarget, March 22
How Collaboration Impacts Digital Transformation, Toolbox.com, March 17
How Contact Center Adds Value to Hosted UC, Toolbox.com, March 15
Amazon Chime - Did AWS Buy the Wrong Company?, No Jitter, March 14
Outbound Communication - Taking Your Contact Center to the Next Level, RingCentral Blog, March 14
Future of Work Survey - Cloud Adoption Drivers, Toolbox.com, March 6
How Channels Can Own Collaboration, Toolbox.com, March 2
J Arnold & Associates is an Independent Technology Research and Analyst, helping businesses understand the strategic value of communications technology as they adapt to the digital transformation of work
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