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A short note for navigating this section - scroll below for the most recent posts, and then for more, click on the Blog Archive box, where you can view all of my posts, going back to the beginning in March 2005.
Got another webinar coming up, this one sponsored by Lumen Technologies, and hosted by Spiceworks Ziff Davis. I’ll be presenting on UCaaS trends and drivers, along with reviewing the associated security risks. After that, I’ll be joined by two speakers from Lumen for a more in-depth discussion about security. Details are here if you’d like to join us - next Wednesday, Apri 14 at noon ET.
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.
Busy month, and am doing another webinar with RingCentral - more specifically, their UK operations. Back in December, I did a webinar with them in the US on the topic of migrating premises-based telephony to the cloud. A lot of businesses are still in that situation, and not sure why or how they should make this change. That webinar was well-received enough to warrant doing an updated version focused on the UK market.
The webinar will be on Thursday, March 18 - right after St. Patrick’s Day - good plan, at 2pm GMT, which is 9am for me. Here’s the registration page if you’d like to join us, and if so, I’ll see you then.
I recently wrote a white paper for Mitel on the importance of digital CX - customer experience - for contact centers, and the impact of COVID-19 on what constitutes a good CX. The white paper has been well-received, and we recently did a Twitter chat on the topic, which was also well-received.
We’re topping all this out now with a webinar, which will be on Thursday, March 4. I’ll be presenting highlights from the white paper, and along with Mitel’s Matt Clare, we’ll be talking about the current state of digital CX, and how contact centers should be thinking about their roadmap. You can register here to join us in real time, and if you can’t make it, the webinar will be available on demand from Mitel shortly after.
What started as a basic exploration of a hot topic - AI for consultants - has turned into a 5-part series that I’ve been presenting on for SCTC. It’s been a great series, and we close out the topic this Wednesday. Joining me will be Gordon Sexton of Genesys, who will add his take to mine.
As always, our Fireside Chats are from 12-1 EST on Wednesdays, and for members who miss the date, replays are available. For everyone else, you can always become a member if you’re a consultant - otherwise, just follow me here, or drop me a line if you need help developing an AI strategy. To join us this Wednesday, details and signup are here.
Tomorrow, our ongoing series about the AI opportunity for consultants continues with Part 4. I’ll be providing a recap of the key themes covered from the earlier sessions, as well as my outlook for 2021.
Joining me will be Tracy Fleming from Avaya, who will address specific AI use cases in the contact center, and as always, the sessions will be led by Steve Leaden. Registration details have now been posted to the SCTC website, and I hope you can join us - tomorrow from 12-1 EST.
Got a new webinar shout-out here - am back with another RingCentral engagement, and it’s on Tuesday, December 8 at 2pm ET.
Heading into the last month of the worst-year-ever, we’re all looking ahead to hopefully better things in 2021. For businesses still going with their premises-based phone systems - the value proposition is weakening, and with many workers happily entrenched at home, it’s going to be difficult to keep supporting them this way in the year ahead.
That’s the gist of the webinar, and I’ll be addressing it at greater length then. I’ll be joined by a RingCentral customer who will tell their story first-hand - and will update you once they’ve been added to the roster. Details are here, and if you want to join us, it just takes a moment to register.
Tomorrow is Part 3 in our ongoing series about the AI opportunity for consultants. This time around, I’ll be talking about emerging AI applications. As usual, Steve Leaden will host, and we’ll be joined by speakers from Vonage and Journey.ai.
If you don’t know, these one hour sessions are open to all, with the core audience being SCTC members and consultants who want to learn more about what we have to offer. The session starts at noon, and to get the link, please follow the registration details here.
I’m running a 3-part series on AI for SCTC, and last week’s kickoff session was really well attended. We continue next with a particular focus on the contact center, and there sure is a lot to talk about. I’ll be giving an overview of the trends, and then I’ll be joined by Gordon Sexton of Genesys, and Richard Dumas of Inference Solutions.
Our Fireside Chat sessions have found a nice groove, and even if you’re not an SCTC member, this should be time well-spent - and for consultants who aren’t members, you might think about joining to be part of this community. Details to register are here on the SCTC site, and we start at noon ET.
Tomorrow, I kick off the first of a three-part series on AI and how consultants can apply to it bring new value to their customers. This a webinar format, under the moniker of Fireside Chats that the SCTC has been running weekly for a while - this one is #32.
We do these on Wednesdays from 12-1 EST, and for this one, I’ll be joined by Tracy Fleming of Avaya. The audience will primarily be consultants, but all are welcome, and to join us, just follow the details here.
I’ll be presenting on another webinar soon, this one sponsored by Lifesize and hosted by Channel Partners. Heading into year-end, the focus will be on planning for 2021, and how contact centers need to be thinking about cloud - and video - and why channels are well-positioned.
It’s a big topic, and am looking forward to providing an overview, and then leading a conversation about with Valur Svansson, Lifesize’s Global Sr. Director, Contact Center EX and CX. I can tell you now, it will be an engaging discussion, so I hope you can join us.
The webinar is happening on Thursday, November 12 at 2pm ET, and all the details for registration are here.
Next Tuesday, I’ll be speaking on a webinar about the “data deluge” that contact centers need to manage, especially for improving the all-important CX – customer experience. Details are here, and I’ll be joined by Heather Barrow of Eventus, as she shares highlights from her recent white paper about this topic – it’s quite good, and you should give it a read.
This is a rich topic, and as my researcher curiosity takes its unpredictable path, things keep getting more interesting. What began as an exploration of contact center reporting, soon became a bigger exercise in the ever-expanding world of Big Data, and that has inevitably taken me into the adjacent galaxy of BI – business intelligence. Clearly CX involves many moving parts, and it’s not hard to see why contact centers are getting overwhelmed with this data deluge.
So, this post is a primer on what I’m seeing here, and I’ll just touch on a few things during the webinar. There’s more research to be done, and I’ll have more to say later, but hopefully my thoughts here will set the stage for you to join us on Tuesday.
Back when the contact center was the call center, almost all customer engagement was over the phone. This was a single-channel world, and the process of providing customer service was relatively simple. There were lots of shortcomings based on the technology of the day, but the pace of business was slower and customer expectations were lower.
Nobody called this “Little Data”, since there really was nothing to compare things against then, but from today’s perspective that’s what it was. Telephony was still largely analog and call recording capabilities were limited, so there wasn’t much in the way of metrics. As technology advanced, and other channels came along, customer service extended beyond telephony, and the call center became the contact center.
More channels meant more sets of data, but with little integration across them, the task of managing all the data was within the realm of human capabilities. KPIs and metrics became more sophisticated, and existing reporting tools provided good visibility into daily operations. Traffic volumes were growing, as were data sets about customers, but things could largely be managed onsite, even as hardware-based systems were morphing into software.
The cloud has changed everything, and that brings us to Big Data. This term applies to every vertical and line of business now, but it’s particularly challenging for contact centers. Not only are the volumes of data much bigger now - and growing faster than most contact centers can manage - but the variety is orders of magnitude greater than what call centers had to deal with.
Consider just a few basic types - structured vs. unstructured, real time vs. non-real time, analog vs. digital sources, internal vs. external sources, live interaction vs. recorded, multiple communications modes and channels, etc. Each and every one of these has distinct characteristics, not just for capturing, but for processing, integrating, analyzing, and ultimately driving business decisions. The mind boggles.
That’s the point actually, and the reason why Big Data has become so daunting. There is simply too much information for humans to comprehend and derive any business value from. This matters not just for the contact center, but the broader organization around it. In 2020, the contact center may be all about CX, but CX is about more than the contact center.
Contact center leaders have lots of great data at their disposal to make better operational decisions, but leaders elsewhere in the organization need that data for other types of decisions, and increasingly, they must work together to serve common goals for the good of the business, especially improving CX. Metrics that come from within the contact center are essential for CX, but they don’t tell the whole story, and this gives rise to a familiar challenge - how to work across silos to access all the relevant data for a holistic view of the customer.
Within the contact center, decision makers have learned to manage their own Big Data by going beyond reporting and adopting analytics. That’s an important step, because providing a good CX is far more challenging than in analog times - it’s not enough to understand the what; you need to understand the how and the why. The discipline of analytics takes reporting to another level, especially with the scale and speed of the cloud. Mining data from the wealth of today’s sources with today’s tools can yield insights beyond human capabilities, and can make all the difference between a good and a great CX.
This takes us to the realm of business intelligence – BI – which is somewhat of a parallel universe to what goes on in the contact center. As an analyst, it seems clear to me that providing a great CX goes beyond what contact center reporting and analytics can provide. There’s a reason why the worlds of UCaaS and CCaaS are converging, and it’s the same story here. A proper, holistic view of the customer requires pulling data from across the organization, whether it’s CRM, HR, Marketing, Billing, Shipping, Logistics, etc.
Contact centers are coming to that realization, and as they do, they’re seeing the limitations of their existing technologies and solutions from the various vendors they work with. That’s a topic for a separate analysis, and I’m going to wrap here by saying what’s even more important is how they’re thinking about the problem. Legacy thinking still looms large in this world, and that means too much focus on operational metrics and reporting that focuses on contact center performance.
For businesses that have pivoted to being customer-centric, CX is now the driver, and everything works backwards from there. In this scenario, analytics is more important than reporting, and that’s the first step to viewing things through the lens of Big Data. To harness all that raw data – and the deluge is only getting bigger – the contact center needs more of many things, and that will present a major challenge if you don’t know which way to turn. If that’s you, then next week’s webinar will be time well-spent. Check it out, read the white paper, and circle back here in a couple of weeks – there’s more to come.
That title should be self-explanatory, so if you’re wondering about how contact centers can get a handle on the exponential growth of data from endless sources - and actually get business value - this is the webinar for you. Eventus is a really interesting company, and they have a pretty distinct take on how to do this.
Aside from learning about that, I’ll share my own analyst perspective based on what I’m seeing in both the contact center and business intelligence worlds. Joining me will be Heather Barrow of Eventus, and long-time industry colleague Erik Linask for the moderating. More to come, and registration details are here. We’ll be doing the webinar with TMC, on Tuesday, October 20, at 12:30pm ET.
September is always busy, and it’s holding true for me. Got another webinar to tell you about - this one is hosted by Channel Partners Online and sponsored by IntelePeer.
The CPaaS space is quite versatile, and contact centers are finding lots of ways to use these platforms. IntelePeer has found a niche here, and on this webinar, I’ll be talking about scenarios where CPaaS can help contact centers uplevel their CX capabilities, especially those still tied to premises-based technologies.
Our webinar run on Thursday, October 1 at 2pm ET, and all the details to register are here. Hope you can join us!
This is busy time for webinars, with four on my plate over the next few weeks. This is the first one, and it’s got an interesting twist. I’m certainly following IoT, but this time around, the focus will be on innovation for social good. The webinar is sponsored by Huawei US with Light Reading as the media partner, and I’ll be one of three speakers on the panel.
The webinar will on Wednesday, Sept. 30 at 2pm ET, and I hope you can join us. Full details are here on the registration page.
This is my next webinar with Informa, where Oracle is the sponsor, talking about the virtues of SD WAN. I’ll be moderating this session, and leading Q&A after the main presentation. Webinar is next Tuesday at 2pm EST - hope you can join us. Registration details are here.
In case you missed it…
Last week, I did a live webinar with 8x8, in conversation with Justin Robbins, talking about business continuity issues during these pandemic times. It’s a legitimate problem, especially to support WFH, and it’s tailor-made for cloud solutions like UCaaS.
Justin and I could talk all day long about this stuff, but we only had a half hour, and the audience was pretty engaged. If you weren’t there, and want to check it out, the webinar is on-demand now, and here’s the link to register and access it. I should note, btw, that this session was 2nd in a four-part series 8x8 is running, so if you like this one, you’ll probably like the others in this series.
Some days I’m doing podcasts, and some days it’s webinars. The latter is next for me, and it’s really more of a fireside chat, and I hope you can join us. 8x8 is doing a series of these on business continuity, and I’ll be the guest speaker for the next one - Tuesday, April 7 at 12 pm ET.
I’ll be in conversation with 8x8’s Justin Robbins, and we’ll be talking about the challenges faced by businesses as they adapt to WFH - work from home - and the role that UCaaS can play to make that more effective. Should be a lively conversation, and if you can make it, here’s the registration page.
Remote working is the topic du jour now, and everyone is either asking about it or weighing in on how to do it. Being an analyst, I fall into the latter category, and it doesn’t hurt that I’ve been home-based for a long time.
For this webinar, I’m a guest speaker, and will be joined by John Gillespie from Poly, and another independent, Andrew Ward. The event will be hosted by Metaswitch, so the audience will mainly be their carrier customers, but it’s open to all.
We’re doing a Town Hall format, so after some brief presentations, we’ll open it up to the floor, not just for questions, but also hear how their customers are dealing with remote working. The webinar is next Tuesday, March 31 at 11am ET, and here’s the landing page to register. Hope you can join us.
I’ve got a new webinar to post about, and this one will be hosted by Channel Partners. The sponsor is Flexential, whom I got to meet on the show floor at the recent ITExpo. The topic is about cloud migration, and how to be strategic about it. For a change, I’ll be moderating, and leading a discussion with Carl Norman, their Solutions Architect, along with Michael Piccininni of Dell Technologies.
The webinar will be on Thursday, March 19 at 2pm ET, and I hope you can join us. Here’s the landing page with more details and the registration form.
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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