You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Telecommuting’ category.
Artificial Intelligence, The Terminator, Post-Humanism, Bionic Limbs, Singularity…As the power of technology continues to surpass human ability in new and rapid ways, our fascination and often fear of machines ask us to question the boundaries of human interaction and the artificial. While predictions and theory vary and even contradict one another, there seems to be a consensus on a need for balance. We see this need often today; whether it is a customer caught in a calling queue or a caller sent to a desktop voicemail over a live mobile human. When it comes to a business’s call center offering, the quest for balance takes front-line.
Service providers must answer the call for an innovative solution to the growing struggle between human response and mechanical communication. As an integral piece of any business’s customer service offering, we believe the move toward hosted call centers offers the flexibility, functionality and visibility required to move end-customers quickly to a live voice without wasting time or resources. Today, service providers leverage hosted communication services to boost human communication through productivity features and on-going application integration, all while minimizing human and environmental risk with automatic maintenance and business continuity.
More and more, we see the end-customer seeking an intuitive call center solution that allows optimal, live customer service while taking advantage of hosted unified communication technology. Micah Solomon, entrepreneur and customer systems innovator, writes for Fast Company on the growing need for live support as organizations place more services in the hands of technology:
Online customers are literally invisible to you (and you to them), so it’s easy to shortchange them emotionally…This lack of visual and tactile presence makes it even more crucial to create a sense of personal, human-to-human connection.
Following such demand, BroadSoft’s own BroadWorks® Call Center application recently released new enhancements allowing service providers the scalability to extend their hosted call center offering into enterprises with higher call volumes and more complex reporting requirements. Taking full advantage of the benefits of a hosted solution, such as low-upfront cost and scalability, the BroadWorks® Call Center application opens new revenue streams from premise-based platforms.
To explore the benefits of hosted call center solutions, read on http://bit.ly/broadsoftcallcenter or request a sales representative contact you.
A modern day Thomas Edison. The Jack Welch of the telecommunications industry. If you have not yet heard of Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi, his biography does not make for light reading (http://bit.ly/gAFnmn). Well known for his revolutionary role with AT&T as President of Bell Laboratories, CIO and CTO until 2006, Business Week has labeled him “a critical player in maintaining AT&T’s status as a technology leader” (12/2005). Eslambolchi has leveraged both his visionary entrepreneurial and engineering skills (named “Inventor of the Year” by the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame 2001) to act as advisor and board member to dozens of companies he has helped to transform. We see this currently with Clearwire’s transition from retail to wholesale network provider. BroadSoft, the leading, worldwide innovator of Voice over IP (VoIP) applications, grilled the often prophetic thought leader on what’s next for the telecommunications industry.
BroadSoft: As a renowned telecommunications strategist, you are known to help set the foundation on what’s next for the industry. So, we have to ask – what’s next?
Eslambolchi: I have been pushing hard for the past 15 years that everything will be moving toward IP; and predicted by 2010 VoIP would be the primary source of all business communication and by 2015 would be the primary source of all consumer communications. We are not too far from it, as more and more businesses have transitioned to VoIP (due to cost, quality, scalability, flexibility, etc). And with FTTX & 4G – VoIP has started to reach out to consumers.
BroadSoft: You see a large market opportunity for VoIP and the end consumer?
Eslambolchi: VoIP is clearly a transformative, converged technology that offers significant benefits for corporation and consumers alike. By 2015 VoIP won’t be an option for voice telephony; it will be the standard – as ubiquitous as the copper wire has been in the past.
BroadSoft: You mention ubiquity. How do you see IP, mobile, and the connected consumer moving forward?
Eslambolchi: Communications must be building around the user, instead of the user having to adapt to their devices. IP convergence will allow you to plug one device into a broadband network to instantly meet all your communications needs. We are reaching the era of the smart environment – smart homes and all of its appliances, smart cars which will integrate with all of our devices from GPS to ipad, iphone, Android, facebook, twitter, and of course smart offices.
Mobile phones will be able to move between VoIP networks, and wireless networks without the user ever noticing a change – a huge boost for reliability and range of use. 4G is the promise of the future for broadband as they fully and easily interconnect with wide range of individual devices, a capability that earlier wireless technologies lacked. It will support all sorts of converged services, including conferencing, training, entertainment, gaming, advertising, mobile banking, NFC, etc. SMS, MMS, pictures, gaming, video, and many other apps will be integrated with voice so that if you drop a call, or need to remain quite in a conference room or at home, you can continue your conversation and other apps.
BroadSoft: BroadSoft recently announced HD video conferencing service, BroadCloud Video. What are your predictions for multimedia, video and IP?
Eslambolchi: Video will be the new voice. IMS will be the springboard for seamless delivery of multimedia streams across mobile and wired devices. And IMS helps enable XoIP service and video services such as video conferencing, video training, video peering between multiple independent networks which will work similar to voice.
BroadSoft: What is the XoIP opportunity for video?
Eslambolchi: XoIP infrastructure allows the service to adjust and adapt to the access technologies the user has at his/her disposal. You record a video message, but the other party does not have access to the video device. The message will automatically covert to the service layer from audio-video format into an audio message or SMS. These XoIP apps on all services will allow you to take your call at home, easily transfer to your car (hands-free), and once you are in the office to transfer it to a audio-video desk phone, and vice versa.
BroadSoft: Our service providers, partners, and end customers have played a critical role in the evolution of IP technology and services. As such, how do you see this VoIP community evolving?
Eslambolchi: BroadSoft plays a key role in all of the above conversations; as they have been the pioneer of the XoIP feature and application services for past 12 years. While others had doubts about VoIP, IMS, FTTX, FMC, 4G; BroadSoft continued to push forward with their innovation. The innovations from BroadSoft enabled so much for us during the past 12 years in wireline XoIP; that now we can take advantage of all of the experience, development, and applications as they all will be extended toward 4G. These will also be the converged XB services of combined wired and wireless networks in a ubiquitous, always available, mobile broadband network.
I have personally invited many executives from our industry to stop by the BroadSoft booth in CTIA and encourage everyone to do the same.
How many of you are tired of hearing about the fact that Washington, DC and its surrounding suburbs are experiencing Snowpocalypse, Snowmageddon, or whatever catchy name you want to use to describe the 30 inches of snow that fell within 24 hours and then another 8 inches 3 days later in our area? Well, let me personally say you are no more tired of hearing about it than those of us at BroadSoft’s corporate headquarters are of living through it.
But our snowstorm of the century is no reason to stop commerce. Those of us in corporate America have projects to complete, goals to accomplish and performance metrics to hit…..so even though most of us are snowed in, we are certainly not bored and looking for something to do. As a matter-of-fact, I have been extremely productive the last 4 business days working from home. I’ve gained an hour, and sometimes 2 depending on DC traffic, by not needing, or not being able, to commute to work each day.
Here is how a BroadSoft employee (me) has spent the last 4 business days…..and how I have leveraged our hosted communications solutions in order to keep moving our business forward (audience for that statement, my boss).
A couple of my days started at 7:00 am Eastern time, on conference calls with our European PR firm. Okay, on the surface, that is not overly interesting, but when I say I was on a video conference call using my Bria for BroadWorks softphone, then interest is piqued. It is not unusual for me to have video calls with my counterparts and partners at agencies around the world, but I typically use my Polycom VVX desk phone. This week, I have used my softphone, and each call has been equally as productive as if I had been in the office.
And thanks to BroadWorks Anywhere, I have not missed a call, even though my email signature and business card do not list my cell phone number. I simply set my home phone as the primary way to reach me through our BroadWorks web-based portal, and all my calls have found me. All my outbound calls show my BroadSoft office Calling Line ID, so my “office” has been extended to my home phone and my mobile phone.
Today was particularly great. Each quarter, our sales executives provide an update on their accounts, so the entire organization is aware of how we can contribute to ensuring our customers are satisfied. Our North American quarterly review was scheduled for today. Even though no one was in the office, because it was officially closed, we all attended the meeting, remotely, and leveraged our Unified Communication services. Many of us joined via video, we all used our collaboration tools to share documents online, and like any business person these days, most of us were multi-tasking, sending IM messages to get other work done.
So, we in the DC area are persevering and pushing on, but even with these great IP-based communication options, many BroadSoft faithful are actually looking forward to when we will be able to dig ourselves out and drive to the office, after so many days with the kids….
And for our service provider customers, we now have 110 personal case studies we can share on how hosted communications solutions are priceless to ensuring business continuity…..
Recently en route to Panama, I spent my time on the plane as I usually do—going through a stack of magazines to catch up on what’s going on and get some new ideas. But an article in Technology Review entitled “Urban Renewal” got me thinking about an old idea: telecommuting.
Did you know that half the world’s population currently lives in urban areas? By 2050, 70 percent will live in and around cities. The TR article discusses how in the future, transportation systems will have to change dramatically to handle the mass movement of people to and from work every day without negatively affecting the environment. Traffic here on DC’s Capitol Beltway is truly brutal today—I can’t imagine what it’ll be like 40 years from now.
So what happened to the idea of telecommuting? I’m surprised at the generally low level of telecommuting today. More telecommuting would certainly ease road congestion, cut fuel consumption and reduce pollution—not to mention the amount of stressful, unproductive time that so many people spend sitting in traffic jams every workday.
I think that successful telecommuting requires just a few key elements:
- Management leadership. Management needs to encourage telecommuting and support employees with trust and training to make it a win-win proposition for their employees and companies alike.
- Training. All employees who want to telecommute need to learn the right and wrong ways to work from home. They need training in best practices for working away from the office.
- The right tools. Telecommuters will need certain tools to maintain their connection with the office and its enterprise-level technologies to keep up their productivity as they work in remote locations.
The good news is that those tools are readily available right now.
Take BroadWorkstm Anywheretm as an example. Even though I travel a great deal, I rarely give out my cell phone number. I generally give everyone my business phone number because BroadWorks Anywhere extends the features of my desk telephone to softphones and mobile phones regardless of manufacturer or network. So no matter where I am, anyone can get in touch with me, and the caller’s contact information is displayed to me on the incoming call.
And think about all of the other IP-based communication services designed to make us all more productive—that’s the essence of unified communications. You just need to be online with a smartphone or computer. You can see who else is on, make or take phone calls, set up and sit in on conference calls, get messages and email, text, tweet and fax. You can even attend video conferences from wherever you happen to be working on a given day. The UC features don’t care if you are sitting at headquarters or in your home office–they just work.
At BroadSoft we’ve partnered with Microsoft to integrate with Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration Version 4.5, which allows users to work from virtually anywhere. We also recently introduced BroadWorkstm Connector for Lotustm Sametimetm –a powerful plug-in that enables enterprises to access BroadSoft’s IP telephony and unified communications capabilities from within IBM’s UC2 platform.
As I said last summer, I believe now is the time for video. A video conference is like being there. There are other important video business applications, as well. We’ve partnered with Polycom to launch a number of joint video solutions. Along the same lines we’ve also collaborated with Tandberg to launch new hosted video business solutions that providers can offer to their customers in an affordable, hassle-free service model.
At BroadSoft we personally experience the tremendous benefits of these communications options on a daily basis. Many of our employees work from remote locations, connecting to headquarters via the latest video phones using the latest Web-collaboration and document-sharing tools. These employees are virtually connected, allowing our global employee base to work as one.
I believe that there’s great opportunity for our service providers in helping companies implement telecommuting programs. The incentives are obvious: Telecommuting saves money, improves productivity and reduces the impact of commuting on the environment.
With all of the benefits available through UC today, maybe traffic on the Beltway won’t be so bad in 2050 after all.
Michael Tessler
Scott Hoffpauir
Leslie Ferry
Alex Doyle
Curtis Hartmann
Shirish Andhare
Paul Adams
