Last week I found myself trawling around various contact centre blog sites (here for example) and was quite surprised by the wide apprehension there still appears to be about the use of interactive technologies such as speech recognition and biometric speaker verification.
Actually, that's not really too surprising when you consider that many people still have a shrink-wrapped set-in-stone cast-iron opinion that basic touch-tone IVR is the devil in disguise. IVR can be done "right", but it so often isn't that it's no wonder people view something that's an order of magnitude (or even two) more expensive as being a significant risk.
I look at numerous business cases where the projected financial return on investment shows little if any acknowledgement of the fact that user adoption may be anything less than monumental. Spectacular uptake and adoption; people will call the service just because its fun. Nonsense. People change their behavior very seldom, and when they're "forced to" it can be uncomfortable.
There will always be a bell-curve of user adoption, and a temporal scale that shows a change of user behaviour (and ideally acceptance) over time. It's not rocket science to understand, and it will "scare" some people who chose not to pull back the covers, but talking about the potential business gains of technology is just not enough.
Not only is it not enough, it's simply not representative of the real world that we live in. Until people start to experiment with the application of technology, on real users, and openly discuss their positive and negative experiences - well, we simply won't get anywhere fast.
There is a time and a place for technology. More, there's a personal time and a place for technology, and understanding how to personalise system behaviour to meet individual peoples expectations and aspirations for service is a key to unlocking the true business benefit.
That's why we think our Concept Lab is such a great idea!
Thursday 28 August 2008
Monday 18 August 2008
Pies
Hello and welcome to the first HTK Blog!
What you'll find here is a reasonably eclectic mix of comment, observation and analysis, and I hope that you'll find some of it interesting enough to reply to. For those of you who haven't yet stumbled across www.htk.co.uk, let me explain in very brief terms what it is that we do.
We have fingers in two major pies;
The first pie is helping organisations to interact with their customers more effectively and at a lower cost. We call that "customer interaction management" and it typically spans the business functions of marketing and customer care, but the benefits of automated communication can be applied in a much broader sense for "communication-enabled business process". Typically there's a cost-saving benefit to the organisation, but that's not a 100% rule.
Our second, some would say much bigger pie, is helping telecom service providers to generate new revenue through value-added services, and to do that with the minimum of time, cost and risk. As a "hosted service delivery platform" we trawl the world looking for new consumer and business services that we believe in, and when we find one we host it and make it available for telecom service providers to sell on a white-label revenue-share basis. Rapid time-to-revenue, low cost and therefore low risk. Et voila.
Occasionally we combine the two pies into a pie-mashup (how very droll of me) i.e. we enable "hosted network services for customer interaction management" that can be sold by a telecom service provider to their customers, especially small businesses, on-demand. We believe that the market for telecom Software-as-a-Service is set to explode (not in a bad way) and we want to be right at the front of that wave.
Anyway, welcome again to the HTK Blog and I hope to speak to you soon.
Best regards,
Marlon Bowser
Managing Director,
HTK (http://www.htk.co.uk/)
What you'll find here is a reasonably eclectic mix of comment, observation and analysis, and I hope that you'll find some of it interesting enough to reply to. For those of you who haven't yet stumbled across www.htk.co.uk, let me explain in very brief terms what it is that we do.
We have fingers in two major pies;
The first pie is helping organisations to interact with their customers more effectively and at a lower cost. We call that "customer interaction management" and it typically spans the business functions of marketing and customer care, but the benefits of automated communication can be applied in a much broader sense for "communication-enabled business process". Typically there's a cost-saving benefit to the organisation, but that's not a 100% rule.
Our second, some would say much bigger pie, is helping telecom service providers to generate new revenue through value-added services, and to do that with the minimum of time, cost and risk. As a "hosted service delivery platform" we trawl the world looking for new consumer and business services that we believe in, and when we find one we host it and make it available for telecom service providers to sell on a white-label revenue-share basis. Rapid time-to-revenue, low cost and therefore low risk. Et voila.
Occasionally we combine the two pies into a pie-mashup (how very droll of me) i.e. we enable "hosted network services for customer interaction management" that can be sold by a telecom service provider to their customers, especially small businesses, on-demand. We believe that the market for telecom Software-as-a-Service is set to explode (not in a bad way) and we want to be right at the front of that wave.
Anyway, welcome again to the HTK Blog and I hope to speak to you soon.
Best regards,
Marlon Bowser
Managing Director,
HTK (http://www.htk.co.uk/)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
