| Just as most people enjoy giving
gifts to friends and family around the holidays, I make it a point to
splurge a little on myself and buy a new gadget or electronic device. I
recently bought myself a DVD player, so I was thinking that buying a Palm
VII or a Pocket PC might be the way to go. I know, you're probably
wondering why on earth I don't have a PDA yet. Tell me about it! Something
else I considered was buying a Tivo or Replay personal recorder. These
devices allow you to record television shows, skip commercials, and pause
live television. Now wouldn't that make a nice addition to my home
entertainment center? I also heard that some people have taken apart their
Replay or Tivo units and actually installed the unit on their home
broadband network. This would allow them to watch recorded shows across
the Internet utilizing the native MPEG compression algorithms supported by
the units. That sounded like a fun holiday project for me!
So what does this have to do with "communications solutions?"
Well, in making my holiday shopping list, I remembered that this year I
planned to do 100 percent of my shopping online. I've written in the past
about the need for e-commerce sites to VoIP-enable their Web sites as well
as offer text chat, Web push, and other collaboration capabilities.
We've all heard the numbers about abandoned shopping carts, so there is
no use repeating them here. I was hoping that my favorite shopping portals
would have done their homework by now and offered some collaboration
capabilities, especially with so many companies offering ASP-model
communications solutions for e-commerce sites.
For example, eStara, HearMe, Lipstream, Net2Phone, and WebDialogs all
offer ASP-model VoIP services targeting e-commerce sites as well as
business-to-consumer relationships. Simply by pasting in some HTML code
that these vendors provide, you can start offering a click-to-talk button
on your Web site. In a matter of minutes you can VoIP-enable your site
with no need for customer premise equipment. Some of these companies also
offer Web push and text chat capabilities. With so many vendors designing
products to make it easy to deploy VoIP services, I was sure to find at
least one major shopping portal to offer such services.
KEEP YOUR CUSTOMERS ON THE CALL
Besides ASP-based VoIP products, there are also some new CPE-based
VoIP products targeting the business-to-consumer market. Softfront offers
a customer premise, hardware-based approach called KISARA. KISARA is an
H.323-based solution that has some key advantages over some of its
competitors. First, KISARA doesn't utilize NetMeeting, which typically
adds about 400 ms of latency. Instead Softfront utilizes their own applet,
which they've tested and claim only adds 90 ms of latency.
I saw a demo of their product in the lab over a dial-up connection that
connected at 48,000 Kbps. Even at this speed, the voice quality was superb
and latency was minimal. Second, the applet is only 650 K, which they
claim takes only about 10 seconds over dial-up. This is certainly key to
avoiding the customer from abandoning the call and thus their shopping
cart.
THE SKINNY ON THINAGENT.COM
I should point out that while VoIP is a useful addition to any
e-commerce site, there are also some interesting ASP-model contact center
solutions where VoIP is only one small subset among its features. I
recently met with ThinAgent.com and was very impressed with their product.
ThinAgent.com is a Web-based contact center solution that enables agents
to have a remote desktop utilizing Citrix technology. In addition,
ThinAgent's feature set includes intelligent skills-based contact queuing,
unified messaging, Web-delivered soft phone, screen pops, intelligent mail
queuing, real-time statistical reporting, chat, Web-callback, VoIP, fax,
Web collaboration, and more.
All you need to become a "ThinAgent" is a phone to dial into
a ThinAgent server (utilizing Direct Inward Switch Access) and Web access.
One of the unique features ThinAgent demonstrated to me was their advanced
queuing features. For instance, if a caller is dropped for whatever reason
(say it was a cell phone call that disconnected), then when the customer
calls back, the system tells the caller that they have retained their
position in queue. Talk about customer service! Also, ThinAgent will queue
abandoned calls to the first available agent for immediate contact.
There's a lot more to this product, so check them out at www.thinagent.com.
Several other companies offer ASP-model contact center solutions that
integrate voice, fax, e-mail, intelligent routing, and Web collaboration.
While there are too many to list, some companies you should check out
include EchoPass, Cygent,
eConvergent, Synchrony
Communications, and Telera.
In any event, during my holiday shopping spree, I did find a few sites
that offered text-based chat or a simple hyperlink to e-mail a question.
Unfortunately, none of my favorite online shopping sites offered Web call
through (VoIP) or even featured a Web call back button. Geez! That's too
bad, and I was really interested in buying the Toshiba TW65X81 65-inch
wide-screen 16:9 aspect ratio TV from an electronics dot-com Web site (who
shall remain nameless), but I had several questions, including the number
of video inputs, anti-glare coating, warranty, and more. Certainly, the
65-inch, 16:9 aspect ratio wide-screen television would have completed my
home theater ensemble. Alas, I could not pull the trigger (or click on the
Submit button in this case) and make the purchase because I had unanswered
questions. Easy-access customer service on e-commerce sites still has a
long way to go.
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