Unified Communications

Customer Satisfaction Software

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I took a vacation day Friday because after a very busy couple of months at work, I just needed some free time outside to clear my head, think, and to not do the day-to-day stuff.  I went for an easy run in the morning, took my wife out to lunch and then played music, worked on a few projects and just relaxed.  It was a very satisfying day.

The reason I've been so busy lately is that at Gold Systems our newest product, Vonetix 7, is starting to get a LOT of attention, both from customers and partners.  I've been traveling and doing demos, working with sales people on new opportunities, and spending a lot of time at my white-board-wall sketching out how all the pieces fit together.   The product is already deployed at some very, very large enterprises and is continuing to evolve.  It's different from anything in use today, though it is replacing old systems and architectures that have been in place for a long time.  My challenge has been to describe what the product is as simply as possible.

Saturday morning, I woke up at 6:00 AM, wide awake, with the words "Customer Satisfaction Software" rolling around in my head.   I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I got up and decided to write it down.

My career has been about helping people communicate, and generally it has been about helping large companies or government organizations communicate with their customers.  In the beginning it was people calling companies on the telephone, and I remember when "improving customer service" meant eliminating busy signals and answering calls twenty-four hours a day.  It meant reducing the amount of  time a customer had to spend listing to bad music while being told over and over again how important they were. 

Call Centers became Contact Centers as they started handling emails and then web chats.  TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms)  were everywhere – ACD, IVR, CRM, SEO, PBX, TXT, ICR.  Some of the technology worked together, but most didn't, and what started out as a customer service initiative became an exercise in customer annoyance. 

As I woke up this morning the thought was running through my head that we DON'T need more customer contact software, or worse, customer management software, we need customer SATISFACTION software.  Even that's not quite right, because we are always going to need people in the equation, but it's a start.  Vonetix 7 is customer satisfaction software.  I like it!

Lync in real life

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There are a lot of case studies about how people might use Microsoft Lync, but here is a real story of how it made my life easier just this morning.

I was working on a demo this morning and needed some help from IT.  Normally I would open a ticket by sending an email to our help desk, but in this case I knew that Ned was the guy who could help me.  I could see by his status in Lync that he was available, so I IM'd him.

Available 

The following IM conversation occurred:

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Terry Gold [10:25 AM]:

Hi Ned – I'm starting to work on a new demo, similar to the Personal Attendant, but this time it will be a tech support line demo.  Is it OK if I add it to the web server on gsi-sc?

Ned [10:25 AM]:

Sure, no problem

Terry Gold [10:26 AM]:

OK, thanks.  Hopefully this will be easy.  🙂

Terry Gold [10:58 AM]:

Hi Ned, we'll I'm stuck adding the application to the IIS server.  Do you have a minute to point me in the right direction?

Ned  [10:58 AM]:

Sure

Terry Gold [10:58 AM]:

want to go to voice?

Ned  [10:59 AM]:

Sure

——————-

At the beginning of the IM above, I told Ned that I was working on a new demo and I got his permission to add the new application to the server.  Thirty-two minutes later I ran into trouble.  At 10:58, I went back to the same IM window and asked if he could help.  Ned had been off doing something else, but he had the context of our earlier conversation in front of him.  It turns out that Ned was working from home today, but it didn't matter, we connected as if he was just down the hall.

I thought it would be easier to tell Ned what I had tried rather than typing it into the IM window, so I asked him if he wanted to go to voice.  He said yes, and I clicked the Call button, highlighted in yellow in this clip of the Lync communicator.

Call 

A moment later we were talking, all without looking up or dialing any numbers.  Lync just found him and connected our conversation and it was much better than cell phone quality.  Ned didn't have to tell me his home phone number or even say that he wasn't in the office.  It just worked.

I told Ned what I had tried, and what wasn't working for me with the demo, and he decided he wanted to see what I was seeing so he asked if I could share my desktop.  I clicked the Share button, and gave him a view of my first screen (I have two – I could have also just allowed him to see a single application or both screens.)

Share 

Ned could see my desktop, but I wanted him to be able to control it, so I offered him control and he accepted with two button clicks.  Then I sat back and watched him explore what I had done.  He quickly found the problem, fixed it and we disconnected.

Connected 
You can see that we connected at 10:59 and disconnected at 11:13.  It really didn't even take 14 minutes to connect, give him control and then have him fix the problem, because we spent some time talking about the weekend and how cool it was that Lync made this so painless.  Ned told me this scenario happens about five times a day where someone IMs him, he goes to voice, and then they share their desktop and he solves their problem.

Here's the point of Unified Communications – I could have IM'd him with any IM client.  Then I could have picked up the phone and called his home number.  Then we could have used some desktop sharing application.  But with Lync, it is all right there and it works with just a couple of clicks.  THAT is Unified Communications.

We're a small company, so multiply this scenario about 100 or 1,000 and the savings really add up for a large enterprise.  And that's just what you get when you install the basic infrastructure.  At Gold Systems we're starting to build applications on top of Lync that are really cool.  And I'll show that to you as soon as I get my demo done. 

 

 

Interview with W3W3 about Conference Server

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Last week Larry Nelson from w3w3 dropped by the office to interview me about Gold Systems' new Conference Server product that's based on the Microsoft Office Communications Server.  We talked about the new product, but I tried to not turn it into a commercial and spent a fair amount of time talking about what we're doing to make it easier for companies to say "yes" to new purchases.  Now more than ever as entrepreneurs we've got to take the risk out of purchases.  In the interview I listed a few specific things to do and talked about how the new product was designed to be "easy to buy."

I can't seem to find a permalink at w3w3.com, but the interview is on the page for August 2009 and shouldn't be too hard to find.  There is a picture of me in front of my bookcase and speech-enabled crank phone.  By the way, has anyone ever seen Larry without a camera?  He likes to joke that one source of revenue for w3w3 is people paying to have their pictures removed, but I'd have to say he's a pretty good photographer.

You can also read the w3w3 blog at http://w3w3.blogs.com/

Thanks Larry, it's always fun to talk to you!

Microsoft OCS 2007 R2 Virtual Launch event today

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OCS 2007 Virtual Launch Microsoft is officially launching Office Communications Server 2007 R2 today.  If you want to attend the virtual launch, go here and register.  Be sure and stop by the Gold Systems booth.  We won't be able to give you the chocolate gold coins that we usually have at trade shows, but hey, you didn't have to fly half-way across the country either, right?  With travel budgets being slashed, I'm really curious to see how a virtual launch works for people.  While I was writing this, the launch officially opened.

A big part of the OCS experience is in communicating better with people when you can't just sit down face to face.  I'm getting more done with less hassles, and the company is saving money.

I wrote about the savings that we're actually experiencing with the new release on the Gold Systems blog - it's over $3,000 a month, and I expect that to go to maybe $6,000 a month once we disconnect our old voice T1s and POTs lines.  And we're a small company – our customers will save a lot more.

I see the press releases are starting to hit – our good partner Polycom just mentioned us in one of their press releases.

Update #1:  I just heard that Gold Systems was mentioned in the keynote address.  Like most trade shows, I was unable to attend the keynote, but with this show, I'll be able to go back and watch it later.

Update #2:  Here's the link to the post I wrote on the Gold Systems blog about our actual cost savings.

Update #3:  Here's our own press release in the wild.

Update #4:  Mitchell Ashley just did an update post on his Network World blog about the R2 release and what this means for the enterprise.