So what if IT won…it still has to work, right?
Remember Datamation’s voice & data are like oil & water cover from Spring of ‘86? What a difference a quarter of a century makes. Just ask Nortel or AT&T or even Cisco! Where am I going with this? Technological schizophrenia.
Datacomm and data networks are truly wonderful things. They remind me of the analog computers of my misspent youth in the subbasement of Tech - all those wires (think patch cords) going all over the place. But I digress.
By telecom standards, data networks win ugly. Stuff goes bad by design and the network simply fills in around it, no problem. But telecom always had a different approach. Telecom was all about 2 hours of downtime over 40 years (http://www.greatachievements.org/?id=3639), i.e., the telecom network always had to work. None of this fall down & get up & fix itself stuff. Hence the arrogance of all us telecom types over the last few decades. We looked at IT encroaching on our domain, shook our heads & rolled our eyes and said customers just won’t put up with that kind of performance. Voice communications must be inherently reliable, but data networks are built to fail and recover. Dial tone comes from God. They’re just plain incompatible. Period.
So what happened? Cell phones. They weren’t a big deal 20 years ago when they weighed 3 pounds, you needed a bag to haul them around, they had an antenna that stuck up 6 inches, and they cost $3 a minute to use when you could find coverage under you carrier or plan. But cell phones softened everyone up over time…changed everyone’s expectations. In exchange for convenience, customers accommodated what was, by classic telecom standards, unacceptably lousy performance. And now everyone has one.
So what’s that mean to us in the contact center industry? Can we slacken our standards to meet the lowered expectations of cell phone customers familiar with networks that go up & down like yoyos and conversations that periodically turn to hash & evaporate?
I don’t think so. In fact, we have to take it up a notch!
Why? Customer expectations about the reliability and integrity of “stuff” on our end really haven’t changed. With their end so unreliable, we in the voice world have to compensate on the contact center end of the call.
Just thinking about voice apps on an IT-managed infrastructure using IP gives me chills. But that is of course where we come in. IQ Services represents the conscience of telecom professionals past. We’re the “2-hours of downtime over 40 years” people looking over the CIOs’ shoulders and helping them deliver networks that live up to customer expectations of what voice – and web – self-service should be. That is…solutions that are always available and work well 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
Just like Ma Bell always said it should be – no matter who’s minding the store.
Telecom’s still telecom, even if it has been homogenized. It still has to work. Period. Even if there’s no such thing as dial tone any more.
For those of you who didn’t mind the earlier digression, take a peak at these:
http://www.sys-bio.org/sbwWiki/_media/sysbio/labmembers/hsauro/vs-heathkit-ec-1-analog-computer.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdu/94291699/
Mike Burke
