Anana is really proud to have delivered 3 of the most prominent Genesys eServices Social Media enabled contact centre solutions anywhere in the European and African region over the last year or so. These include T-Mobile, Orange and Vodacom. We are also working on several others concurrently which are not quite ready for public attention! (More on these later!).

A very early requirement in these initial shipping releases was the ability of the customer services representative to originate new interactions to the customer over social media channels without requiring an existing OPEN interaction to respond against.

Anana’s first deliverable was a functional extension for Twitter Originate for Genesyslab 8.1 version on the Genesys Agent Desktop. This was then rewritten and rebuilt as a custom module for Genesys Interaction Workspace 8.1.200.xxx as described in video demo here in an earlier post.

We are now working quickly on another custom module for the Genesys Interaction Workspace 8.1 or higher releases that see’s the same underlying functionality and capability being extended to Facebook. This will allow the Customer Services Representative to create a new POST on the WALL or to add a new parent COMMENT to an existing topic thread in the absence of a parent interaction from an existing customer.

Whilst working quickly to realise these new functional capabilities within Genesys Social Engagement and the Social Messaging Server we work closely with Genesys Product Management and Engineering to effect the disclosure of the features and functions created so that they may be returned to the generic mainstream shipping products over time.

Tweet Originate is a custom Anana development for Genesyslab Interaction Workspace 8.1.200.16 on Genesys 8.1 with Social Messaging Server. It is a functional addition to the main shipping capabilities of Twitter as a media type for Social Media Customer Service. It allows Customer Services Representatives to conduct 3 typical additional functions in the following typical use cases;

1 – It allows the CSR to post an outbound tweet to the underlying Brand Twitter Account that doesn’t specifically target an individual customer
2 – It allows the CSR to initiate an outbound tweet to a new customer which has not yet interacted with Customer Services on the inbound side
3 – It allows the CSR to initiate an outbound tweet to a known existing customer

Use Case One
We have found our existing Genesys based customer deployments of Twitter required the ability for the Customer Services team to send a “Good Morning” or end of the shift tweet to their followers. Another use case could be a tweet to the timeline that recognises an event that touches a significant number of followers; for example, an Operating System Update available for their phones; or an outage or similar regional or national event.

Use Case Two
Could be triggered by a scenario where someone in another part of the business is very keen that someone in Customer Services reaches out to a customer who is talking about the Brand; but not directly at them. This form of escalation is quite common; where Customer Services may get an urgent request from Marketing or the Brand team to reach out to a Customer and offer assistance. “Could you please get one of the Customer Services team to reach out to Dave Tidwell @dave_t_pilot and assist him with the problem on his iPhone?”. In this case Dave may have been complaining bitterly about the device and/or the brand but not mentioned the brand directly. This is common too where your Genesys deployment is configured to pick up MENTIONS and Direct Messages but not to listen for keywords.

Use Case Three
Is typically triggered by a customer who might say “Okay, when you’ve got the answer from engineering can you please tweet me with the update?” The time lag between the original interaction and the subsequent response from the back-office could be minutes, hours, days or even weeks. Without Tweet Originate it is impossible for the agent to initiate a response to the customer as the previous interaction will have been closed.

The following video explores these 3 use cases in detail, completely narrated and described step by step.

All of the custom features included in this module are designed to fully harmonise and replicate usage of the Interaction Workspace by Agents on the inbound side. Some are subtle; for example, the lookup of the target customers KLOUT social influence score when the outbound tweet is initiated. This activity is conducted asynchronously so that a failure of score to return from KLOUT will not prevent the agent from doing the response; and will appear after the interaction has already been started. You’ll notice that perhaps in the video.

2011 has been a fantastic year for the Anana team. We have met all of our internal and external targets on all fronts. I couldn’t be happier! 2011 has been a year of incredible innovation and execution. In preparing ourselves to continue our activities into next year I thought I’d take a moment to capture the key-highlights of our year. Also, perhaps, the activities that have driven us through 2011 and a solid pointer into the momentum for 2012. I’ll try and end this piece with a forwards looking view to predictions for next year.

Anana delivers solutions across two main lines of business. Our first of course is our Enterprise Contact Centre solutions unit.  How has this unit performed this year?  Not ignoring our ‘business as usual’ integration work, here are a few of our key milestones in the year;

1. We delivered a global virtualised contact centre solution for a household Brand. The heart of it was a SIP based solution, featuring the Genesys Voice Platform. Powered by Nuance Speech recognition, the Anana Speech Applications Framework (for VoiceXML and driving the Speech Recognition) its key highlight was service offerings in 17 countries supporting 12 languages concurrently.  Truly trans-continental call manipulation and custom telephony desktop and computer telephony integration
2. Our Anana Briefing Centre (ABC), a £1.4 Million (Sterling) investment went from concept to reality. The ABC is a state of the art demonstration and workshop facility that has allowed Anana, our partners and in some cases our ‘competitors’ to “Show” rather than “Tell” the 21st Century Customer Interaction Management capability of Genesys.  I think the most remarkable testament to the validity of the ABC is that our shortest lifecycle from first-view of the “Art of the Possible” to contract award for a large Bank in the Middle-East, who even flew all the way to the Centre for a Saturday workshop was 6 weeks!  By far though, the most telling thing that it has done, is to give our existing, as well as knew clients the confidence they need to proceed; and the ability to do so in record time-frames. Contact Centre projects are typically 18 months long; even in the pre-sales and sales lifecycle. 2011 saw our customers engaging, buying and deploying in weeks!  A high confidence in execution and delivery is a good place to begin new ways to engage!
3. We delivered the first Genesys Social Engagement projects in Europe, both with Tier 1 service providers that saw the first phases of true cross channel and multi-channel customer service go from concept to reality, including web-chat, email, Facebook and Twitter as customer service capabilities beyond inbound and outbound voice. We then went on to win a 3rd engagement in as many weeks with a Bank for the same blended eServices and Multichannel Customer Service capability.  Most remarkably we were asked to deliver one of these solutions, on premise for a Pilot in only 10 days.  We did it!  One of them is delivered in a hybrid Cloud; with Anana running all the technology, yet providing Desktop based access to Genesys Interaction Workspace over Xenapp.  Very cool stuff.
4. We delivered new mobile applications that bring customer services directly to the consumer smart-phone; including some cool concepts like reversing the role of the Contact Centre wallboard; showing customers how many agents were available for each media type so the customer could chose the means of engaging that made most sense and avoided delay.  This delivered customer service efficiency for both the customer and the customer services team.  A true win:win situation. The mobile app featured customer initiated ‘please call me back’, live text-chat and the ability for the customer themself to review their entire cross channel interaction history with their provider in real time.
5. We extended Genesys Social Engagement with several new features including Social Influence scoring and originate Tweet from the agent desktop without requiring a customer interaction and manipulated the Genesys solution to support Arabic language for Social Media interactions. Coolest use case derived was using Social Influence scores determined in eServices transactions to route Voice calls based not only on the assigned customer segment in Voice but their underlying Social Influence.  Let this be a sign of things to come!
6. We delivered new innovation in a hybrid self and assisted service customer service application for SMS.  A customer would interact with an automated Knowledge Management (FAQ) system by asking a question in SMS. If the customer then responds to the suggested response with another question, we take the ‘history’ of the self service interaction and offer the customer the opportunity to chat with an agent.  The customer continue’s to engage via SMS, but Anana technology takes those SMS interactions and delivers them to “web-chat” agents in the contact centre.  This is a twisted cross-channel conversation of course! The CSR is on a web-chat interface, and the customer is on an SMS interface; yet both can chat happily back and forth! This is an exciting blended technology capability; allowing the Enterprise to train once for Web-Chat in customer service, but extend other media through the same interface.  Not a big deal when you have to train 5 agents of course! But, what about the overhead if your busy hour team is 9000 agents strong?
7. We concluded our first Social Media and Customer Services contracted Business Consulting project that is already delivering the execution foundation for a significant project for one of our partners in early 2012.  This is new ground within the Genesys partner, Value Added Reseller (VAR) and Systems Integration Market.
8. We won some very large contracts in ongoing Mission Critical Customer Service platform and solutions support that give our customers assurance of Customer Service solutions availability 24x7x365 – the key thing is these mission critical support contracts are about yesterdays legacy technology support whilst in evolution to IP and SIP and Anana support operation has a hand on both at the same time.  Our customers are crossing the PSTN/TDM to SIP valley.  Anana is the bridge that is helping them to cross safely and with surety
9. We completed a very nice high-net-worth banking integration for one of the UK’s most prestigious Banks that integrated 1990′s mainframe with 2010 customer service platforms. Boy, I’d so love to say who it was for and why!
10. The Anana team stood side-by-side with Genesys and Alcatel-Lucent showcasing, demonstrating and tackling industry analysts and events all most if not all Contact Centre events in all themes eServices and Social Media related.  This included a humbling invite to showcase Genesys’ own technology to its European sales teams in Cannes in late summer.  That for me is the strongest vote of confidence in thought and market leadership with some of these leading themes.

In the service provider and Carrier Telecommunications business we had a great year too!

• Anana was selected out of the entire ecosystem of global “Applications Enablement” partners to assist Alcatel-Lucent at the IMS World Forum in Barcelona. It is an absolute honour for Anana to be aiding and abetting €17Billion company in showcasing their own capabilities to Global Audiences
• We completed the integration for its4u – the Anana Social Media and Voice Mail solution that links the dial-tone at the voice messaging event with the subscribers voice prompts.  Replacing the old and rather stagnant Voice Mail experience with one where the caller hears the latest Social Media updates of the mailbox owner before leaving a message.  This is a hybrid solution using Anana speech applications framework and the Genesys Voice Platform, Nuance Speech Recogntion, Ivona Text-to-Speech and the Converged Messaging System (CMS) and Messaging Applications Broker from Alcatel-Lucent.
• Anana has been formally selected by Alcatel-Lucent as an applications partner for innovation with the Converged Telephony System, the CTS (5420) and the IP Multimedia Subsystem with Alcatel-Lucents Agility API sets.  We are working closely together to showcase extreme innovation in manipulation and subscriber controlled telephony with integrated Voice User Interface, Graphical User Interface (web 2.0) that will be shown to the world for the first time at Mobile World Congress early next year.  This is really exciting stuff, but can’t talk about it too much yet!  Again we are offering a hybrid technical solution that uses the best in breed core Carrier equipment in the IMS core from Alcatel-Lucent, with the Genesys Voice Platform (for media in VoiceXML and call control in CC-XML).  Imagine a web2.0 dashboard with all your friends in it; like your own social dashboard. Click and drag your friends onto the ‘conference table’ and you’ll all be instantly on your own conference party line.  Sound Cool?  That’s just a small snippet out of the technology we are building in this space.

Looking ahead to 2012

Should I be bold and predict what I think are going to be the key things going on in the Contact Centre markets in 2012?  Perhaps; let’s see how accurate these turn out to be;

• Permira acquisition of Genesys Telecommunications labs will manifest itself through intense market engagement and focus on the key current drivers in Customer Service. These will be;
• Intense investment in Mobile Applications for Customer Service and Customer Interaction Management as such a high proportion of the consumer markets are now armed with smart devices
• eServices power-play for email, SMS, web-chat, web-callback and Social Media to rapidly evolve. Why? I think the Enterprise will learn very quickly in 2012 that they have to listen and engage WHERE their customers are trying or preferring to reach them, and secondly, they have to LISTEN and ENGAGE where customers are talking ABOUT them – both of these will work in harmony to force the enterprise to offer a holistic and channel intenstive customer service capability
• We will see a general increased focus on the role for customer services and customer care as it relates to Social Media as a paradigm. The enterprise will recognise for its full effect the “New Voice of the Customer”. 2011 saw the early adopters begin to define best practice and physical and technical capability to execute. 2012 will be the year where the rest of the market realises how far behind they are falling and how fast they will have to move to catch up. Not as a special business practice; but as a wholly and deeply integrated customer service capability in the core of the incumbent customer operation
• Twitter will relax their 1000 tweets a day and 250 direct messages a day limits for certain enterprise entities – making it possible for BRANDS to offer customer service on Twitter. 2011 saw the Enterprise facing a tough problem. 100,000 customers are tweeting at us with customer service queries but I can only respond to a maximum of 300 an hour, and even then only 1000 in any 24 hours.  This is a huge problem in late 2011 for those engaging in “Social Customer Service” and I hope and trust that Twitter will offer BRANDS the ability to execute in 2012
• Facebook will be less about BRAND broadcast and become more a platform to ‘engage’ with the customers who “LIKE” the brand
• Google+ likely to become the second Social Platform
• Our customers will be asking us to integrate YouTube and YouTube comments into customer care
• Anana is going to spend a lot of time and energy helping the Enterprise align and bring together the three key drivers of “customer engagement’
• Marketing & the Brand
• Online and Digital Strategy
• Customer Operations, Customer Service and Customer Care

On that note, Merry Christmas to to all our Customers, Partners and friends, and best wishes for 2012! If 2012 is only half as wild as 2011 it will still be a great year! Let’s see how the predications shape out through the year!

Studying the relationship between KLOUT and PEERINDEX

We are now regularly deploying Social Media enabled contact center solutions. In these solutions a key functional deliverable is the ability of the Genesys Contact Centre Solution to be able to measure the social influence of the customer, and attach this data, as a score, to the inbound interaction.  With this data, alongside the measurement of Actionability (what can be done about it), Sentiment (how positive or negative is it) and Classification (what is the interaction about?) we are able to apply significant logic to the routing strategy.  The ability to decide what is important, and how to establish a priority for an interaction is an extremely powerful addition to any customer service paradigm of course.

We have seen two common social-influence scoring engines; both of which offer readily accessible API’s for the developer to integrate the score into any scenario.  We have been working with @klout and @peerindex scoring mechanisms for some time now. Our customers are now beginning to ask us whether or not there is a significant difference in how Klout or Peerindex measure social-influence.  Now, there are literally hundreds of blogs that already discuss this question, so I am not going to attempt to replicate all of that content.  What I am interested in is “Can I see a parallel relationship between increase or decrease in a score in one system being reflected in the other?”. In other words, if I increase my social activity for Period X I should see my associated score on Y increase.  Can I see the same effective (within reason) increase on the other engine?

To this end, I have created a simple XML (REST) based lookup to each of the associated API’s for my own Twitter Account @dave_t_pilot and I interrogate the API for the latest score in very regular periods.  I am looking for a range of things essentially;

• Evidence that slowing down social-activity online affects both scores
• Evidence that increasing social-activity online affects both scores
• Relative stability in the scores over a period of weeks or longer
• Consistency in the returned results from the API
• Appreciable parallel impact on scores as they change. In other words, can I see both pointers moving together?

The Live Graph

The graph below is real-time.  Place your mouse near the bottom right hand corner of the graph display and select your preferred update frequency.  Once I have about 3 months of data I will publish a second set of graphs based on the 95th percentile over the period, where it may be a lot clearer how both engines are behaving.  I will continually update this post with key dates/times of increased or decreased social activity.  If you cannot see a graph below please REFRESH your browser; the monitoring graphs are in a frame that is sometimes missed by the blog engine.

First Interim Results – Day 15 of the Study

Note – I have scheduled a lookup against the API’s in both cases to run once every 5 minutes, 24 hours a day for the report period.

Klout Results

• Klout API responded to a lookup request 12,885 times to the score lookup (99.115%)
• Klout API failed to respond to the lookup request 115 times (0.885%)
• Klout – monitoring uptime of the API – 99.691% and downtime of 0.309% (unavailable for a total of  1 hour and 10 seconds over the periods of attempted access)

Peerindex Results

• Peerindex API responded to a lookup request 12,822 times to the score lookup (97.811%)
• Peerindex API failed to respond to the lookup request 287 times (2.189%)
• Peerindex – reported monitoring update of the API – 99.646% and downtime of 0.354% (unavailable for a total of 1 hour, 8 minutes and 49 seconds over the periods of attempted access)

Social Network Usage in the Period

• Twitter – routine use whilst avoiding un-typical use behaviour. I engaged with the timeline in the routine and normal manner
• Facebook – routine use, typically only work related and generates little comment or feedback (I kept it this way on purpose)
• LinkedIn – routine use
• Blogs – I kept activity on the blog to a minimum and posted no new feed updates

Score Appraisal

• Klout reports scores to 2 decimal places.  Throughout the period of observation the lowest score received was 44.08, highest recorded was 45.63. The average score reported was 44.53. Given the nature of social media usage these results are expected.
• Peerindex reports scores to nearest integer. Throughout the scoring period the score moved between 48 and 49, with most reported scores at 48.

Anomoly Results

Anana has been quite busy over the summer deploying and realising Social Media solutions on Genesys. During the course of these projects we have enjoyed working closely with our customers on use cases, and scenario’s in which they would like to use the technology.  A more recent development is the concept of treating social media interactions as conversations rather than transactions in the form of individual interactions.

What we have certainly noted with some of our clients is that their customers actually treat Twitter differently than originally intended.  Rather than sending in a single request, that recognises the limited real-estate (character count) in a standard tweet, a user may type 3 tweets in rapid succession that target the Enterprise in rapid succession.  In order for these tweets to arrive into Customer Operations in a meaningful way we had to think of ways to deal with the scenario.

The standard, out of the box capability in Genesys (as of Genesys 8.1.1)  is ‘interaction based’. In other words, each tweet is treated distinctly, and is routed and targetted to a skilled agent distinctly.  This is fine in any use case where the customer does not Power Tweet, or indeed, use a Twitter LONG web-service that turns a long utterance into a series of tweets.

If a user sends, say, 3 tweets in rapid succession (or a longtweet that is turned into 3 of appropriate length), and these 3 tweets are picked up by the social media server in the next POLL interval, then Tweet 1 may go to Agent 1, Tweet 2 may go to Agent 3, and Tweet 3 may go to Agent 2.  As a whole, the ‘conversation’ could still be reviewed by any of these targeted agents by using the ‘interaction history’. At best though, this may result in the FIRST tweet in thread being the owned tweet, and the other two agents having to go through consultation with each other to FORWARD the other tweets that formed part of that conversation directly to the now, newly owning interaction Agent.  Sound complex?  It can be!  In simple terms, why target 3 agents with a single LONG Tweet that spans 3 interactions, when it could be easier to simply target all 3 of them at the same time to a single agent, in the right order.  That consideration gave us time to think about, what will happen if a few seconds later the subscriber tweets again?  Where should that tweet go?  A new agent, or take the first agent as the preferred agent and send it straight into that interaction?  Sounds a bit like Web Chat does it not?

Genesys has done an incredible job of offering the maturity in social engagement that is evident in the 8.1 release and we are working closely on the types of use cases cited above with Genesys Product Management, Engineering across eServices and the Interaction Workspace on identifying and documenting these new use cases so that they can be captured and become part of the roadmap where approved.

To test out the use case scenario we are discussing, our Platform Practice Team went ahead and built a new Social Media driver for Genesys based on the STREAMING API, which allows us to listen in real-time for any activity on our ABC Company Wall (in the Anana Briefing Centre) and immediately target that to an agent.  Once targetted, any subsequent tweets from that subcriber in timeframe X would be targetted to the same agent; effectively treating the interaction the same way the use-cases for Web Chat have already proven themselves against.

The video below shows the Anana manipulation of a new Driver for the Social Media Server, with Real Time Streaming API, targetted to the Genesys Strategy as a Web-Chat.  This is a basic proof of concept and would require a lot more work.  For now, it shows how useful it could be in certain use-case scenario’s where your customers want to treat social media streams of communication as near real time channels.  Please turn on the CC (Closed Captions) option, and go full screen for best viewing.  Best viewed in HD format of course if your bandwidth will allow it.

Do you think a conversational mode for interaction management in social engagement has a role to play in Customer Services?  Our clients currently think so!