Nortel Asia is running around New Zealand this week giving its take on unified communications. Speaker Darren Leffler, a veteran of the TUANZ circuit, hails from Sydney, and is accompanied by colleague Steve Harris from Melbourne.
There are a lot of messages in Leffler’s presentation which I found rich in insight. To me it lifted the case for unified communications to a new level. Check here for more on UC.
He talked a lot about the notion of “human latency” – the delays caused by people’s unavailability or slowness to act. The challenge in businesses is to reduce this. When phoning other people you typically get a voicemail 70% of the time – a figure that surprised me until I thought about it, but its true. The multiplicity of devices, numbers, addresses and inboxes actually inhibit communication and add to human latency rather than help the situation. That’s where Unified Communications comes in – it can help reduce human latency by combining instant messaging, mobiles, email and all the other technologies to bring people together with a minimum of delay.
With the GFC ( yes – new acronym – Global Financial Crisis) the mantra is doing more with less. And that has led CIOs, contact centre managers and others to focus on improving business processes, a task that has been identified as the number one preoccupation of CIOs in the current climate.
Darren spoke at length about the notion of “click to talk” – the concept of being able to push a button to talk to a live operator during a self service on-line transaction. I remember seeing early research on this ten years ago and its good that it is now here and in the market. SOA or Service Orientated Architecture, another new acronym, uses click to talk as a major enabler of its products. Its fundamentally changing the way business applications are designed, built and delivered.
There’s a whole lot more detail in the Nortel presentation. You need to hear it directly to really grasp the concepts. Darren was in Christchurch yesterday and is speaking here in Wellington as I write this. There’s still time to register tomorrow in Hamilton or Friday in Auckland. Its an excellent presentation and well worth a couple of hours out.
Thanks, Nortel, for your ongoing support of the TUANZ Contact Centre Networking programme. And everyone can be assured that in the Asia Pacific region Nortel is very much a going concern.