1. Nortel is in a highly competitive IP market with many other companies. How do you differentiate yourselves from competitors such as Avaya, Cisco, and Nuasis
Nortel differentiates us in our expertise, award winning, pioneering designs for solutions that range from very small through to very large in an IP world. We have introduced Expert Anywhere which uses all the multimedia collaboration offered by SIP to leverage on the strengths of IT, to optimize their business performance and produce value-driven results. Our services deliver a total solution package designed to meet our clients' complete business and technology needs.
The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for initiating interactive communication sessions such as voice, video, and chat between users finally enables diverse technology to work with each other. As a global IS/IT company, it is important for us to work with many vendor products and technologies to serve our client.
Expert Anywhere is a unique solution that gets the caller to the knowledgeable expert wherever located within the business, not just the formal call center agent. For example, a second level tech support person, or a Financial Manager may be required. Their presence and availability will be known so the call can be directed to the knowledgeable expertise the first time.
Nortel's has shipped more IP Telephony than any other company worldwide making us a preferred vendor and we are the industry leader in SIP. We have been delivering a SIP based application server for over two years.
Nortel’s rock solid Contact Center and Self-Service solutions are very scalable, more reliable, and more secure than many of our competitors. We believe strongly in making them simpler to use, providing more cost effective solutions to our customers. We are improving on this even further with the evolution to the Nortel Application Center which is driving to offer a comprehensive, open application suite that will seamlessly integrate across customer contact, self-service, unified messaging and multimedia collaboration. Using standards like VoiceXML, CCXML and SIP, Nortel offers enterprises superior flexibility - which ultimately makes them more competitive and creates a break-thru customer experience. Agents can now be located anywhere utilizing the full spectrum of 'customer touch' solutions and users can access messages from PDA's and other e-mail enabled devices - assuring optimum mobility for the anytime, anywhere, any device business model.
Our approach lets customers implement IP Telephony where and when they choose. Customers want to evolve to IP and take advantage of its many benefits when their back-end infrastructure is cost effective to move forward. They are not forced to throw out many years and many thousand’s of dollars of investment in their business applications. It’s the best of both worlds.
2. What percentage of your IP implementations are "pure"? What percentage is an evolvement from leveraging a customer’s current technology to IP? What trends do you anticipate In the near future?
Pure IP is still a smaller percentage, but it is picking up steam. Most new systems are always pure IP. Most installed customers create a hybrid solution that builds upon their installed applications and networks.
The trend toward virtualization or agents at home is accelerating the move to pure IP.
3. Nortel provides solutions for many functions, i.e. multi channel, IP, monitoring, within the contact center. What are Nortel’s main areas of focus? What are Nortel’s major areas of success?
We introduced Contact Center 6.0 which brings together additional functionality including a comprehensive suite of open, SIP-based contact center and self-service solutions, combined with the real-time collaborative multimedia capabilities available on the Nortel MCS 5100. Nortel Contact Center 6.0 eliminates the boundaries of traditional contact centers by allowing businesses to deploy multimedia SIP-enabled agents anywhere. Web, chat, voice, video are available to the caller and the agent from a single unified desktop client. Administration tools are unified to provide simplified access and management across the contact center, unified messaging, and Self-Service solution.
We are using the strategy of Nortel Application Center as a guiding principal for our future roadmap. Contact center, unified messaging and multi media collaboration enables you to get a holistic view whether it is the call flow, web, chat, IVR, or speech recognition. The integration of unified tools simplifies management, speeds up implementation, and ensures the caller gets the information they need the first time. It provides a more agile business model to manage time, distance and relationships. These dynamics are driving the need for effective communications solutions that erase boundaries and enhance collaboration.
Our success is really uniquely positioned because we are very strong in all these areas including contact center self-service messaging, and business communications and we are global. Nortel’s extensive recognition in the past 18 months includes IP Contact Center Technology Pioneer Award (March 2005) by Customer Inter@ction Solutions, "Leader" in most recent Gartner Magic Quadrants: Contact Center Infrastructure, IVR & Voice Portals, Unified Communications, among many others as highlighted on our web pages.
4 . From an overall contact center market perspective, what are biggest changes that you have seen in this environment over the past year?
The use of standards based development tools such as VoiceXML and CCXML is finally showing traction. Our Nortel Applications Center is focused to take full advantage of this trend. Nortel Applications Center prepares us to offer true multi-modal and integrated application design that takes the customer from one touch point to another.
SIP is a key focus! (People have learned how to spell SIP). VoIP is becoming very popular as long as you use SIP as the signaling protocol. We have seen that H.323 is not really going anywhere as a result. One of the surprises was the slow take-off for IP with IVR and Contact Center over the last 3 years. The cost to lose existing investment in TDM applications if a total switch-out was made to IP lead to hybrid IP systems preserving the functionality of TDM applications. Customers were not quite ready to throw everything out yet, because signaling was not always there to support them. For example, ACD queuing on the switch side of a traditional PBX for the Call Centers is an advantage that may not necessarily be there on the IP side. We see definite momentum building, but the market still has not caught up with the technology available yet.
5. Please comment on Nortel’s direction in the near future from a technology perspective.
In the work-place we will see real-time multimedia soft-clients (audio, video) becoming integrated into business applications and collaboration tools. While telephony clients will support more multimedia and presence based capabilities enabled by SIP.
On the home-front there is the potential to see SIP integration into consumer/home electronics devices such as multimedia servers/players, playing PC based multimedia content on a TV or a home theater - using SIP to negotiate sessions as well as the integration with IM and telephony features.
Nortel is very focused on open architecture and design and we take this one step even further with the Nortel Application Center that incorporates SIP, Video, web, chat, email, human contact touch points and automated Self-Service and Unified Messaging in a single solution.
We are also building IMS/MRF interfaces for our carrier solutions that enable new services (current and future) that the Internet provides to be able to execute all their services when roaming, as well as from their home networks. These goals are achieved with open standard IP protocols, defined by the IETF. Multimedia sessions between two IMS users, between an IMS user and a user on the Internet, and between two users on the Internet is established using exactly the same protocol based on IP protocols. IMS truly merges the Internet with the cellular world using cellular technologies to provide ubiquitous access and Internet technologies.
6. What are the "hot" areas of interest in the contact center, i.e. self service, analytics, customer retention?
Voice is still the most preferred method for a customer to get to the correct answer point, whether it’s to a human or a Self-Service application. Today, natural language understanding and call steering is improving the contact center’s main goal to answer the caller quickly and provide the correct answer on the first try. We have reached the apex where the business drivers have met the cost points and natural language is becoming a common consideration as part of the solution.
Furthermore, the "virtualized" nature of IP networking means that agent staffing can be much more flexible, for call coverage, Expert coverage, skill-based routing, follow-the-sun routing, and offshoring/nearshoring giving you a lot more options when trying to optimize your human resources.
The new analytics again, is an area where IP’s natural advantages shine. Being able to integrate business systems with the contact center via IP could help produce more complete results in new analytics to prove the ROI and reward success where it is achieved such as the agent skills, communications savings, and customer satisfaction improvements. The ability to use all of this disparate information together is known as contact center analytics. Nortel provides this integrated data via its "Business Reporting Portal." We acknowledge that analytics capabilities still tend to be homegrown, and aren’t yet coming out as part of ERP packages. But the business will get a tremendous step up as usage becomes more prevalent and they are brought into the regular reports that contact center managers use to run their operations. Nortel Expert Anywhere taps the expertise where and when it needs to improve upon that goal.
Looking further out, being device independent is the next big thing. Self Service applications started as DTMF, menu driven applications with multi-level menus to complete a task. As the Self Service applications interfaced with more data (TCP/IP, CTI, databases, XML), the applications became more complex. Speech became the next evolution to reduce the complexity. Technologies such as voice recognition, speaker verification, natural language allow the users to interface with the Self Service application in a natural and efficient manner. The next step in Self Service will be more of a revolution, than an evolution. Applications will no longer be traditional IVR applications. They will include Speech, Video, and Chat and will involve multiple devices. The Self Service platform will emerge as a multimodal portal to allow users to interact to an application with the device of their choice. I can envision most traditional IVR applications being offered via a chat session. The user would initiate a chat by posing a question. Using technologies such as Natural Language Understanding, the text can be parsed to determine "meaning". The answer can then be retrieved from an external source and the Self Service application can "respond" via a chat session.
7. What are biggest challenges that Nortel faces in the next 12 months?
Our business transformation efforts are part of making Nortel an easier company with which to do business. Customers will see the end result of simplified processes, uniform tools, cross-functional collaboration, and quality that’s built into the beginning of a product’s lifecycle, among other benefits. This is our roadmap for building investor value and a great company.
We will continue to focus our efforts on developing those market segments where we can be successful. And we will be recognized for outstanding quality and predictability in the delivery of solutions that provide customer value.
Nortel will continue to support new standards and multi-vendor interoperability, and we will continue to focus on enabling secure communications while enhancing the mobility of our solutions to extend feature support across a host of end user devices.