By Nick Fera
Chairman and CEO
“Unified communications” seems to be on everyone’s lips. You need look no further than TMC (News - Alert) itself, which has just announced a magazine dedicated to the subject. Unified communications (UC) involves converging, both technically and conceptually, all the various communication and collaboration modes in the typical organization, including voice, video, email, web conferencing, chat and document sharing.
Unified communications promises to bring order to the chaos of disjointed communications modes that are typically managed piecemeal and selected arbitrarily for each business task. To that end, unified communications envisions two things:
First is a presence framework that tells you where the people you want to reach are located, what communications device they would prefer to use that moment, and how available they are to participate in your intended conversation.
Unified communications also involves a new ability to shift seamlessly among the various device options, selecting whichever one is best for the business at hand and the people involved. The most efficient form of communication for a given task will reveal itself organically, and you will simply run with that option, paying little or no attention to the fact that you’re switching from one mode to another.
Unified communications’ potential is attracting heavy attention from media, analysts and business executives, and every new product development generates tremendous interest. Sounds great, but where might one start?
UC platforms such as Microsoft’s (News - Alert) Live Communications Server 2005 and the upcoming Office Communications Server 2007 manage presence and make it easy for users to shift among communication and collaboration modes. Although these UC platforms unify the technology, companies still need conceptual unity within the organization to prevent users from wasting time and driving one another crazy with so many options. Too often, this step gets left out.
Establishing conceptual unity
Organizations can establish conceptual unity rather simply through a form of text messaging called persistent group chat. Persistent group chat gives organizations hundreds of communication channels that behave like “chatrooms” but add:
--The stickiness (or persistence) of email so large groups of users can communicate asynchronously as well as in real time;
--Configurable filters and alerts that eliminate information overload and enable efficient knowledge management; and
--The scalability and reliability of an enterprise application, including full compliance capabilities.
The first thing you do upon adopting persistent group chat is establishing the chat rooms, or channels. Significantly for unified communications, each chat channel brings users together in a cross-functional team around a particular topic, client or initiative.
By organizing dispersed users in cross-functional teams around topics, persistent group chat puts the desperately needed conceptual unity in unified communications. Persistent group chat thus defines ahead of time the persons who may need to participate in a conversation around a problem – whether in that business-class chatroom or by switching gears to another communication mode, e.g., a telephone conference call.
In other words, the team for any given situation is already assembled and gathered. Email doesn’t do that. The telephone doesn’t do that. Instant messaging doesn’t do that. Persistent group chat does do that, however, reducing communications chaos in the process. In this way, persistent group chat is the unifying bond in unified communications and the ideal launch pad for any conversation on any device.
Launched from chat rooms, communications become organic outgrowths of continuous discussions rather than disjointed, tactical events. Persistent group chat topples information silos along the way by returning everyone to the chat room once other conversations are complete. These unique attributes make persistent group chat the logical first step in any enterprise’s unified communications strategy.
In addition to its role in unified communications, persistent group chat is one of the most efficient communications mediums in its own right. Persistent group chat is exponentially more efficient than email or the phone for many purposes. It enables dispersed employees to monitor dozens of conversations at once, making them capable of consuming more valuable information at an exponentially faster rate than ever with no worry about critical content hidden behind misleading email subject lines. Persistent group chat reduces telecommunications costs as workers rely less on conference calling. It makes employees smarter by conveying tacit knowledge that wouldn’t warrant an email or phone call.
Persistent group chat in action
Persistent group chat is becoming increasingly helpful for customer-facing sales and support teams because it engages more people in the sales and support process. For example, an inside sales representative trying to upsell a high-value customer can get help from a “deal closer” or solution expert monitoring a chatroom from the other side of the world without even asking. The simple and unobtrusive act of posting a quick update on the deal to the chatroom broadens awareness of the situation and often results in help from unexpected places — a key benefit that only comes from organizing people and topics in advance of the communications need.
A customer service representative with a sticky support problem may discover that no one on his immediate team knows the solution to the customer issue. A colleague from R&D, however, may be passively monitoring the channel. An alert triggered by a keyword filter captures her attention, enabling her to solve the problem even before the customer is put on hold. Using traditional communications modes, the colleague from R&D would never have even known of the issue.
Companies regularly extend group chat to special customers for one-to-many or many-to-many conversations to improve support response and increase visibility of customer issues internally. Companies can also extend persistent group chat to their web pages so that when a customer hits “chat with a representative,” they’re really chatting with a power group of customer representatives. One company, for example, used persistent group chat in an award-winning external portal implementation that helps financial markets customers manage accounts, execute transactions and communicate efficiently with their account teams. In any of these scenarios, conversations are logged and archived, providing cases for training opportunities and solutions for a knowledge base.
External connectivity: Where do we go from here?
In the same way that local computer networks have interconnected to make up a rich and robust Internet, business-class chat rooms will join together, or “federate,” so that customer, partner and supplier organizations can work more efficiently as extended virtual teams. With shared presence, multiple organizations’ employees will be able to communicate and collaborate in an internetwork of chat rooms as small or large as the organizations wish. Much like social networks, these virtual super teams will come together organically around key projects, topics and business problems. Just as they do in an enterprise, extended organizations will use these internetworks of chat rooms to support unified communications on a massive scale. As a result, all involved will more efficiently achieve once-daunting business objectives for larger profits, higher-quality products and improved services.
So remember, your unified communications strategy will require conceptual unity on top of technical unity, and persistent group chat is one way to do that. Even if it has no effect on your unified communications strategy, which is unlikely, you’re still exponentially improving your customer interactions.
Nick Fera (nick.fera@parlano.com) is chairman and CEO of Parlano, Inc., the leader in persistent group chat. He is author of “They Speak,” a blog (http://nickfera.typepad.com/) focusing on improving communication and collaboration efficiency.
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