It is one of life’s ironies that a teacher often learns as much from the student as the student learns from the teacher. Certainly it is true from my experience, which stretches back over ten years to when I was first approached to lead a photography course at evening college – sure I knew my content (I hold a Diploma in Photography after all), but I had no idea how to deliver.

The hardest part in preparing for such a task was how to open up, knowing where to start. I was searching for ideas when I had that light-bulb moment: I’ll simply ask the audience to introduce themselves, and tell me what they were hoping to get from the course. Perhaps they had a recent addition to their family, or were planning an overseas trip, or had just been given a camera for their birthday and had no idea how to use it. Maybe they were retired and have now the time to re-visit an old hobby, or perhaps they were young and have dreams of being the next contributor to National Geographic (like I did).

Whatever it was they were all there for a reason, and if I knew that reason then teaching them something valuable would be easy (or at least; easier!).

However, their answers soon presented me with a new set of problems: all these people were from totally different backgrounds. I had labourers, doctors, sales-people, IT geeks, stay-at-home mums, retired grand-dads, students, bureaucrats – you name it, I had it! All these people were approaching this craft from different angles. I had the techos in the room who knew nothing about art or composition. I had the artists in the room who knew nothing about f-stops or shutter-speeds. I had the total newbies (or golden oldies) who knew neither, and (worst of all) I had the self-taught ‘experts’ who knew everything (or so they thought) but still couldn’t capture a decent picture to save themselves!

So I had to go back to basics; to make things simple, concise, and above all relevant. I tossed the camera user guide out the window and spoke to them in terms they could understand, words from everyday life – with plenty of examples to reinforce the message.

Fast-forward to 2010: my National Geographic dream never quite materialised, but photography has nonetheless been a fantastic hobby. Importantly though, the lessons I learned from my ‘baptism of fire’ all those years ago have been put to great use in my role at Avaya – and no I don’t mean taking the odd snap or two for the company newsletter. You see I’ve just been on a bit of a product road-show – IP Office R6.0 incidentally. And while the audience on this show were all relatively similar (sales people positioning UC solutions to SME) these guys had to deliver a value pitch to an incredibly varied audience, both from a vertical perspective (manufacturing, hospitality, retail, government, health, financial etc) and a role perspective (Business Owner, IT, Customer Service Manager, etc).

My light-bulb moment; let’s break this down to five simple areas that should articulate value for all business – no matter what the vertical:

1. The wallet. Whether it’s showing a rapid Return on Investment (ROI) or a demonstrable Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), it’s hard not to get the attention of a prospective customer by talking cash savings. It could be the elimination of external conferencing service provider costs, consolidation of trunks to SIP, or rationalising resources in the Contact Centre – an Avaya solution has some great tools to save cold, hard cash – and can do it fast.

2. Mitigation of risk. It sort of relates to point 1 above, but is often a discussion that’s left alone during the sales dialogue. A simple question: what would be the impact to the business if one site in the network had a failure to the communications server (perhaps an errant IT support person has unplugged the wrong cable in the rack)? What if the WAN went down and with it so too the queue announcements for the customer service centre? With the improvements in IP Office R6.0 (as an example), critical parts of the Avaya applications can be duplicated in an active-active scenario – meaning a business can keep trading and serving their customers without compromise to their employee’s productivity.

3. Provision of outstanding customer service. Avaya recognises that a great competitive differentiator is customer service. What you can’t measure you can’t manage, so we strive to deliver concise, granular, yet flexible information about the sales or customer care centre in an intuitive and integrated fashion.

4. Productivity of the workforce. Extend the features and services of the Avaya system beyond the physical boundaries of the enterprise. Whether the workers are highly mobile or need to work from fixed locations outside the business, deliver tools to enable them to do their jobs no matter what their location – while integrating it into other business tools to streamline process.

5. Making small business look and feel like big business. Compete effectively with larger business while using less resource. Enable customers to trade or engage using clever technology like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) when the enterprise is on holidays or asleep.

Funnily enough, all these value points marry up perfectly against the strengths of an Avaya IP Office solution:

1. 128-party audio conferencing can deliver a hard ROI.

2. Duplication of the Voicemail Pro application server and IP500 communications server in a Small Community Network can reduce risk.

3. Customer Call Reporter is a great tool for measuring customer service levels.

4. one-X Portal and one-X Mobile can keep employees in touch and communicate telephony presence wherever they are.

5. Voicemail Pro is a class-leading IVR platform with an intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI).

It’s very easy for those of us who work in the ICT industry (yet another TLA – Information and Communications Technology for the uninitiated) to get swept away in the technology and forget about the value. In the post-GFC era (bugger; I did it again – Global Financial Crisis), it’s no longer good enough to purchase IP Telephony (IPT) or Unified Communications (UC) simply because it’s fashionable.

To coin/modify an old (well if you call ten years ‘old’) adage; even selling the sizzle over the sausage is no longer enough – the sausage’s sizzle has to convince me I’m hungry, satisfy my appetite, taste like Wagyu beef, and ensure I won’t be hungry again until the next meal while costing less than ‘on-sale’ mince!

Mmm (TLA for Homer Simpson) – sausage…

Jim Hughes, a Consulting Systems Engineering colleague of mine, was recently doing a bit of fatherly bragging, talking about how his son was attending Flashpoint: The Academy of Media Arts and Sciences in Chicago (and referencing how Robert DeNiro’s Tribeca production company was taking a large stake in the future of the school).

As my grad school days are long behind me, he went on to explain that the focus of the school is for students that are interested in Digital Media Arts: Gaming Development, Film Production, Sound Production, and various Digital Arts.

But the real focus, he said, is in creating interactive content for a future generation of gamers and consumers.

“I still believe that the Call Centers of the future, with Video now starting to be talked about, and fantasy demonstrations of Call Center Agents as Avatars, are just the beginning of these applications. Young people that are coming out of these types of schools could be important to companies like Avaya as resources for creative content creation.”

He went on to ask several key questions about Avaya and our business:
(1) Do our customers sometimes ask us to integrate to their existing web presence? Yes they do.
(2) Do we have to automate interactions with systems that are outside of the traditional Call Center? We do.
(3) Are we now starting to consider how Video will impact the Call Center agent and the consumer? We are.

Having answered his own questions before I could get a word in, he added,
“What does it mean that there is growth of a class of young developers focused on digitally interactive content to an Enterprise like Wal-Mart? Or CITI? Or Wells Fargo? It could mean that companies like Avaya need to help bring more interactive content to the sales experience on-line, on-mobile, on any device and we need to consider the creative elements that make the experience more entertaining or more educational and ultimately more sticky.

Maybe someday soon it will be required that our Professional Services need to include Sound or Film Production as part of the customer service experience. Who do we hire? What do we tell our customers?”
This, in turn, got me thinking a bit more about Avaya’s Web.alive immersive environment and its applicability to the future call center.

Imagine, if you will, visiting a web site for your favorite consumer electronics vendor. Click to chat live with an agent, perhaps even have a video chat. But the more impactful experiences will come when the agent invites you into their virtual demo and customer support center, where they can show you a range of fully rendered 3D product models, twisting and turning them in the hands of their virtual avatar while explaining exactly how to connect their latest product up to your existing home entertainment components.

No more wondering what they mean by the “geek speak” on the side of the packaging at your favorite electronics retailer. Or wondering if their documentation is either underwhelming or overpowering. You can see, experience and just-about-touch the product in ways like never before.

Or as Jim put it, “What does it mean that there is growth of a class of young developers focused on digitally interactive content to an Enterprise like Wal-Mart? Or CITI? Or Wells Fargo? It could mean that companies like Avaya need to bring more interactive content to the sales experience on-line, on-mobile, on any device and we need to consider the creative elements that make the experience more entertaining or more educational and ultimately more sticky.

Maybe someday soon it will be required that our Professional Services need to include Sound or Film Production as part of the customer service experience. Who do we hire? What do we tell our customers?”

Building these experiential customer service environments isn’t going to be your run of the mill corporate skill set. It’s going to take a whole new type of thinking. Perhaps you too will one day have a Director of Digital Media for your contact center staff.

Then again, perhaps Jim just wanted to brag a bit…