Skip to main content

Its not the channel, its the implementation

It seems like every other day now we get a blog post about how one technology/channel is dead and how this new thing is now the best thing since sliced bread.
First they said the phone call is dead. Not.
Then they said email is dead. Or support over email is dead. etc etc. Not
Though these may be ok to get page views, the reality of the matter is quite different. Phone calls and Email usage has not gone down(for businesses, its a different story for B2C). In fact it has increased.
And all the blog posts take some example of a bad implementation and highlight what is wrong with the old technology or channel.
Problem is even in the new channels, in app support etc there are some very bad examples. But that does not mean that the problem is with the channels.
The problem is with the implementations.
Flickr

For example, very few IVR systems use the context of the caller and provide help. Very few use speech recognition technologies which have improved by leaps and bounds. What if someone implemented a simple IVR for support where you just call and state your problem and disconnect. And within a couple of minutes either your problem is resolved or an update is given. If this happens every single time, phone would be the first point of contact for most customers.
Customers just need resolution. They are not looking at using the next big thing in tech to talk to businesses.
Similarly in email, still most systems are dependent on tickets, ticket numbers etc. Customers get confused. Its time the systems moved on to conversational mode of solving. And email is built for conversation.
Same thing with chat bots. A chat bot need not be intelligent. All it needs is to answer queries or hand over to a human.

In our experience with a lot of businesses at Ozonetel we have seen that many of them spend too much time on installing a technology for their processes(sales/support). They dont spend enough time on working on the communication flow. If they start doing that, we may have good conversational systems on all channels.

Popular posts from this blog

First Post

In this blog, I will be talking about my experiences in trying to build a cloud telephony platform , KooKoo . Along the way I will also be talking about different design choices I made, good programming practices and the IVR domain in general. For technoratti: NNFJW8EW86C3

Integrating Arborjs with Angular to create a live calls dashboard

Arborjs  is a cool graph visualization library. Angular  is one of the best JavaScript frameworks and we have been using Angular in a lot of our front end development. When you handle millions of calls, proper visualization becomes very important. Without proper visualization, you can get lost in the mountains of data. So we spend a lot of time to come up with good visualizations to represent the data. Since we loved the cool way in which Arbor represented graph data, we could not wait to hook it up with Angular. Because of Angular's two way data binding, when you hook up Angularjs with Arbor.js you can get a dynamically updated visualization of graph data with cool animations. To give back to the community, we have put up the code online at Github . Basically we have created an Angularjs directive for Arborjs. Please feel free to fork the code and add extensions and use it for your own visualizations. The code is self explanatory with comments inline. Best way to get s

Telecommunication Revolution & Cloud Telephony

Telecommunication Revolution & Cloud Telephony Every one talking that world power has shifted from west to east, next century belongs to India and China, as China is an aging country, everyone is betting very high on India. To find the reality, I have done a comparative study between India and western countries. The result was really depressing, in most of sectors/areas we are way behind the developed countries, except one sector i.e. “Telecommunication”. You can see in the above picture the call rate, which was at Rs 15.5/min has dropped to less than a Rupee/min. The telephone subscriber base has also increased a rate of 40% YoY (approx.). According to Mar’15 release by TRAI, India has 999.71 million telephone subscriber, now we are in Sep’15. We would have crossed 1 billion mark. This is the overall picture of telephone subscriber, but if we look internet and broadband subscriber base it is also very optimistic. Apart from that recently Airtel has launched 4G servic