David Lover

The past few weeks have been interesting, as several customers have inquired about how to best prepare for a health pandemic. Within this same period of time, one of our industry’s largest conference, HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society), cancelled its conference (with 42,000 registered participants) due to concerns about COVID-19, commonly known as coronavirus. Clearly, our industry—and society as a whole—are paying attention and investigating next steps for dealing with this outbreak.

While voice authentication is now a hot topic, it is not a brand-new concept. Traditionally, voice authentication was used purely as a way to replace a user’s password. It was a very manual process to establish your voice password (today, we’d call that “active enrollment”), and you were limited to very specific ways of using it (typically a challenge-response model).

Do you have omnichannel projects that just aren’t moving along as fast as you think they should? What are the hurdles getting in your way? I’ve yet to find a scenario where it’s the technology that’s slowing things down. Don’t get me wrong, omnichannel isn’t easy. It’s a very different approach to customer contact than traditional call centers or even multichannel contact centers. Omnichannel is all about customizing the journey of the person (or thing) trying to interact with your business. First we need to understand what the customer journey actually looks like. This is often a lot harder than it sounds. Most people in a company know their little piece of the customer journey, but very few can articulate the details of the full, beginning-to-end journey. This often requires a lot of exploration, business-level interviews, multi-disciplinary teams, and documentation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic right now. Unfortunately, when a topic is hot, I find that many people throw around the term without really having a good understanding of its details. That’s where our teams within ConvergeOne kick into gear, working to understand those details. As we researched AI, one particularly relevant use case became obvious: chatbots. In fact, Gartner calls chatbots the current face of AI and predicts that by 2020, more than 50% of large enterprises will use product chatbots. Let’s dive into the details of AI within the context of chat.

Omnichannel is a big buzzword when it comes to one of the latest trends in contact centers and customer experience. I’m hearing a lot of vendors, partners, and even customers initiating the discussion. I get really excited when people bring it up, but sadly, I very quickly get deflated once I realize everything they’re talking about is actually just multichannel. So, I thought I’d take a look at some of the big differences between the two.

Fourteen ConvergeOne thought leaders presented at Avaya ENGAGE 2019. They'll be sharing highlights from their sessions in a blog series over the next several weeks, so check back for the next installment.

For years, I have been asked about the death of voicemail. It started at the end of 2014 with Coca-Cola’s announcement that it was disconnecting voicemail, which was followed by similar announcements from companies like JPMorgan Chase. What ended up happening in most cases? The companies didn’t actually completely get rid of voicemail, but they did experiment with eliminating it for certain users or groups of users.

Last week, I introduced SIP and wrote about the use cases around adjunct connectivity and routing. This week, I'll share use cases around SIP trunks and endpoints. Let's get to it!

I don’t think anyone questions the fact that most of enterprise communications is going SIP. We hear it everywhere. But I still get people asking about why it is such a big deal. Isn’t it just another signaling protocol? Is there really a strategic advantage to go SIP? The answer is an overwhelming YES! SIP’s flexibility and interoperability makes it an obvious choice. But I do think it’s important to dive into the details to know exactly why SIP is such a big deal. I think of SIP having three major strategic use cases. Generally in order of adoption, they are:

As a gamer, I'm always amazed by how realistic the modern gaming experience is. I'm currently playing the latest God of War on the PS4, in stunning 4k resolution. I can't help thinking about how far we've come since the video games of my childhood. I vividly remember playing Adventure on my Atari 2600, where your character was represented by a small square able to move from room to room, picking up things that kind of looked like a key or a sword. Pretty amazing transformation since then.