Global Investment Banks standardise on SmartNumbers

With another major global investment bank re-signing for a further three years to use BT SmartNumbers, it is interesting to take stock at the wholesale adoption of these services in the last 3 years;

• 6 of the Top 10 global investment banks now protect their essential voice services with BT SmartNumbers. 
• Of the global retail banks, 3 of the Top 4 use SmartNumbers both as resilience and voice continuity service and also to deliver calls as part of their data-centre strategy. 
• It's not only the large banks that are embracing these services, with over 200 smaller financial service companies also deploying SmartNumbers for applications as diverse as 'Calls to Branch', 'Relationship Management', 'Voice Continuity' and 'Data-Centre Voice'. 

For more information on these services please check out www.btsmartnumbers.com. 

Cloudforce

Learning some pretty cool stuff regarding social media and business at Cloudforce with Radian6

10 Rules to Business Resilience

I'm pleased to share an article in The Risk Universe, a specialist risk publication, on what it takes to ensure a resilient organisation. This is especially in the context of the London Olympics, where organisations are looking for the agility to cope with both flexible working requirements and business continuity.

Here's the article: http://www.resilientplc.com/news/docs/theriskuniverse-p3031.pdf

My colleague Andrew Bale makes the point that resilience and organisational agility go hand in hand. The more agilie and organisation is in their ability to flex or respond to unforeseen business events, then the greater the resilience they inherently have.  This is contrary to standard . disaster-recovery thinking which places an emphasis of recovering from an unforeseen event....with true resilience the business will be able to withstand any type of potential disruptive event without having any impact on the day-to-day operations of the business.

Banking Technology Innovation

Interesting article in this recent issue of Banking Technology here:

http://tinyurl.com/79zzf63

In this piece, my colleague Andrew Bale observes a trend that's become prevalent across Financial Services, and that being the desire of the larger banks to take on many of the responsibilities, but to benefit from many of the advantages, of being a telecoms operator.

It's not a great surprise really. Banks themselves tend to be amongst the largest global network operators. Rather than connect into third party networking services, banks invest huge sums themselves in building global networks, linking their sites, trading operations and customers. Fractions of a seconds in latency can make the difference between profitability of a trade, and building and maintaining these data networks are a core competency of any large banks.

However, when it comes to voice networks, banks are still having to rely upon the telcoms operators in each country to provide their connectivity to the public telephone network. Andrew observes that a clear trend in the UK financial services sector is to enable Banks themselves almost to become telecoms operators. In the past there were technical and regulatory hurdles that prevented this, but which have now largely disappeared.

One such service that is leading the way with financial services companies who wish to take advantage of the benefits previously reserved for telecoms operators is BT SmartNumbers Direct Connect.  Information can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/83dhaur

With Direct Connect, major banks have at last been granted access to a carrier-grade service which is able to deliver on the promise of lower costs, enhanced resilience and increased business agility. Don't hesitate to get in touch if you want to find out more about this service or have a little Q&A.

Who's answering the phone during the Olympics ?

A study by Resilient Networks shows that about half of London bosses believe that calls to their company's phones during the Olympics will be answered if their employees are away from their desks. But only 15 per cent of their employees believe that inbound calls will be picked up or diverted.

Despite the fact that the loss of telecommunications is damaging to operational effectiveness, the research reveals an alarming misunderstanding between bosses and their employees about the plans actually in place to protect call handling. Nearly half (47 per cent) of IT decision makers believe that their employees are able divert calls when they are away from or denied access to their normal place of work.

However, contrary to this, 75 per cent of employees in London do not believe this to be the case; in fact only 15 per cent believe they have the ability to divert incoming calls themselves remotely. In addition to this half of all business continuity plans do not even cover inbound call handing for when staff can't get to the office.

In terms of the level of disruption expected, the research revealed that 57 per cent of businesses believe travel disruptions in the capital will have the biggest impact on operational efficiency and over half of London based workers who were surveyed said they also anticipate delays and will be unable to travel due to public transport, resulting in home working or irregular hours. While a quarter of businesses expect staff to call in sick during the Games, only three per cent of staff admit this will be the case.

"An alarming percentage of businesses risk losing contact with their customers, partners, suppliers and employees if they do not make the appropriate provisions before London 2012 kicks off," said Andrew Bale, CEO of Resilient Networks. "These results highlight the importance of telecommunications to businesses and yet they show that they are not communicating clearly internally and do not have the right infrastructure in place to withstand the scale of disruption anticipated. How do businesses intend to ensure 'business as usual' if something as simple as a phone call is not reaching the right person at the right time?"

The research also examined how employees handle incoming calls when they are away from their desk currently. A third of London based workers relying only on voicemail to manage calls remotely. Only eight per cent make use of a call forwarding function. A further third rely on a company or personal mobile – which begs the question will callers know the mobile numbers of all those they need to contact in your business and will mobile networks suffer from congestion as they have done before during major disruptions.

"Voice continuity is an essential part of ensuring a business can operate day to day. Afterall it's hardly business as usual if your consumers can't reach the right person at the right time to assist them. Businesses need to ensure they have covered all bases before the Olympics to avoid any downtime, they should communicate all procedures to staff to avoid the disconnect we have seen reported and play out scenarios before it's too late," concluded Bale.

The Resilient Networks report gives a full overview of all the findings from the report as well as offering practical tips on what to look out for when updating or structuring a business continuity plan. 

iSad

Profoundly saddened by the passing of Steve.
An amazing light who shone so brightly in a dark world.
Rest in Peace.

Convergence Summit

Underwhelmed by Convergence Summit. Do people still attend trade-shows these days?

Despite claims by vendors to the contrary, few if any providers are delivering on the promise of fixed/mobile convergence. Integrated billing and a single number to call does not FMC make... where are the business apps that will transform personal and business productivity?

Pretty clear that the FSA mandate for mobile call recoding has been poorly thought through. Rather than banks having a choice from many suppliers, what is clear is that no single supplier has really cracked this. All of the current offerings have sufficient problems in their implementations and/or commercials to make them broadly unfit for purpose. Despite rumours of major representation by banks to the FSA about this lack of a robust solution, we are now down to the last 40 days before the FSA mandate becomes a compliance requirement.

I dare say that give this a further 6 months or so, some real, credible solutions will probably emerge. But nothing so far really addresses the problem head on with a wrap that makes sense for business.

My advice would be to sign up to the best of the current vendors on the shortest of possible contracts. Rumour is some vendors are offering 3 month contract terms, so that's what I would be pushing for.

Sunday Times Tech 100 - One to Watch

Interesting that the Sunday Times Has recognised Resilient Networks, the owner and operator of the BT SmartNumber services, as 'One to Recognise' in their 2011 Tech 100 awards.

These are the awards which recognise the 100 fastest growing technology companies in the UK and it should be encouraging for our customers and partners that Resilient Networks are achieving these continued levels of growth despite the economic slowdown.

It just goes to show that in times of uncertainty, smart companies are investing in services which reduce business risk, enhance organisational agility and cut costs.

Data-Centre Voice: Cost reduction and increased agility pay dividends for UK banking sector.

There's a growing trend across not only financial services, but within any large organisation, towards centralising all IT services within a number of distinct 'data-centres'. These 'data centres' may be owned and operated by the company themselves, or in shared facilities hosted by a plethora of data-centre providers.

Under this strategy, the company will rationalise common IT services from individual offices and instead host these as 'shared services' from within their data-centre, accessible to staff via the company intranet.  This strategy of 'private cloud' is mirroring the benefits of companies adopting 'public cloud' services and include;

• Cost-savings by rationalising IT services from each of the corporate offices and instead deploy these centrally.
• Reducing the overhead of management and operational staff at each office required maintain these services
• Support agile working so that no matter where staff may be located 'on-net', there core IT services are available to them at the click of a mouse.
• Enhance resilience so that should staff be denied access to the corporate offices and have to work from home or other sites, then their services will follow them

While this data-centre strategy is able to be applied to most of the essential IT and services that the business relies upon for it's day-to-day operations, there is one critical IT service, infact perhaps THE most critical IT service that has had to be excluded from this data-centre strategy, and that is 'Voice'.

Due to legacy limitations in the public telephone network, a company's telephone numbers are hard-wired into a local telephone exchange which is withi a couple of miles of the office being served. This is why telephone numbers for an Edinburgh office are fixed to a single Edinburgh telephone exchange, as are telephone numbers to a London office which are again hard-wired into a telephone exchange in London.

So, while an organisation may have a data-centre strategy that is centralising all IT Services to a couple of sites outside of the major cities, Voice, or rather the ability to receive incoming calls through these data-centres has had to be excluded. As a result, individual offices still need to retain their connectivity to the public telephone network (which requires expensive ISDN circuits), as well as their own PBX to receive and route these calls (which again is an expensive piece of kit to purchase and maintain). Furthermore, each office also needs someone to manage and operate the PBX is there is any failure. All told, this legacy limitation to exclude Voice from a data-centre strategy adds unnecessary cost, complexity and management overhead to any organisation wishing to streamline their operations through the adoption of a data-centre strategy.

Until now.

I see that BT have just launched a new service 'Data Centre Voice' which is aimed explicitly at large organisations wishing to drive the benefits of their data-centre strategy to their voice estate. More information can be found here: http://www.btsmartnumbers.com/business-needs/integrating-voice.html

I understand this service is already being rolled out by a number of major banks and defence organisations, but interestingly it's not only the largest companies that are seeing the benefits of this. A number of medium sized companies with perhaps 15 - 20 UK offices are also realising significant financial and operational benefits from adopting data-centre voice. In some cases, by rationalising PBX and ISDN connectivity from each offices, organisations stand to save hundreds of thousands of pounds per year in fixed cost. In addition, the increase in resilience and organisational agility will contribute still greater benefits of efficiency.

This theme of adopting voice services within a data-centre strategy is gaining significant traction, and I will keep looking at this trend closely in future posts - as well as giving insights into real, tangible benefits that organisations have realised to date.

Canary Wharf. Protected.

I had an enjoyable evening on Thursday with new clients, a major investment bank in Canary Wharf, where we attended a wrap party for the successful migration of their London voice services to the SmartNumbers cloud.  The project was delivered on time, on budget and without incident and now provides this leading investment house with significant organizational agility and resilience of their inbound voice.

Walking back through Canary Wharf, I was struck by two things.

Firstly, there seem to be clear signs everywhere that the financial services sector is slowly returning to life. Trading volumes are up, trading positions are being expanded and companies are selectively hiring again.  Dare I say it but Thursday night takings in the bars around the Wharf are returning to levels not seen for some time, which is certainly a sign of something though not entirely sure what.  Hopefully the sovereign debt crises will not cause too many drinks to be consumed in sorrow.

Secondly, as I look at the skyline of Canary Wharf dominated by those vast towers of financial durability – HSBC, Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Nomura – it strikes me that nearly all of the major finance houses in Canary Wharf are now in the process of adopting SmartNumbers for resilience and business continuity. It seems that one clear impact of the financial earthquake that so rocked this sector is the greater prioritization now given to risk and resilience across all aspects of their business. The mandate seems to be that department heads are driven to reduce risk in all aspects of their business, whether this is capital risk, operational risk or IT risk.  And that should give comfort to us all.

So, while Canary Wharf was already embracing SmartNumbers for resilience against pandemic planning (http://www.wharf.co.uk/2009/07/wharf-signs-up-to-swine-flu-co.html) the area seems to be in good shape to withstand any of the uncertainties that still surrounds this important sector. 

SmartNumbers Cloud – CESG Accreditation

Among the most critical concerns for organisations looking to move to Cloud-based services are those of resilience and security. As new vendors rush to make their services ‘Cloud-Based’ it stands to reason that some of these will take short-cuts on the way there.and in so doing will put their customers at risk. Without independent accreditation, it’s impossible to know those that have taken these short-cuts, and those that have done the job properly. Keep in mind that even the reputation of the vendor in other areas of business may not be sufficient to ensure that when it comes to providing services from the Cloud since short cuts can be taken accidentally as well as on purpose. 

There are many aspects in both the design and operation of the Cloud that will make it susceptible to risks and in which corners can be cut. These fall into a number of major categories;

• It’s design and architecture, especially with respect to scalability and security
  
• The quality of the hardware, software and network interconnects using to built it
  
• The processes around the ongoing management and maintenance of the Cloud
  
• The people responsible for running these processes

Weaknesses in any one of these areas could present a major problem to customers. Weakness in several of these could prove catastrophic. But without benchmarks for formal cloud accreditation, it’s impossible to know the quality of the basked in which customers are being asked to put their eggs. Even Service Level Agreements (SLA) are of little help, since most vendors do not publish their performance against SLA’s and very few protect against the business impact to the client if an SLA is breeched.

One UK solution to this problem is the accreditation provided by the Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG). This is the government body that provides formal accreditation for any technology or service to be provided to the UK Government. While CESG accreditation is mandatory for the deployment of technology into the UK Defence sector, it’s also becoming widely adopted across major government and commercial organisations. More information on CESG accreditation can be found here:  http://www.cesg.gov.uk/about_us/whatwedo.shtml

CESG accreditation is very rigorous and time-consuming to achieve, and once achieved only relates to the version of the hardware/software/service that was accredited. From a business perspective, BT’s aim was to achieve CESG accreditation for our cloud-based SmartNumber services so that they could be deployed within the UK Ministry of Defence and other government customers.  The CESG accreditation process looked in great detail at;

• The design of BT DFTS SmartNumbers Cloud, at both a macro and micro level and it’s dependences on any third party interfaces
  
• Assessment of the components used to build, monitor and maintain the Cloud
  
• The quality and resilience of the Network Operations Centre used to monitor the day to day running of the Cloud
  
• The processes around maintaining the cloud, including provisioning, helpdesk
  
• The people managing the operation of the Cloud, education, qualifications, security clearances
  
• Scalability and Penetration testing to try to expose any weaknesses regarding resilience, security, and scalability

I’m delighted to report that SmartNumbers has finally achieved CESG accreditation, the first such accreditation given to cloud-based voice services. While this is essential for the delivery of our Cloud-based voice services into government, this should also provide reassurance to customers in the financial services, retail and pharmaceutical sectors. When looking at other suppliers and their Cloud-based credentials, organisations would be well advised to consider those that have been CESG accredited and those that have yet to submit themselves to such rigour.

Hybrid Cloud ?

For organisations not yet willing or able to make the leap into cloud-based voice services on a permanent basis, BT Group and Resilient Networks now offer companies the chance to route calls through the Cloud on an as-needed basis, without impacting the status quo the rest of the time.. This is great for companies who are comfortable with the traditional voice services they have in place today, but for events such as a business-continuity disruption may want to take advantage of the Cloud for more flexible and sophisticated call routing.
This service, known as BT Voice Continuity Directed Recovery, essentially provides organisations the benefits of a hybrid-cloud architecture.  In ‘normal’ mode calls flow through the traditional PSTN as usual, but should there be a business continuity event which denies staff access to offices or disrupts travel etc, then they can invoke a BT service to route calls instead via the BT SmartNumbers Cloud. Once calls are routed through the Cloud, then organisations can take advantage of the web-based portal for routing individual DDI’s, such as routing desk calls to mobile phones, home phones or business recovery sites.
This service is great alternative to companies who realise the benefits of Cloud-based voice services but who are not yet willing to jump in with both feet in order to achieve these benefits.  It’s likely that as the Cloud is adopted across many different business applications there will be many variants from the pure Cloud architecture that meet practical business needs, at low risk and a price point that the market is willing to pay.
A short video overview of this hybrid-Cloud service can be seen here: http://www.btsmartnumbers.com/services/resilience-and-connectivity/directed-recovery-demo.html

Financial services sector most innovative following economic downturn

Technology investment proves integral to post-recession recovery

Interesting report from BT Group outlining that of all industries, it is the Financial Services sector that is leading the way in terms of ongoing IT investments. Amongst the technology areas being invested in was SaaS / Cloud-Based services.

Details of this report are here: http://tinyurl.com/ylkou9u

Andy Nicholson, Vice President global banking & financial markets, BT said: “Among the financial community, CTOs and CIOs are looking for ways to create leaner, increasingly cost-efficient infrastructures without compromising their business models.

This research highlights that in order to keep pace with changing business requirements and customer expectations CIOs, now more than ever, will need proven, reliable infrastructure providers, such as BT, to help them tackle their shifting network infrastructure needs.”

The Cloud: Adding resilience to business critical voice services

This posting, one of an occasional series on the benefits of Cloud-based voice services, explores how the Cloud is able to deliver an unparalleled level of resilience unmatched by premises-based voice services.

Resilience is an increasingly critical business imperative, perhaps more so in difficult times, and one which demands board-level attention. Be it for regulatory reasons, or sound business planning, organisations need to ensure that their voice services are wholly resilient and not susceptible to failure under any circumstances. In this context, businesses concern relates to the delivery of incoming calls, since for outbound calls staff can relocate, move to another office or to their home, and start calling customers, partners or suppliers from there.  

Adding resilience to incoming calls can be quite a challenge, especially since in large part the successful delivery of incoming calls is dependent upon the resilience of the public telephone network itself, over which most companies feel they have little control. However, the Cloud does now enable organisations to protect against not only failure of this public telephone network but also against more local events that can affect the organisation, such as denial-of-access events, PBX failure or even the local council workmen digging through a cable.

There should be no need to detail the importance to the organisation of protecting their incoming calls. Whether this is to take orders, provide service, offer a life-line or simply to transact business, the telephone is the most powerful and important piece of business technology any organisation has - and without which they will be lost. Voice continuity, the ability of the organisation to ensure the delivery of these important incoming calls, can protect the revenue and reputation of the organisation in a crisis. Nothing is more powerful in a crisis than a calming word, and the spoken word can say far more to customers, shareholders and other stake holders than any email, press-release anything delivered electronically.

And yet, while organisations have typically invested significant in business continuity planning to protect their data, networks and business applications, the area of voice continuity has been overlooked largely due to complexity and the belief that there was little that can be done to change the resilience of the public telephone network.

Infact, by moving enterprise voice services to the Cloud, the organisation can not only add resilience to their own premises, network and facilities, but can also extend greater resilience onto the public telephone network itself. Before I explain this further, I will provide a quick overview of the current public telephone network, the issues around resilience inherent in this network, and how the Cloud can overcome many of these shortcomings.

In the UK, the public telephone network is known as the PSTN (packet switched telephone network) and is comprised of around 100 core PSTN switches, spread across the UK, with each switch linked to a number of telephone exchanges. As a meshed network, each telephone exchange is itself connected to multiple core switches (known as DMSU’s – digital main switching units). A company’s DDI range, those telephone numbers that people call in order to speak to staff in the company, are held within a single local exchange, which is in turn connected to the company offices via ISDN circuits.

Should the company want protect against business continuity events in the network itself, such as failure of these ISDN circuits or failure of the local telephone exchange, or wish to protect against more site-specific problems, such as failure of the PBX or denial-of-access events, then it becomes very difficult to achieve these since many of these are outside of the direct control of the organisation itself.

However, organisations do now have a choice in terms of how they wish to protect themselves, and can look to the delivery of enterprise voice services from the Cloud not only to increase their resilience but provide benefits of agility, cost-savings and many more besides.

This is achieved simply and easily by moving the delivery of the incoming calls away from the local telephone exchange and instead to deliver calls through the Cloud. With cloud-delivery, the organisation is given a web portal to setup and manage how they would like to receive their calls, and can change this instantly and automatically to respond to different types of business continuity events.

It may be that in the first instance, the Cloud should try to deliver calls through the local exchange and across the companies ISDN circuits into the premises. However, if the service detects problems in the local exchange, or in the ISDN circuits or even with the company’s PBX onsite, the Cloud can instantly re-route calls through an alternative gateway onto their voice network. This gateway may be at another office, a data-centre, or indeed any point of ingres on the company’s voice network.

Should staff have to leave the building, or be denied access to it in the first place, the Cloud can re-route calls to staff on their mobile phones, home phones or infact any location from where they’re able to receive calls.

No matter what type of business continuity event may befall the company, be it as little as staff not being able to make it to the office due to weather disruption, or as major as a major infrastructure failure, the organisation can ensure that it is always able to receive it’s important calls – and that the caller is unaware that the business may be undergoing great stress.

It is this ability to project an aura of calm, business-as-usual operations in times of stress that can add significantly to the reputation of the business and protect it’s revenues. And while this is true of lesser events that may just effect the business itself, it is even more true of major incidents or events that could lead to competitors being out of action while the company itself proceeds on a business-as-usual footing.

By protecting against problems that occur as a result of network failure, or people/process issues due to a staff relocation, the Cloud is able to prove a critical business asset. And like any asset, the more uses that can be made of this investment, the greater will be the return. So it is with the delivery of voice services from the Cloud, which can not only be used to add resilience against business continuity events, but can also be used on a day-to-day basis to add organisational agility.

Since the Cloud removes any geographic dependency on call delivery, this ability to ‘virtualise’ a company’s DDI range can also be used to give staff a ‘number for life’. No matter where they are posted in an organisations, staff can move across the country and across the world and always ensure that there calls will reach them. Therefore, for office relocations which may affect large numbers of staff, or for individual call routing for personnel as they take on new roles in different offices, the organisation can be assured that calls to these staff will always be completed.

As more use is made of number virtualisation, so too will the return on this investment increase. As such, the Cloud can be an important business asset not only for organisational resilience but for agility and cost-cutting too.

Tethering the Cloud ?

While the principle of cloud-based services hold many benefits for the business and consumer alike, there are many examples of where the purists vision of cloud computing may be at the cost of business benefit - be these cost-saving, security, resilience or other.

While a pure-cloud vision would hold that business application, processing, data-storage, analysis and reporting are all held in the cloud, there may be very good business reasons why part of the overall solution may be better served by premises-based add-ons.

Take security as an obvious example. Would salesforce.com lose it's pure-cloud mantra if, say, they provided a local NTU (network termination unit) that customers could deploy on-site to hold their highly confidential customer-specific data ? What if increasing internet speeds meant that the overall performance of the application was unaffected by the fact that some of this less-sensitive data was held in the cloud, while other data was held on this NTU ? Would tethering the cloud to this NTU fly in the face of the cloud purists or would the business benefits override the philosophy of the purists ? VPN being what it is could ensure that staff with the right levels of security could still continue to work anywhere on the planet and still see the benefits of an application that took some of it's data from the cloud, and others from secure NTU's within the customers own data-network ?

The reason for asking is explore how these principles apply to the delivery of voice services from the cloud. Just as with traditional business applications, there is great merit in abandoning the premises-based hardware/software solutions in favour of voice applications from the cloud. Why have to continually upgrade your PBX to the latest IP-whateveritis just in order to take advantage of features that, if delivered from the cloud, would work on any voice network, old or new ?

As you'll appreciate, the problem with the delivery of voice services from the cloud, unlike traditional business applications, is that the delivery of calls is currently metered. We all pay a pence per minute (or cent-per-minute for my american friends) for routing calls from the cloud to the handset...regardless of whether the call cost is paid for by the caller, the subscriber, or ad-funded - the network operator somehow makes a few pennies for delivering this call.

What if we tethered the voice services cloud directly to the customers premise so that while the processing of this call was cloud-based, the delivery of the call was over private-wires linking the customers own voice network to the public telephone network from which the call originated ? Would the requirement to deploy a voice NTU fly in the face of the cloud purists, or would rational business sense prevail ?

Take any readily embraced IT philosophy de jour, and in it you'll see a religion. You'll get the fanatics, the purists, the fundamentalists, the conservatives and the liberals. For a religion to become mainstream, it needs to find a place that accommodates all beliefs, biases and dispositions. It needs to work for everyone. Isn't this the case with cloud-computing that in order to be adopted by the mainstream it needs to address the concerns that businesses may have, be these around security, costs, resilience or other barriers to large-scale adoption ?

Time will surely tell.

Solid growth in cloud-based revenues

Resilient Networks plc, the leading provider of enterprise voice services (and sponsors of this blog) today reports strong earnings for their fiscal year ending September 30th 2009. With over 46% revenue growth from cloud-based voice services, this represents a fifth successive year of revenue growth from the cloud.

And it’s not just revenue that’s showing impressive growth. Across all indicators, from subscriber growth, new customers, margins and network capacity, Resilient have been able to demonstrable substantial year on year gains. Infact, over the past three years alone, subscription revenue from the SmartNumbers services has increased by more than 230%.

Geoffrey Patterson, CEO of Resilient Networks plc is clear what has been the driving force behind this growth. “5 years ago we were a CPE solutions provider, installing hardware and software on premises for customers wishing to adopt flexible working and single number services. Today, we derive over 80% of revenues from cloud-based voice services, whether this is for our traditional market of flexible working to new propositions we have developed for Banking, Retail, Government and Defence companies. The lower total cost of ownership for cloud-based services, their ability to be deployed across legacy and IP infrastructure and the predictability of cost are just a few of the many reasons the enterprise is looking to the Cloud to deliver the next class of enterprise business applications.”

Relationship Management – Outstanding Results from the Cloud

For those not too familiar with the challenges of addressing telephone support to high-wealth individuals let me first describe the problem – and then how the Cloud is being used to address this with outstanding results.

Wealth management organisations have always struggled with the best way to provide telephone support to its high-wealth or important business customers. In an ideal world, the customer would be given a direct telephone number where he could reach his Relationship Manager (RM) on a 7/24 basis but in practice this level of contactability isn’t realistic. For much of the day, the RM will be in meetings with other important clients, or in many cases out on the road visiting the homes or offices of their clients. And so when a client has an urgent banking request and needs to speak to their RM in person, the chances are that at any given time the RM will be unavailable to take the call – much to the detriment of customer service.

So the Wealth Management institutions have an interesting challenge in how to ensure that their RM’s are there to always take the clients call with the need for them also to be spend much of the time away in private meetings with other high-wealth customers.

In the past, banks addressed this challenge in a number of ways. Some would give out the desk, mobile and even home-phone of the RM and invite clients to call them at any of these numbers. Of course, should the RM be genuinely unavailable then this only provided more numbers for the client to call, more places in which to leave a voicemail and generally more dissatisfaction.

Other banks would provide the name and number of an assistant who could take a message to pass along to the RM but who wouldn’t be able to address the clients needs directly. Again, possibly a better solution than leaving a voicemail - but still not very satisfying for the client who might need his request actioned immediately.

Some of the more insightful banks have taken a ‘team approach’ to solving this problem whereby the RM’s are grouped into small teams and while each RM has an individual responsibility for their personal clients they also have a collective responsibility for clients of their team members. Regular team briefings ensure that the RM’s are updated on any important issues concerning the clients they are collectively responsible for, so that if a client does call and is unable to reach their personal RM they will at least be able to talk with a banker who is familiar with their account and who can discuss this, or action any requests the client may have.

While this team approach is the most pragmatic at balancing the need to personally attend to the needs of important clients with the fact that the RM’s will often be unavailable it does pose a number of technology challenges to achieve. These include;

- The need to provide a single number that the client can call which will ring the desk, mobile and possibly home-phone of the RM so that the client doesn’t have to ring around these numbers themselves.

- The ability to create and easily maintain the ‘virtual teams’ made up of members who are changing frequently, often spread across offices or floors in a building and who themselves may be out on the road or meeting with clients themselves.

- The ability to overflow calls made to the RM to their support ‘team’ who themselves may have other delegation or overflow setting for handling their personal calls.

- The ability to determine prioritisation of call-flows to ensure the clients call is answered as quickly as possible. This will need to take into account the location and availability of the RM’s so that calls are routed first to RM’s working from the office and then to overflow to RM’s working on their mobile phones.

- A requirement to provide comprehensive Management Information to ensure that service-level targets are being met no matter where RM’s are working, how much time they are out of the office and against a fluctuating volume of clients.

While each of the above are individually achievable with many of the latest PBX and switch technology, in practice it becomes impossible to setup and maintain this type of service using premises-based equipment due to the complexities of setting up and maintaining these diverts. A better answer is to elevate this sort of business routing complexity to the cloud, where it can be managed online by business users (not PBX technicians) so that as the business requirements change these call-flows and other requirements are easily mapped into the cloud, independent of the voice network or infrastructure in the bank.

Being controlled through a web-portal, with call-flows and business logic residing in the cloud, this makes the delivery of calls business-led. It also allows the PBX estate to be ‘dumbed down’, which extends the life of the equipment, since all the call-routing and unified messaging aspects of call-flow are managed through the cloud, independent of the technicalities or limitations of the underlying voice infrastructure.

Quick Case Study

A major UK high-street bank had a problem in providing telephone support to its high-wealth and business customers. The main problem stemmed for two main reasons – firstly that the RM’s spent a great deal of time in face-to-face portfolio reviews with clients and then when they were free to take a call the average call length was usually fairly long. Both these meant that the chances of a client calling the RM and speaking in person to that RM was very low. As such, calls were going into voicemail, and if the client needed urgent attention they would typically try ringing back or call the main branch number to speak to anyone else able to assist them.

As far as the callers experience was concerned, this was very poor customer service. Infact, over a six month period when data was being captured, a callers had less than a 10% chance of speaking to anyone in person, and a much lower chance of speaking to their RM. Call abandonment rates were extremely high at over 60%, meaning that customers would put the phone down in frustration before they even had a chance of being served. Considering these were high-wealth customers, the most important segment of the market as far as profitability was concerned, something had to change.

The Solution

The bank decided to trial the BT SmartNumbers service, which is a cloud-based voice service that removes any geographic dependency on call-delivery. Call-flows and personal communication options can be configured in the cloud to meet the exact business needs of the client.

In the case of this bank, they decided to group the Relationship Managers into teams of 4 – 5. Each RM continued to have primary responsibility for their clients, but also had a collective responsibility for the clients of other team members. Calls to the RM would automatically overflow to their team if not answered quickly. Call whispering was enabled so that when the RM answered the call they would know if it was for them personally or was overflowed as a team call. Finally, they built in a second overflow so that even calls that were overflowed to the team would eventually overflow to dedicated staff in the contact-centre. As such, with the fine adjustment of timings, calls were ensured of being answered in person, by knowledgeable staff, within an agreed 45 second period – this being less than the average period of call abandonment. All of this was designed and configured in the cloud, and worked independent of the location of the RM’s so that even if they were out of the office, on the road or working from home the appropriate call-flows would be follwed.

The Result

After a 3 month trial of this new cloud-based service the results were very impressive. Call abandonment was reduced to single-figures, average call-answering in person increased from 30% to over 90% of calls. As a result, the bank has decided to roll this out across all their branches. Furthermore, with the enhanced management information they are getting from the system they don’t just feel that they are provided better support to their most important customers – they know without doubt.

Musings

What is driving the growing appeal of recording in the cloud?

Is it one of pure cost?
Is it some limitation of site or hosted services and the desire for greater flexibility?
Is it one of resilience?

Exploring demand for cloud-based Call Recording

As organisations look to deliver their essential voice services from the cloud the issue of call-recording becomes an important requirement.

This is true not only for business continuity events, where staff may need to work outside of their usual place of work, but also in normal operations for recording calls to and from mobile phones.

A couple of issues that are prevalent for most of these requirements:

• Storage of recordings. While companies like the concept of call recording from the cloud, are they comfortable with these recordings staying in the cloud or do they need to be saved 'off-cloud' for security purposes.
• Outbound calls. How can calls from mobile phones be locked down to ensure outbound calls can be recorded. Certain devices, such as the blackberry, are easier to lock down than others and does outbound call-recording require a client or not.
• Functionality for retrieval. Clearly those calls that have been recorded for regulatory and compliance reasons are different than those recorded for training both in terms of the type of UI required and target consumer. Are their any good cloud-based retrieval systems are does this need to be PC-based.
• Commercials. Looking at the problem from a cost-up basis the costs of running this sort of service is based on capacity, storage and management. Understanding the commercial model and the business requirements and expectation for these is going to be useful to understand.

We're currently looking closely at these aspects of cloud-based call recording into the financial services sector and would be keen on feedback regarding any or many of these issues.

Cisco embraces cloud computing to deliver Virtual Voice service

In a move that was widely anticipated, Cisco has recently announced that it will be extending it's committment to cloud computing and delivering voice to it's corporate clients through the cloud.

More details here.

While this is a new venture for Cisco, cloud-based variants of Cisco's voice services have been in the market for many years, with limited successs. In most of their markets, Cisco resellers and service providers have themselves developed hosted instances of the Cisco platform and made these available on a 'pay as you go' basis.

In the UK. BT Global Services launched their MMVoIP platform based on Cisco's IP voice network and sold on a per-seat per-month basis - but they have enjoyed only meagre succecss with this. To date only Abbey (now part of Santander) was the only major client to go for this approach, despite many years of promoting this service to it's enterprise clients.

It will be interesting to see how Cisco themselves will bring this new service to market and what they intend to change to the offering to ensure it has greater success than the existing hosted-offerings provided by it's reseller and service channels.