1. What is the status of the Nokia Siemens planned merger? Since your organization is not part of the merger, what is status of the Siemens Enterprise Communications division?
The Siemens-Nokia merger is complete and the new company is operating independently effective April 1st, 2007. Since October 1st, 2006 Siemens Enterprise Communications has been operational as legal business entity, fully owned by Siemens AG, and a leading global player in the enterprise communications space. Our immediate goals include improving our business performance and continuing to serve our customers in over 70 countries worldwide, while continuing to explore the potential of a strategic partnership within the industry.
2. What do you anticipate your group’s major challenges will be in the remainder of 2007 and the first half of 2008?
Our customers have embraced convergence of data, voice and other multimedia services and we see that continuing. However, we see our challenge in delivering these services from an open standards perspective and helping customer realize the benefits of doing so. We can help them integrate communication into business processes, simplify communications with customers, and get productivity gains in their internal processes.
But our main challenges are different from theater to theater. In the European market, where we have our main volume, the main driver is integrating voice with applications on the desktop. In North America, which is the more innovative market, we are having detailed discussions around expanding presence, mobility, collaboration and other Unified Communications features into the voice communications world.
3. What will be Siemens's focus and direction for the next twelve months? What new products and services can we expect from Siemens?
The next twelve months will see us delivering on the Open Communications promise. Leveraging OpenSOA, Siemens’ own Services Oriented-Architecture framework, our Unified Communications, Unified Messaging, and Contact Center Solutions will become more seamless in their deployment and our Software Development Kits in each area will expose SOA interfaces to the underlying services. We will maintain our commitments to our existing voice platform customers while continuing to support the developing market for the HiPath 8000 Communications Server, our carrier-grade Enterprise class SIP-based Soft Switch.
In particular, the CRMXchange audience may be most interested in Siemens recent launch of the Open Virtualized Contact Center solution which expands the reach of the Contact Center outside four walls and to a variety of devices. This SIP-enabled offering positions Siemens in very large contact center environments supporting up to 5000 concurrent agents independent of the underlying communications infrastructure.
4. Siemens has been a strong proponent of Unified Communications (UC) utilizing HiPath ProCenter ® Portfolio. It appears that acquainting users on UC will take a significant amount of time. When do you expect this approach to gain market acceptance and to generate significant revenue for Siemens?
Our ground breaking Associate Agent and Team Bar based Presence and Collaboration functions in HiPath ProCenter have proven exceptionally popular. Sales of the Agent and Associate Desktops that enable these capabilities are increasing, indicating that our Contact Center customers are well acquainted with Unified Communications concepts. For several years now the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) has been using this capability to link direct contact center agents with claims specialists and lowered total call volumes by 15-20% due to reduced repeat calls and callbacks, and reduced abandon rates by 60% with higher service levels.
With the introduction of Siemens Open Virtualized Contact Center, agents can proactively engage enterprise experts in real time regardless of where they may be or what device they may be using to enhance First Contact Resolution. The voice presence of any subscribed user on Siemens HiPath 8000 SIP-based softswitch is visible to contact center agents allowing the expansion of the customer service function to the entire enterprise as necessary.
Furthermore, tiered and flexible licensing supports a role-based model for delivering Unified Communication (presence and collaboration) capabilities to super-agents, full-time agents, associate agents, on-demand agents, and roaming subject matter experts as necessary to support business requirements.
5. What are the major drivers for Unified Communications solutions?
The pace of business and increased competition are driving the entire range of interest in enhanced communications systems. With the increase in media options, employee mobility, and communications volume, there is an increase in what Siemens calls “communication friction, latency, and overload”. This results in waste of costly employee time, delays in decision-making, stalled business processes, and even employee burnout. Unified Communications is the best tool to address these problems and enable distributed enterprises to best leverage their personnel resources and knowledge in real-time. Unified Communications can streamline workflow, reduce cycle time, speed first contact resolution, thereby enhancing customer service, and thus ultimately differentiating an organization from its peers.
6. Siemens has been a strong advocate of first call resolution. Has the market matured to a point where it recognizes its benefits and is willing to implement technology and practices to adopt this mantra?
Unquestionably, the data supports the fact that improved FCR benefits business in a myriad of ways. As we continually suggest to our clients that the broad metrics of Lifetime Value of a Customer, Cost per Customer, and both Employee and Customer Satisfaction are more important than calls per agent or average call length; we see acceptance that improved FCR drives the broad metrics in the positive direction for the business.
SQM Consulting Group found that, in fact, there is a tight correlation between customer satisfaction and first-contact resolution rates. First contact-resolution influences cost efficiency in the contact center. Improving first-contact resolution rates means lowering the total volume of incoming calls, since fewer customers have to contact the company with follow-up calls. The research also showed that there is a correlation between first-contact resolution and the likelihood of a customer accepting an offer during a call. Since customers are more likely to accept cross-sell, up-sell or follow-on offers if their problems have been resolved on the first contact, first-contact resolution positively impacts revenue generation in the contact center.
7. Siemens is in a market space with many major vendors, i.e. Aspect, Avaya, Cisco Systems, Nortel, etc. How are you meeting the challenge of differentiating yourselves from your competitors?
Siemens has developed a unique approach to how we differentiate in the market. We categorize our approach in three ways: 1) A vision we call LifeWorks, 2) a strategy we call Open Communications, and 3) a path to help our customers get there, called OpenPath.
So very briefly, what is LifeWorks? LifeWorks is our vision of universal access to services provided through a truly unified communication domain. This vision means that every enterprise employee should have access to the people, the information and the collaboration groups they need, irrespective of their location, irrespective of their device, and irrespective of the network they are connected to.
Open Communications is our strategy of how to realize the LifeWorks vision for our customers. Siemens is looking to the future of Open Communications via an OpenPath.
OpenPath is our unique strategy for supporting our customers’ journey to an Open Communications environment. OpenPath consists of technology, service and financing components.
Essentially, everything we do is done in an Open manner. With strict adherence to Open Standards, we have embraced SOA as a framework for all our development efforts and will expose our SOA based interfaces to customers and developers who want to use them to integrate our solutions into their own SOA environments.
8. Has the decision making process changed significantly over the past twelve months? If so, how? (e.g. In some cases, the sales process has become more complex, users have become more sophisticated, more marketing and VP Customer Care type people are involved in the decision ,etc.)
We are seeing an obvious increase in IT involvement in CRM/Contact Center decisions. Voice over IP plays a huge part in that, but as a result we’re also seeing more technical savvy among CRM managers, more involvement of a Customer Management Office or Officer role, and interest in better integration of communications into the workflow and business process of an enterprise.
Ross Sedgewick serves as Director, Global Marketing for Applications in Siemens Enterprise Communications, leveraging over 18 years of management experience in the Enterprise Software, CRM, Channel Management and Marketing arenas. Ross has responsibility for the applications marketing team, which drives marketing for the unified communications, unified messaging and contact center product portfolios worldwide. Prior to working at Siemens, he acquired broad industry experience in senior positions with companies such as IBM Corporation and Delano Technologies. Ross holds a Honors Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Toronto, and an MBA (Marketing) from the Schulich School of Business at York University.