The animated tutorial can be found at: http://www.techtionary.com/ocsforum/presence/

Overview & Business Impact

The impact of IM-Instant Messaging on business has been profound with nearly every enterprise using some form of instant or “live” real-time chatting.  However, the financial ROI on IM has been more elusive.  Certainly faster communications means faster problem solving which in a call center can reduce call holding times and allow agents to process more calls.  However, in traditional business settings, while a great benefit to managers who use IM to put their subordinates on a “choke chain,” constant interruptions by superiors and gossip chatting from others more likely reduces productivity.

Here are some of the key benefits to super-sized presence:

Incident Management

When an event or incident occurs, a continuous persistent chat session enables real-time communications for all involved across multiple platforms.  Consistency is provided by an online database providing real-time information data gathering allowing responder’s access to visual communications for different events simultaneously. In the animated tutorial, a fire initiates an alarm to the fire department and then sends the map of the building and information on any hazardous materials.  This is also an example of “late media” with information provided during or after the SIP call is disconnected.

Click-to

Click-to call, video, database, IM, shared screen and other applications allow single click contact to key files and personnel.  Immediacy can bring faster customer resolution, field problem-solving and decision-making.  Multi-part video conferencing allows connections to resolve “finger-pointing” problems without prolonged telephone-tag.  The key point of “click to anything” is the ability to communicate to connect without dialing, simply click on a name or image to connect reduces mis-dialing, delayed communications and other errors.

EIM-Enterprise Instant Messaging (IM)

Traditional internal and external IM can also be extended to conference or multi-party IM.  With various options including multi-party and multi-level discussions, shared screen and video IM or VIM can speed contact and contact to database information retrieval.  In the animated tutorial, improved coordination means faster response managers to a crisis condition.

Presence Alerts

Maximize employee interaction and contact time with visual presence notification such as task and meeting reminders.  Reduce callbacks, delayed decision-making while improving team building with multiple level presence indicators.

One-to-one marketing

Opt-in marketing communications (marcom) can be linked to event notification in the form of airline, concert, sports or other seat-based activities.  The very nature of marketing is changing from mass to mental.  Away from mass marketing of general concepts such as age range, socio-geo-demographic and other factors to “mental marketing” targeting individual mental states as evidenced by the individual profiles completed as part of the website membership process and developing profiles based on browsing and purchasing decisions.  In addition, expert systems, advanced profile analysis often part of a “deep search” analysis, blackboard systems and other AI-Artificial Intelligence techniques can be applied.  In the animated tutorial, there is an example of IM marketing based on specific customer indications.

Role-based activities

Manager, doctor, nurse, project manager, process leader are all examples of role-based functions.   Role-based presence routing can direct queries and inquiries to specific and trained responsible personnel.  Changes in presence can redirect communications in time of demand, outage or crisis.  In addition, “incall” communications can alert, retrieve or activate specific functions.

Trading systems

Event alerts in the form of trading price, activity level, analyst reports, news market indicators and other events improve trading posture and performance.  Presence notification aka programmable software agents of buy-sell recommendations can be based on key words, blog-wiki, RSS feeds, social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.  In addition, links and data routing can be provided to automatic systems such as front office and back office systems.  In the animated tutorial, there is an automatic “buy-sell” based on a trading price.

Knowledge management

Another area where presence can provide considerable benefit is in the broad area of executive decision-making often referred to as DSS-Decision Support Systems.  Few complain when a CEO leads like Steve Jobs a company to market dominance.  At the same time, thousands of jobs and billions of dollars have been lost to management corruption such as Enron, Worldcom and Madoff.  Presence systems have the potential to capture or audit communications between executives or groups of managers.  Executives can monitor internal “gossip” to reduce morale problems resulting from the “rumor mill.”  In the animated tutorial, executives can collaborate globally by “visual presence” allowing for all to “see” the same information reaching a consensus and decision more quickly.  

Summary

Undoubtedly there will be unforeseen and unanticipated benefits to “super presence” and advanced intra- and inter-personal with single and multi-person communications.    

This tutorial is written and produced by TECHtionary.com (http://www.techtionary.com) and

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