August 24, 2008
“Smart Wallets” Will Drive Consumer and Business UC
Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View
Over a year ago I wrote an article commending veteran IVR technology provider Intervoice with developing “multimodal” user interfaces for mobile “smart phone” users. One of the key demos they developed was that of a bank application that proactively notified a customer that their account was overdrawn, along with user options to access a either self-service application with voice or visual interfaces, or immediate access to live assistance to deal with the the time-sensitive problem.
Recent announcements from major banks and credit card services that they were offering financial applications for mobile “smart phone” users is a practical sign that all aspects of UC will indeed take over the consumer market and push business users as well. In effect, the “smart wallet” financial applications are what will drive consumer adoption of UC and carry along general “Business UC” in its wake. This will particularly affect enterprise customer contact interactions (inbound and outbound) and self-service applications, all of which which I like to refer to as "Customer UC.".
Will Wireless Carriers Get In the Way?
According to the excellent article in today’s Los Angeles Times (8/24/08) by Joseph Menn, leading banks are aggressively moving forward in offering mobile banking services to their customers. However, in addition to having a “smart phone” that provides Web browser access and text messaging functions, radio frequency chips that allow wireless scanning (like a credit card) will also be necessary for mobile purchases.
Since the carrier services still control distribution of mobile devices to the consumer market, they will have to be cooperative in supporting the distribution of coming smart phones with radio frequency chips, as well as not interfering unreasonably with the use of these devices and the financial applications that will be accessed over their networks.
The Bottom Line For Enterprise UC
The extension to personal business transactions will make mobile smart phones become “must have” devices for most adult consumers, but especially those who are also business users. We can then expect every new employee to come equipped with such devices that can also support “Business UC” applications. Therefore, it will be only a matter of using those same personalized devices also for multimodal enterprise communications between people and all their business contacts, as well as interaction with specific enterprise business process applications that are "mobilized" for information retrieval and time-critical notifications.
It should be obvious that if consumer financial services usage of smart phones will meet those stringent security, regulatory compliance, and authentication requirements, those capabilities should also satisfy most enterprise needs as well. As expected, the real driver for UC adoption by end users is the mobile, multimodal endpoint communication device that will enable them to exploit UC flexibility when they are away from their desktop PCs.
What Do You Think?
You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.
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