Last night I ordered a whole bunch of components to upgrade our main PC and satisfy my wife’s Warcraft addiction. Today I got a text message as follows:
There is a problem authorising the payment for your order E123456 . Please ring us on 0870 0123 4567 to resolve this. Thank you for your custom.
Of course, you call the number and have to re-dictate your order code to the agent.
There was also an email with the same message. Now, with a URL, you can add in parameters at the end. Just tag on “?param=value”. But the telephone system doesn’t understand URLs, and there’s no standard way of encoding phone numbers in SMS messages and emails to be able to extend the system just in case you do have a click-to-call capability. (Yes, I know about SIP URIs. The potential is there; a standardised deployed system is not.) There’s no way of me pressing the “call” button on my mobile and the order code being passed straight back to their system.
The whole point of VoIP is not arbitrage, price or regulatory bypass. It’s doing things you can’t do on the set-in-stone circuit networks. The phone companies don’t seem to have a vision to sell you anything other than minutes, even if the objective/value/revenue potential of the call is enabling a transaction. What’s even scarier is that architectures like IMS are likely to rob the end user of any chance of unilaterally deciding to extend the system. What if I want to participate in some data-exchange that the operator hasn’t pre-approved or tariffed in some way? The other part of IP is empowering the user to go out and buy some nifty new talk gadget and have it work without having to worry what their telco, ISP or “IMS-SP” might be compatible with.
In user-to-user Skype calls, we’ve cracked the exchange of text, URLs, files and desktops. In user-to-business calls, we’ve made no progress in several decades. This is where I think the opportunity is for Skype and eBay to disrupt telephony the most. Sadly, I think their marketing focus on “free” rather than “better” will come to bite them.
It turned out that the vendor’s payment system was down and had automatically spat out the rejection message, and they re-tried and payment went through. At least I got a blog post out of it, for my effort…
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:12 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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I am not sure that I agree with your claim that VoIP can do "things you can’t do on the set-in-stone circuit networks." Indeed I venture to claim that I can do almost all of the things if you will grant me end-points with the same level of intelligence. Indeed I will take advantage of the fact that the circuit network is set-in-stone to my advantage. The problem with PSTN is not that it is set-in-stone or that it is not "stupid"; the real problem is that for PSTN we will assume a simple device with a limited user interface but for VoIP we will assume a PC, with a wide screen and a rich GUI. Like it is fashionable to say these days, it is all in the end-points whether the carrier is circuit or packet.
Posted by: at August 4, 2006 03:01 PMThere are companies that care about customer experience that tap eStara to help solve this problem using the existing phone network. SIP URIs are solutions for the future, but customers deserve this technology today, and the savings from the call center are signficant.
Traditional phone numbers are an informational blackhole, and services like Skype were built a completely different purpose. To offer any sort of reliable, scalable service, you need to have a robust service that works with existing phone networks.
"To offer any sort of reliable, scalable service, you need to have a robust service that works with existing phone networks."
Why?
I think one of the biggest stumbling blocks the VoIP landscap has today is the presumption that the main desire a user has is to get the call off IP and onto the PSTN. (part of that is also the attempt to make VoIP look/feel/walk like a regular PSTN system as well)
Guess what? It's not even close to being the main goal.
My main goal as an end user is to have the freedom to do what I want, with whatever I device I choose to use, and to do so for as little cash as possible.
Do I want to be able to call a PSTN number from my computer or random mobile device? Sure. But that's a secondary goal.
I also want to be able to call freeworlddialup users. And iaxtel users. and [randomuser]@[randomdomain] users, and have conference calls and get the weather, etc. etc. and so forth. I want to call those users, without having to download a million different propietary clients to do so (think Yahoo!/MSN/Google Talk). I want those users to be able to call me, and I want to be able to have all umpty-zillion devices I have laying around ring when they do, so I can pick up whichever one I happen to be closest to.
There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to do this, other than shortsightedness on the part of my provider, and/or the desire for 'vendor lock-in' (and/or large profit) on the part of my/the called parties provider (again, Yahoo!, etc.)
None of those things have jack to do with existing phone networks, and that's a GoodThing(tm).
Posted by: at August 4, 2006 07:55 PMThat sounds like the ideal situation for the vendor to implement a ring-back system.
Either allow the user to reply to the text message (they know why they sent you a text message so can match up replies from your mobile number with the order number, note: this should not be used as an excuse to make some more pennies by PSMS) or simply embed a URL in the e-mail with a link saying "Click here to have us call you to confirm your order", when a user clicks the URL it asks for the phone number they'd like to be contacted on (it could pick up the numbers from the order and give them as a choice, but they might not be at those locations right now!) and have the vendor's phone system call the user back and connect them to the sales line, at the same time piping the order details to the screen of the salesperson that takes the call.
The salesperson knows why they've had to call back and make the appropriate apology and confirm the order without the user repeating themselves.
This relies on the vendor being willing to not only pay for the cost of calls but lose out on the 0870 revenue (but hey, it's THEIR system that was down in the first place, from that point onwards, everything they do is about recovering the sale). The fact they use an 0870 number for sales calls suggests that this particular vendor isn't quite as interested in customer services as one that would implement a callback system.
In an ideal world, we wouldn't need this level of integration with the traditonal telephony systems but we are currently in a state of transition, during which is it essential. A large part of what we as a company do is based on offering "emerging telephony" ideals to organisations that are forced to interact with clients using plain old telephony.
We use a similar SMS based ring-back system ourselves :)
Posted by: at August 4, 2006 10:24 PM