| Leveraging a High Fidelity Switched Network Model to Inform System Dynamics Model of the Telecommunications Infrastructure A generic representation of the telecommunications infrastructure in a metropolitan area designed to be integrated into a much larger simulation of the seventeen key infrastructures has been implemented in Vensim. This Critical Infrastructure Protection Decision Support System (CIP/DSS) is designed to provide insights for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in making decisions about investments related to critical infrastructure protection. Although a system dynamics representation was well suited to representing the dynamics and interdependencies in this complex system of systems, it was recognized early on that collaborations with key infrastructure domain experts and organizations would be important to the success of the project. |
| 3G Migration in Pakistan The telecommunication industry in Pakistan has come a long way since the country's independence in 1947. The initial era could be fairly termed as the PTCL (Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited) monopoly, for it was the sole provider of all telecommunication services across the country. It was not until four decades later that the region embarked into the new world of wireless communication, hence ending the decades old PTCL monopoly. By the end of the late 1990's, government support and international investment in the region opened new doors to innovation and better quality, low cost, healthy competition. |
| Consumers and Convergence - attitudes are changing... Mobile commerce, tracking personal profile data, privacy and security concerns - discover how consumer attitudes to online and mobile issues are changes in KPMG's 2010 Consumers and Convergence IV report. |
| Aiming for Fast Growth? Changing the Ways of the World? This paper is a discussion between a business publication and a Senior Manager of a mobile communications corporation that has gathered an impressive reputation in the Indian telecommunications industry and won several accolades. The senior manager in this paper discusses the telecom industry in India, and the role of his company in this sector. He describes new developments and challenges ahead for the company, and their required solutions. He describes the trajectory of the company and its remarkable increase, and their demand for robust business processes. It describes the IT challenges faced by the company in audit and regulatory compliance management, and in migration from a legacy system to Oracle 11i. The Senior Manager describes their engagement with Pieran, and how they quickly scaled up their team to meet the unprecedented growth experienced by the telecommunications company. Pieran put in place a number of teams to implement processes that coped well with the huge increase in transactions. Now, they manage critical business processes as well as meet conditions by Service Level Agreements, including risk management. The Senior Manager describes how Pieran set up effective delivery teams to manage critical business functions. The team identified key risks associated with the business processes, and implemented mitigating controls to ensure smooth operations. |
| Workplace Mobility - A Unique Technology for Access Provisioning With the access to the application, is it possible to control a function better? Does one like to learn more about this issue, and access more about the provision for the mobile workflow? Then, this is the right choice, and this webinar helps the attendee discuss the process to examine the various challenges that people face in today's rapidly changing workplace. Through this webinar, one can explore Claims Based Provisioning, and how it enables the delivery of the sort of Role Based Access companies which have been searching for. This webinar provides a demonstration of the AppGate which walks you through the policy setting, and resulting user experience. One can see from the webinar, how one can save both in terms of money, and time in abundance through the policy based access, at the same time know how you will able to solve the issues related to control reporting and compliance. |
| Profiling the 'Mobile Phone Only' Population: A Study of Australians with a Mobile Phone and No Landline Telephone The document brings to light the factors that are known to stimulate active participation in the social structures of a Learning Network. With this goal, the paper investigates various aspects of successful social interactions in online learning communities. |
| The Role of Prosody in a Voicemail Summarization System When a speaker leaves a voicemail message there are prosodic cues that emphasize the important points in the message, in addition to lexical content. In this paper comparison and visualization on the relative contribution of these two types of features within a voicemail summarization system has been done. It describes the system's ability to generate summaries of two test sets, having trained and validated using 700 messages from the IBM (International Business Machine) Voicemail corpus. Results measuring the quality of summary artifacts show that combined lexical and prosodic features are at least as robust as combined lexical features alone across all operating conditions. Speech is a very rich communication medium and recently there have been efforts to find ways of incorporating prosodic cues in order to extend the capabilities of spoken dialogue and audio browsing/retrieval systems. An important aspect of this approach is the combination of prosodic, acoustic and language information to achieve results that are more robust than those of single sources. Humans use prosody to disambiguate similar words, to group words into meaningful phrases, and to mark the importance of words or phrases. The acoustic correlates of prosody are among the cues least affected by noise, so it is likely that human listeners use prosody as a redundant cue to help them correctly recognize speech in noisy environments. Spontaneous and read speech differ in regard to prosodic structure, with the former having shorter prosodic units. |
| 10 Principles of Radio Advertising that Apply to Effective Voice Mail Some principles from the "Science" of radio advertising that can make one's voice mail "Commercial" more effective are mentioned in this paper. These include linking specific benefits directly to the listener's needs because with radio one had only a few precious seconds to create interest. Attention spans are short in general and even shorter when people are listening on the telephone. Hence the listener should receive the most important details early in the message when his or her listening is at peak efficiency. The second is to visualize the target market to think about whom one is calling. Much like radio advertising, a voice mail always identifies the target market and then communicates as if that customer was standing right in front of the announcer. The third is to provide the listener with an outline of the message. If several points are to be communicated and some are more actionable or more important than others, tell the listener up front. This will help position one's thoughts and manage the listener's expectations. Fourthly, summarize the single most important point at the end of the message. It is helpful to let the listener know what the main feature of the product is. Stand out by acting uniquely or differently from other callers or advertisers. This helps a lot and humor is a key tool here. Other principles for effective radio advertising include using the person's name in the message at the very beginning of the communication; leaving one's phone number with the message, if possible; not reading from a prepared script; and a confident tone. |
| Visual Voicemail Client-server visual voicemail is the most cost efficient and optimized voicemail service configuration available for those who wish to update their current voicemail platforms to the visual domain and beyond. Voicemail has proven to be one of the most profitable value added services ever introduced by telecommunications service providers. Personal vocal characteristics including tone of voice, inflection and accent combine to convey much more information than can ever transmitted through words alone. Client server-based visual voicemail is a marked improvement from Traditional Telephonic User Interface (TUI) based voicemail in several notable aspects. Visual voicemail users are able to immediately see all messages in one glance and access each in the order of their choice. Client-server visual voicemail is used to add visualization to voicemail such as forwarding to e-mail and forwarding to Multimedia Message (MMS).A visual voicemail client-server architecture is flexible in order to quickly and cost efficiently deploy new interfaces for multiple handset operating systems such as found in Symbian, Mobile Linux and Windows Mobile and enough to allow for rapid delivery to other types of devices beyond handsets, such as PCs. This paper shows that service providers adopted Visual Voicemail in order to take full advantage of existing platforms and expand existing offerings onto current smartphones. |
| Optimized Customer Service Portal With Multilingualism and Detailed Analysis Functionalities Proximus is a subsidiary of Belgacom, and is the biggest telecommunications service provider in Belgium. The paper studies the company's strategy to optimize its client service and to reduce its costs. Proximus has three call centers which handle 50,000 calls daily. The company also needed to devise a plan to handle its increasing traffic. Proximus decided to automate the system. It also decided to address the issue of multilingualism. Proximus seeks to support the country's official languages of French, German, Dutch and English, as a minimum. It also wanted to deploy the system supporting open standards. The company chose Voxeo VoiceObjects based on Voxeo's presentation highlighting layer concept and Voice User Interfaces (VUIs). Voxeo system was also low-maintenance and had lower costs. The company also engaged the services of NG-Solution, a partner firm of Voxeo. VoiceObjects technology featured dynamic menus which were easily adaptable to customers' requirements. Proximus also decided to use Voxeo Analyzer. Analyzer forms a part of the phone application server software suite. The case study also discusses the advantages accrued to the organization due to the transition to new system. The new system greatly enhanced the customers' experience. The system is also easy to use as it allows the administrators to tweak the setting within a couple of minutes. |
| Versatel Calls on Voxeo VoiceObjects for Customer Care Self-Service Phone Portal Versatel is a leading telecommunication services provider in Germany. The company required a new way to power its self-service phone system. This case study discusses the company's strategy and the methodology for choosing the new system. Versatel uses the self-service phone system for handling escalating numbers of its customers. The company chose Voxeo VoiceObjects for this purpose. The reasons for choosing this system were its easy integration and flexibility. The system flawlessly integrated with Versatel's existing customer relationship system. It also made financially good investment. Simultaneously, Voxeo VoiceObjects also provided real-time analysis, which increased the customer satisfaction level. VoiceObjects also was helpful in designing a new work flow where customers use a customized dialog which prompts for latest service information. The study found that VoiceObjects's Infostore stores the information in real time. The combined use of VoiceObject with Analyzer helped the company in study customers' behavior. The paper also studies the impact of new technology on an organization's operations. The new system led to the decrease in costs but also enhanced customer satisfaction. The system combines the self-service method with live agent, which helps the live agent in retrieving the information at a faster speed. The system is also capable of handling increasing traffic of consumers. The paper concludes that the transfer to the new technology had a great benefit. |
| Vodafone Ireland Selects Voxeo VoiceObjects to Power Phone Self-Service System Vodafone Ireland is a leading telecommunications provider in Ireland. The company was looking to change the powering options for its automatic phone self-service system. The decision was important as it was meant to determine the level of customer satisfaction. Vodafone Ireland was the first Vodafone conglomerate company to use a VoiceXML Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. According to the case study, the company chose Voxeo's VoiceObjects phone application server software suite for the above mentioned purpose. The paper studies the reasons behind choosing Voxeo system over its competitors. Voxeo VoiceObjects has the advantage of being the most flexible, fastest and easiest system. The system helped Vodafone Ireland in reducing the projects costs by up to 75%. The paper also deals with the deployment of Voxeo's VoiceObjects Analyzer in conjunction with the company's MicroStrategy business intelligence platform. The Analyzer helped in improving the performance of IVR system. The study examines the future course of action to be taken by Vodafone Ireland. The company is looking to enable more personalization of its services and applications. It is also planning to appraise new interfaces and channels like USSD-based text. The paper suggests that Voxeo system helped the company in cutting costs and increasing efficiency. The new system also increased callers' satisfaction and lowered the waiting time period. |
| T-Mobile Czech Republic Customers Rate Phone Self-Service as Good as or Better Than Live Agent Support T-Mobile is a prominent telecommunication service provider in the Czech Republic. This paper studies the efficacy and popularity of its services in the Czech Republic. Specific attention has been paid to its multimedia contact center and VoiceXML Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. T-Mobile employed Voxeo's VoiceObjects phone application server for their self-service phone facility. The paper evaluates the reasons behind choosing Voxeo product. Voxeo was picked over its competitors due to its simplicity and flexibility. This system also was very cost efficient and had lower overheads. The chosen system allowed the company to increase speed of its response. It also helped in quick adaptability based on system usage and caller behavior. Voxeo system is easily deployable on various platforms such as text, video and the web. The paper suggests that the system also eliminated the requirement of proprietary programming skills. Its other advantage was the flawless integration with IT infrastructure and call centers. This led to saving of time, money and other resources. It also reduced the time required to train employees for new program. According to the paper, T-Mobile then surveyed its customers to determine the efficacy of the new system. The survey was conducted every two months and it revealed that customers rated new automated phone system better or at least equally good as live agents. |
| T-Mobile Powers Integrated Voice and Mobile Self-Service Strategy With VoiceObjects T-Mobile has been a leader in mobile services in America, Middle East, Africa, Europe and parts of Asia. Recently, it decided to deploy Voxeo VoiceObjects software as a part of its self-service consumer technologies. The case study describes the two key criteria which led to the project. First, the company wanted to provide intuitive and easy self service to the customers. Second, T- Mobile required optimizing efficiency of affordable services via a range of channels. Voxeo VoiceObjects provided an ideal technology partner with its cost effective, simple self-service architecture. The paper highlights several qualities of Voxeo VoiceObjects. It is a personalized and effective self-service provider which can be deployed at any channel once it has been designed. VoiceObjects' multi channel approach provides a useful conglomeration of service channels. The paper concludes that Voxeo VoiceObjects shall lead T-Mobile customers to fast, personalized mobile services through a self-service mobile portal with speech recognition, SMS services or touch-tone (DTMF). It is a near miracle solution that shall enable T-Mobile to improve user experience and do so at a lower cost. T-Mobile shall shortly use, create and manage customer self service consumer portals in Czech Republic, Poland and Austria (PTC region). The new technology also aided company in providing richer customer experience. |
| Case Study - GPS at Disneyland Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and radios are of immense use even at an unassuming place such as an amusement park. This case study discusses how a family with children visited Disneyland and Disney's California Adventure Park taking along with them a GPS receiver. This GPS receiver was a Garmin seventy six cs, and came with four GPS radios that were Rino five hundred and twenty HCx. The family initially used the GPS receiver with the standard basemap, and later with the StoneMaps. The case study tries to understand how the family used these units and made good use of the radios. These radios turned out most useful as a means of communications given they were often in a crowd and split up from time to time to explore different amusements. The GPS receiver was also a help because children tended to wander away. The paper highlights how the equipment maximized the family's time and fun by offering a ready guide around the place, activities and a tracking and communication system that involved the children as well. It discusses the details offered on the maps. The paper points out that the maps are uncluttered and they are visually clear and appealing on a color screen. The available maps are also compatible with older units. They offer an overview when zoomed out and display details when zoomed in. The paper also offers details on the waterproof features of the Rino GPS units along with the carry a backlight for use at night facility. |