vCons can secure the future of conversation.
Why are vCons important? Business leaders don’t buy technology, they buy positive outcomes.
I write this as a charter member of The vCON Foundation who has had Call-Center teams reporting in to me.
- Voice is Persuasive
- Human Conversations are Powerful and
- Recorded Conversations have become pervasive even while our memories lack perfect recall.
What are vCONS?
vCons are essentially voice conversations. vCon is the emerging open standard being developed at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Consent, lawful use, compliance and other expectations that matter are needed now that conversations are so readily recorded, transported, and or transformed while becoming permanently accessible.
Voice used to exist only in the moment
Says vCon Foundation founder, Jeff Pulver, “Voice used to exist only in the moment. A call ended, and it disappeared. Conversations can now be captured, structured, and treated as assets when they are handled with care, consent, and trust. This creates new opportunities for business, customer experience, and productivity. It also raises real questions about governance, privacy, and accountability.”
Pulver knows this better than most of us. His successful battle against monopolistic telecoms resulted in the FCC Pulver Order in 2004 and is the reason we have smart phones that handle voice, text and internet access without us paying by the mile or by the minute from device to device or human communications. The Pulver Order allowed the widespread adoption of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). This one act moved internet communications away from phone company regulation.
Then and Now
As VoIP changed the internet then, vCons will create guardrails that protect real-time conversations now and in the future. The vCon Foundation’s meetup in Boston on March 6th demonstrated with actual examples the seismic shift in thinking as presenters and attendees participated in the highly interactive session. Nobody could have guessed in advance that attendees would linger for quite a while after the program ended. I suspect if it weren’t for other commitments, we’d all still be there now as you read this review.
A vCon is important because it contains a collection of data at the conversational level. I loved the comments that made us think of them as PDF’s. They work because they capture all that is needed for the contextual future use of that voice/video focused interaction. Mitch Liberman an advisor to VCONify got my attention by speaking of vCONS as AI robot food.
Ai Robots speak vCon
AI robots already “speak vcon.” So, we were not surprised to learn that they were trained on them. Because of this, context is critical. Along with context, we need a healthy respect for confidentiality and need to demand a permissions signal that both gives and removes consent easily. Presenter Thomas McCarthy-Howe drove home the point that “Consent is not forever.”
Contrast this with the current wild-wild-west improper and potentially illegal use of voice and data redeployed with nebulous permissions where confidentiality might have been expected.
“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well” – William Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Real time conversations transient nature and the existential questions of past contextual facts vs future possible misuse make vCONs a possible guardrail for trust. The ability to define time parameters and secure permissions in context has huge importance.
An instructive highlight of the event was a live demo with Vconify played out on screen and speakerphone. Jeff Pulver used his phone to call Audrey, a real customer care person who role played a textbook case study script of an escalating customer complaint. We watched in real time as the collection of data at the conversation level triggered next level responses when a key word (here it was “refund”) was spoken. Conversation points that might previously risked being lost as casual castoffs from the phone call were tagged and noted for their criticality to the business involved. The resulting automatic escalation internally improves chances of a more satisfying outcome.
vCons might work like spreadsheets
Pulver sees vCons as spreadsheets of assets inside a business. We can protect our customer relationships and head off misunderstandings and disasters when we can catalog and recall not just the conversations we remember but the ones we might forget.
The memory capability that vCons represent from voice conversations can be the basis of building trust if the care team takes action on and follows up on those quiet sticking points that might otherwise be lost in traditional note taking.
My personal experience in having call centers report to sales operations reinforce that keeping the human in the process insures higher success rates and better outcomes. Studies continue to show that people are more comfortable talking to humans who resolve or escalate issues and subsequently deliver desired results.
“the intersection of Telecom and Ai. Deeply rich data that adds value to future business. Trust and legal compliance held within the memory of a vCon.”
This, as Jeff Pulver says, is the intersection of Telecom and Ai. Deeply rich data that adds value to future business. Trust and legal compliance held within the memory of a vCon. Thomas spoke of coders and builders now capable of writing apps in front of their potential customers. The portability of trust, safety, compliance and permission levels built in at the core.
The automotive industry has a great jump start on implementation because of the work at Strolid and now vConic. New Hampshire was well represented along with a sizeable group up from Cape Cod. Others traveled in from NYC and beyond to participate.
You can find more in this series of The vCon Foundation conversations happening this year. You can support the work of the Foundation and benefit from the organization’s thought leadership by joining the Foundation as a business or as an individual member.
With Thanks to Thomas McCarthy-Howe for providing these valuable Open Resources:
Open Source: http://www.github.com/vcon-dev
Open Standard: https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/vcon/about?
Documentation: https://www.conserver.io