Once upon a time, a troop of army cadets who had finished their basic training was paraded in front of an audience including many proud parents. After two such parents had pointed out their respective offspring to the other, one commented that Johnny, the other parents son, was not marching in time with the others. To this, Johnnys mother responded Johnny isnt out of step with the army, the army is out of step with Johnny .
The communications and call centre fields are awash with a plethora of technologies , each with their own subset of the myriad of terminologies keeping up with which requires the erstwhile practitioner to spend almost as much time as is required for the technologies themselves.
But if this wasnt difficult enough, there are those whose life mission appears to be to either create new terms to supplant perfectly adequate terms that already exist or claim new definitions for or changed means of existing terms. Setting aside the imbeciles who use workstation instead of PC (or desk), workbench in place of workstation, claim the plural of mouse is mouses or refer to Macs and PCs (Macs are PCs), there are a number of other terms for which the misrepresentation is more subtle and/or more loaded that real confusion often results.
One such term is proprietary .
Pick up any dictionary and one will find a definition of proprietary that refers to being covered by copyright, trademark or patent. By this definition, just about all hardware and software used within the broad field of IT is proprietary. Within the communications field, proprietary also refers to interfaces the specifications of which are owned by one or another party, readiness of the owner to license notwithstanding.
The term is, however, widely misused by marketing myth-makers to refer to anything that is not produced by or using components from Microsoft or Intel (or perhaps Cisco, Dell, IBM or HP). This is sheer gibberish as the Windows operating system is just as proprietary to Microsoft as that used in the MD110 PABX is to Ericsson.
Another misused term is open although it has a far greater range of legitimate uses. Within the field of communications, open refers to the extent to which a system can be interfaced to other systems, independent of the developers of such systems. Thus, a PABX which can be interfaced to PSTN and ISDN services from each of a large number of telcos, supports QSIG allowing it to be networked to other vendors PABXs, supports analogue extensions allowing any of the 1000s of different analogue handsets to be interfaced to it, supports an SMDR port with a published interface allowing a telephone information and management system (TIMS) to be interfaced to it and supports one or more standard CTI protocols such as CSTA, can legitimately claim to be open.
A system which is deficient in one or more of these cannot. However, this somehow fails to register amongst those who write advertising blurbs for and the sycophantic commentators who write about the developers of some PC-based and LAN-based telephone systems who claim that a system that, although it does not support QSIG, a TIMS interface or any CTI protocol, because the operating system is proprietary to Microsoft, the system is somehow open.
Equally misused is the term legacy which is correctly used to refer to something handed down from an ancestor or a predecessor or from the past or disposition of either personal or real property in the event of death. The term crept into use in the IT industry to refer to a very old and outdated systems, such as, in the 1990s IBM 360 computers, to which something much newer had to interface. However, once the marketing myth-makers seized on the term, it was applied indiscriminately to disparage alternative products and alternative technologies. It is not uncommon to find some vendors referring to current model competing products as legacy. A key point here is that when a vendor representative begins to bag competing products and/or technologies as legacy , that person has most likely run out of favourable attributes of that vendors own system to cite.
Although not used disparagingly, another term that is often misused is CTI . As a product category, CTI refers to software which interfaces to both telephone system and enterprise computer software to integration computing and telephony applications. Although other product categories such as audio call recording systems, predictive diallers and CRM software may have a CTI interface, and are thus CTI-capable, they are not CTI products. And vendors of such products will generally not disagree.
However, some vendors of products ranging from circuit cards to IVR application generation software, from voice mail systems to IVRs, from unified messaging systems to telco exchange provisioning software find the assumed cachet of the term CTI irresistible. At least one PABX manufacturer considers its ACD MIS software product to be a CTI product! Although the use of the term CTI for non-CTI products is different from the competitor bashing implicit with the misuse of the terms open, proprietary and legacy, it nonetheless has the potential to confuse potential buyers and the market at large.
But when it comes to intentional misuse, it is that of the term CRM that really takes the cake .
An abbreviation for customer relationship management, as a product category, CRM is widely accepted to be software that supports the processes of liaising with customers and potential customers and/or of analysing such contacts in a background mode. It thus features capabilities or modules that perform sales lead management, sales force automation, customer contact tracking, customer segmentation and data mining.
However, in unvetted directories, whether on-line or in print (send us your details, nominate the categories youve chosen to be listed in and fees, no questions asked), one is likely to find, as well as genuine CRM products, audio call recording systems, IVR systems, knowledge management software, E-mail processing software and who knows what elselisted under the heading of CRM. These may all be find products in their correct categories, but they are not CRM products. And CRM has absolutely no inherent connection with voice over IP technology vendors claiming otherwise are best shown the door.
Another aspect of this product space that demands comments is the term ‘eCRM’, a term which appears to have emerged from the wave of unnecessary name changes to eThis and eThat. Given that a customer relationship management system is used by an organisation to track and facilitate customer contact independent of the channel used by customers to make contact, the e in eCRM is redundant, unless the product is actually able to service only one channel. Does a vendor of so-called eCRM products also have pCRM, mCRM and cpCRM products? (Ditto for so-called wireless CRM.)
Software to process e-mails, either generating automatic responses or routing e-mails to appropriately skilled agents, is software to process contacts via one specific access channel, but such software is not CRM and it is certainly not eCRM, it is simply skill-based e-mail distribution. Tracking a customer’s contacts and analysis of that customer’s value, payment history, upsell potential etc. is CRM, whether the customer makes contact in person, by e-mail, by fax or by carrier pigeon.
The deliberate misuse of terms such as CTI, CRM and others reflects an element of arrogance and even deceit along the lines of You know your call centre systems have shortcomings which you are trying to overcome . Even though you arent searching for [a product in the category] we sell, you probably dont understand this category [genuine CTI or CRM]. So if we can trick you into contacting us, we might be able to sell you what you arent really seeking.
But a good number of users are not so naive as to be so readily hoodwinked. I have begun to add sections on appropriate terminology to request for tender (RFT) documents and encourage others to do likewise.
As much as some vendors pretend otherwise, an IVR is not CTI, call recording, even for quality monitoring is not CRM and the army is not out of step with Johnny.
Stephen Coates
Stephen Coates is the author of the reports Computer Telephony Integration: from the Internet to the Desktop, in Europe, published by Bloor Research and Computer Telephony Integration Marktübersicht (Computer Telephony Integration: in the German-speaking market) published, in German, by Oxygon GmbH. Both reports cover all aspects of CTI including standards, application integration, applicability to call recording, predictive dialling, audio call recording and internet integration, licence and application development costs, forecasts for future development by product category, and a glossary. He can be contacted on swcoates@occidental.com.au.
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