Are You Manually Doing MACs?
New technologies impact the way we approach old problems. For example, We are learning how to grow steaks more efficiently than raising cattle.
We are also conquering how to perform [manually intensive] UC and contact center administration without human intervention.
Imagine a customer/user requesting a UC administrative change via a self-service portal, and having other IT resources take care of it:
Auto-magically:
- See the ticket
- Verify authorization
- Process the request
- Log everything
- Notify the customer
- Close the ticket
All in minutes. The technology is available and in-use today.
I recorded this video at Avaya Engage in January, but this is not an Avaya solution. The company is Starfish Associates, the half-man in the video is co-founder David Raanan.
I first met Starfish last summer at Cisco Live. I’ve also saw them at G-Force, and then again at Avaya Engage. They provide an automated workflow engine that connects with all the major UC and contact center solutions as well as other business applications such as Service Now. It can process tickets automatically, or act as an IT tool that ensures consistency and across IT staff.
In this video, Raanan provides a play-by-play of a fully automated deployment:
Avaya-Engage-Starfish from Dave Michels on Vimeo.
This is not a fake demo, well it was, but that’s not the point. The point is this technology exists and is in use today at many large companies — including household names in banking and other brands.
Current economics limit this type of deployment to organizations with about 5k or more employees, but that cost is coming down. The ROI is typically around time savings, but the solution can also be justified around consistency and compliance.
If you would like to learn more it’s easy – Starfish just released a new white paper that lays out the benefits of automation and digital transformation. It’s a pretty solid paper except for the idiot they quoted on page 5. You can download the paper here.