Act 3: The Technogogo Millefeuille
Oct. 5, 2020
Everything used to be simple. We communicated by calling each other from landlines, by sending messages via pagers or minitel, with a fax machine, and sometimes, for the more nostalgic, by telegram or telex. A single telephone line was enough to do it all. Then, in 1994, everything changed with the advent of the Internet and the IP protocol.Email replaced faxes, VoIP supplanted landline calls and the web made minitel obsolete. Our venerable copper-based networks enjoyed a second youth with PSTN modems, then ADSL, before fiber optics and 4G networks signaled their programmed demise.
The same goes for the IT world. In 1990, a single developer could develop an application using Visual Basic or FileMaker Pro.Then the advent of local networks spawned "client-server" applications (who remembers Novell?!), quickly supplanted by 3-tier Java architectures, then by Web applications and finally mobile applications and widgets. At the same time, companies first replaced their mainframes with PCs and servers operated in their offices. Their servers were then moved to hosting providers, and desktops were replaced by laptops, until today, when applications are deployed in the Cloud in "Infrastructure As a Service" mode.
In 30 years, telecoms networks and IT equipment have merged, mutated and moved to become smartphones, Web services and other APIs and SDKs. This technological millefeuille has spread everywhere, and particularly to contact centers, where fixed and cell phones, wired and Bluetooth headsets, workstations and laptops, telecom, ethernet and wifi networks cohabit, with a myriad of software applications, on premise, hosted or in the cloud, all of which are essential to the smooth running of customer relations.
Technical debt is present on every floor, and IT managers are also a bit of spelunkers, telecom managers a bit of archaeologists, and teleconsultants are obliged to know the past in order to adapt to the present and prepare for the future. Today, this pile-up is the cause of much friction and expense. Many business applications of more than venerable age are still immovable (ah, Cobol in banking), yet new needs call for the very latest generations of technology.As a result, startups just getting off the ground have a golden opportunity to disrupt the veterans trapped in their old codes, free as they are to develop everything "from scratch" with the most modern "stack" and to build their applications in "API" mode, or even in "no Code" mode, but in any case remaining "Lean"!
Does this mean the end of dinosaur history? No, not at all. Because no comet has fallen on the traditional economy, and the digital economy is indeed an Eldorado to which all generations of companies are entitled, even those born in the last century. As in chemistry, nothing is lost, everything is transformed. The data stays. Vials change.
Today, it's possible to deploy "meta-applications" that replace obsolete software with state-of-the-art floware, that enable "business" actions to be coded in place of "software functions" and, above all, that communicate with legacy systems to ensure business continuity.WorkFlow, BPA and RPA are becoming the order of the day, to compensate for the obsolescence of initial systems while avoiding the need to start from scratch - which, as anyone facing this dilemma knows, would be like changing the tires on a car while driving.
In contact centers, too, this wave is growing, improving processes, agents' work and customer satisfaction every day... At ViaDialog, we've been working relentlessly on this subject, and we're proud of our latest arrival... A natively omnichannel platform, available online or on site, providing 360° customer knowledge, interfaceable with the market's leading CRM and support software, and above all, supplied with an SDK that finally offers the possibility of coding workflows directly into intelligent widgets reducing agent processing time by at least 30%. The icing on the cake is an on-board AI that greets customers in natural language, sorts and routes messages, and helps agents deliver the most relevant response as quickly as possible. And also, made in France, with love. A lot of love!
To all generations of engineers, managers and advisors, nostalgic for Minitel and fans of virtual reality headsets, we're proud to introduce you to our latest opus, the first hybrid, codable platform for customer relations, ViaFlow! 👇
Last update: December 31, 2021
