Internet telephony cannot deliver on its promise if
users remain welded to their mobiles. Winning hearts and minds with
training and quality service is the key.
While experts predict that voice over IP usage will double in
the next few years, there is enough anecdotal evidence of its
limitations to give pause for thought.
One example is the teleconference hosted by a global telecoms
carrier that was delayed because a senior technical manager
realised he had not logged out of his IP phone. He returned to his
desk - several floors away - to perform the task even though VoIP
users can log in and out from anywhere on the planet.
The story is recounted by John Waterhouse, managing director of
The Network Collective consultancy. He says the lack of training
and cultural acceptance of VoIP remain barriers to adoption within
many companies.
"Most people continue to use VoIP systems in exactly the same
way as they do the PSTN systems. Even a killer app such as having
your desk phone follow you everywhere you go is under-utilised
because people continue to use their mobile," he says.
The central problem, according to Waterhouse, is that people
think of IT as complicated but expect their phone to be simple to
use.
If so, the chances of staff getting up to speed on call routing
options or more esoteric features, such as calling phone numbers
embedded in web pages, are slim.
And if applications are not relevant to an end-user's work
routine, there is a danger of VoIP falling into the category of "a
technology looking for an application", says Waterhouse.
When the business case for VoIP rests on the economy of scale
achieved from maintaining one network instead of two, this need not
be too much of a concern.
And, in fact, most implementations that analyst Gartner has
observed over the past 12 months have been to harvest cost savings
from centralising access points to the local networks and removing
local lines.
But end-user take-up becomes a crucial issue when businesses
implement expensive and state-of-the-art IP handsets as a way of
gaining value from integrating voice and telephony
applications.
"One of the biggest disappointments has been the $20bn global
spend on flashy handsets that sit on the desk and no one uses,"
says Steve Blood, vice-president of research at analyst firm
Gartner.
According to Blood, "The training piece tends to get forgotten.
The perception is that the handset is so easy to use that no
training is necessary. It is not true, and it is vital."
The other obstacle is that IT or business managers worry that if
they factor in 200 hours of training, it will blow the business
case for VoIP.
Blood recommends that companies resist top-end handsets and
instead spend the savings on integrating messaging software and the
PC.
That way, instead of trying to calculate the value of saving
three seconds on every call, people in the organisation can have
more intuitive and integrated communication between e-mail, voice
and messaging.
The Future Work Forum (FWF), a Henley Management College
initiative, believes that multichannel communication could well be
one of the more fruitful outcomes of VoIP.
FWF director Peter Thomson says, "In an ideal world, even when
you call on voice, the caller should have the option of speaking or
leaving a message. However, people need to be reconditioned or
trained to use media in different ways.
"I now talk to my son and use a webcam but it needed him to
start living in Hong Kong for me to change my habits."
Such a change of mindset will be necessary if employees are to
be weaned off their mobiles onto their IP handsets, for
example.
Blood cites the case of a Portuguese bank that recently
implemented VoIP purely to reduce the heavy cost of
branch-to-mobile calls.
"Fixed-to-mobile costs are increasing all over Europe. They are
terribly expensive," he says.
The Communications Management Association was an early adopter
of VoIP, and John Harrington, CMA leader for regulatory affairs,
says training was a vital element, given the various niggles to
sort out.
"You expect a converged voice and data network to be all direct
dialling in, but unless it is overlaid with interactive voice
response,that is not necessarily true," he says.
Harrington says the biggest contribution made by training was to
counteract the natural reluctance of staff to believe they could
create and handle calls from the PC screen. Timing also proved
important.
"It is better to involve staff at the outset and explain the
rationale for the system, rather than implement and then impose a
training schedule," he says.
Similarly, all the bells and whistles that accompany VoIP can
produce learning overload and deter acceptance. Rather than train
staff in every feature of the new system, Harrington recommends
that businesses identify the important functions first.
"Once users are solidly wedded to their new systems, it is more
effective to follow up with the 'nice to haves' in six months'
time," he says.
GCap Media, formed last May from the merger of GWR and Capital
Radio, discovered an effective approach to IP telephony training
almost by accident.
The radio station decided to migrate the technical staff and
senior managers onto IP handsets first (see box).
In effect, it was a "top-down and bottom-up approach," says
Aidan Hancock, GCap's network manager.
"Having two layers of enthusiasts - the IT specialists and the
senior managers - meant the mass in the middle heard it was a good
thing."
Getting IT staff on-message is not as straightforward as you
might think. The transition to a seamless voice and data network
means their specialised skills in different layers of the
communication stack are no longer required in the same way.
"There is a training gap. People assessing suppliers do not know
the pitfalls or 'gotchas' of the products," says Duane Sword,
vice-president of product management for VoIP testing company
Empirix.
Plus, there is a lack of hands-on experience, with most
technical people learning through trial and error, Sword says.
Businesses want to go live at the lowest cost, so there is not a
lot of space or money for training IT staff or end-users. The
result is that the network is not optimised for voice and end-users
are not prepared for - and will not tolerate - poor voice quality
or echo.
Sword says, "The worst situation is when end-users pick up the
phone, do not hear a dial tone and put it down again."
It is therefore important for the IT staff to be aware of what
is important to end-users. This means the IT department should
refrain from talking about VoIP in terms of packets and protocols,
and instead pose questions about service quality, such as what is
an acceptable delay for users?
Large corporations are cottoning on to the advantages of
employees communicating in multiple media, and now have the
opportunity to do so as they upgrade to IP networks.
But IT usage has never been defined by what suppliers write on
the product tin. IP training should focus on the applications that
are already indispensable to workers.
"Direct dial and missed calls are the most used applications on
mobiles," says Blood. He suggests that there will be more overlap
between IP handsets and mobiles, and IP networks and Wi-Fi, than
any IP training manual describes.
Case study: High quality sound makes voip a capital
solution for radio group
Extending VoIP across the business has been a priority for GCap
Media since it was formed from the merger of GWR and Capital Radio
last May.
The UK's largest commercial radio company relies on an
integrated voice and data network to deliver live broadcasts.
Adding voice to the mix made commercial sense.
"GWR had been successfully using IP telephony since 2004 and all
employees wanted to know was when they were getting 'the good
phones'," recalls Aidan Hancock, GCap's network manager.
This cultural acceptance of VoIP was largely down to the
training programme and the way IP handsets were introduced.
"We needed the technical team to embrace the technology.
Culturally, radio technicians are conservative with a small 'c',
accustomed to previous-generation, manual technology," says
Hancock.
Technical teams were therefore prioritised alongside senior
management and both tiers became enthusiastic adopters.
Once VoIP was rolled out to everyone else, an internal trainer
was sent to the site two weeks before the final switchover.
In this way, employees had a working IP phone as well as the
comfort of their PSTN phone and could become properly acclimatised.
It helped that the Cisco telephone handsets were "quite nice and
intuitive to use," says Hancock.
Acceptance was also helped by the fact that end-users did not
suffer any of the delay or voice echo problems that dog some
implementations.
This was because GCap over-engineered the bandwidth, given that
the networks were the backbone for their live radio broadcasts.
Senior executives and other staff were weaned off their mobile
phones by integrating some "nice to have" applications onto the
handset.
As well as putting on the phone directory, some top-line data
had been abstracted from business systems and could be
accessed.
"The sales manager can press a soft key button and see various
sales figures," says Hancock.
Another application that proved popular with staff was
integrating messaging with telephony so they can see at a glance if
someone is on the phone. Programmers wrote a Sip interface between
Microsoft's Office Communicator and the Cisco router. Similarly,
staff can select a work buddies list to create an on-the-fly voice
conference.
"It is a very nice front-end to have for functional teams
working across different sites," says Hancock.