TADSummit Americas 2019 ran on the 15-16 Oct, in parallel with the IIT RTC Conference. This weblog provides a summary of the presentations and discussions from TADSummit Americas Day 1 afternoon.

Thank you to TeleSign and Mio for sponsoring TADSummit Americas, all our partners (VoIP Innovations, Apidaze, IIT RTC Conf, IIT RTC Labs, Mind Commerce, Aplisay, The Fast Mode, Disruptive Analysis), all the world-class presenters, and both the in-person and remote attendees.

We kicked the afternoon off with a session led by Shai Berger, CEO Fonolo, on “Platform Evolution in Customer Service Communication.” This built on the Customer Interaction Session we ran at TADSummit 2018 that generated much discussion.

The first presentation was from Thomas Howe, CTO Ten Digit Communications on “Simply adding SMS to your CRM won’t solve your customer interaction problems”;

Reviewing why history makes us look at customer interactions all wrong. Highlighting how perverse an IVR is for many tasks. The importance of focus on the entirety of the customer’s device NOT a particular technology or ‘channel’. Mashing up voice, messaging, camera and browser to deliver authentication, document delivery, cheap augmented reality, and secure chat. Lots and lots of quantified case studies.

<slides coming soon>

Shai followed on with an insightful discussion on “The Race to Control the Customer Service Messaging Channel.”

When it comes to text-based communication for customer service, a battle is heating up between the big messaging platforms. I’m referring here to Messenger and WhatsApp (both from Facebook), Apple’s Business Chat and Google’s offering called (for now) Google My Business Chat.

Each of those three control a channel (or channels) of communication used by a significant portion of the population. Apple though iMessage on Macs, iPhones and iPads; Google through Android; Facebook through its social networks. (Internationally the dynamic is different, but in North America, they are the only ones with power to change the game.)

Each has the same goal: to dominate business-to-consumer communication, but since they are coming at it from different directions, they can’t use the same strategy.

This presentation will look at how Facebook, Apple and Google are competing with each other; the ecosystem of vendors around them; and how proprietary messaging platforms compare with other text-based channels.

The last presentation was from Alberto Gonzalez, Senior Engineer, WebRTC.ventures / AgilityFeat on “Experiences from Incorporating Sign Language in Customer Interactions”.

The diversity of customer interactions has never been greater. Customer experiences that once required dedicated devices, and hence remained niche, can now run on almost any phone or laptop. Some of you may remember the first hack to incorporate sign language in customer service interactions from TADHack Global in 2015. Four years later, adding sign language to customer interactions is becoming mainstream. We’ll share our experiences from incorporating sign language in customer experiences. Programmable telecoms is not only enabling many new and better customer experiences, it’s making customer interactions ever more inclusive.

We wrapped up the session with a panel on Platform Evolution in Customer Service Communication.

Chair: Shai Berger, Founder and CEO Fonolo

Panelists:

• Tony Jamous, previously President at Nexmo, the Vonage API Platform, currently investor and advisor
• Thomas Howe, CTO Ten Digit Communications
• Alberto Gonzalez, Senior Engineer, WebRTC.ventures / AgilityFeat, TADHack Global Participant
• Dinesh Saparamadu, CEO hSenid Mobile

Questions included:

• A fun opening question on RCS 🙂
• Are we ending up with a General Motors problem? Is differentiation becoming difficult given the common underlying platform (e.g. Twilio Flex and Amazon).
• Are the connectivity issues solved yet, e.g. Facebook and Whatsapp? Or will voice and SMS remain the dominant channels for the next X years?
• Is AI delivering in Customer Service? Or is it still marketing fluff for RFP tick-sheets?
• Where are we seeing real chatbots success?
• We’ve heard earlier on the role identity and authentication can play in customer service. What’s your view?

 

Conference Keynote from the winners of TADHack Global 2019. This is an opportunity to meet some of the TADHack Global winners from the weekend (12-13 October). It’s a chance to see the power of what programmable communications can do for people outside the industry. And chat with the winners to share their excitement on the future of communications we’re creating together.

The final session of Day 1 was a Telesign led session on Identity, Authentication, and Programmable Telecoms. We kicked off with a presentation from Pierre Demarche, VP Product and Marketing, diving into:

• Registration fraud. Identifying fake users, preventing bulk account creation, etc.
• ATO (Account TakeOver). Preventing ATO fraud through phone hijacking attacks like SIM Swap, Porting attacks, call forwarding, etc.
• IRSF (International Revenue Sharing Fraud) attacks on enterprises. Registration to SIP trunking.

We wrapped-up this session with a panel discussion on “Identity, Verification and Fraud Management.”

Panelists included:

• Pierre Demarche, VP Product and Marketing, TeleSign
• Simon Woodhead, CEO at Simwood Group PLC
• Todd Carothers, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at CounterPath
• Thomas Howe, CTO Ten Digit Communications

This panel provides a broader discussion across additional fraud management cases, particularly the VoIP use cases. For example Simwood provides real-time VoIP fraud management, with a similar black-list database to that described by TeleSign, as well as guidance on how to use calling patterns to trigger exceptions, and threat analysis. While Simwood is providing the tools for their customers to limit VoIP fraud on their network in real time, TeleSign provides information to help companies better manage customer interactions in real time. Its similar yet different, hence enables us to have a nice compare, contrast, and possibly mash-up panel discussion to wrap up this session. Particularly when we examine customer communications across voice, messaging and online.

Suggested questions include:

• To the panelists who have not presented, what services do you provide for identity, verification and fraud management?
• As businesses integrate more workflows with programmable telecoms, including PBX/UC, what do you see as emerging battle-fronts in fraud?
• Do your solutions have a role in limiting robocalling?
• As mobile phones become SIP end-points for corporate networks, with auto-provisioning, are there new hybrid fraud management risks being created like proxy user authentication?
• Within the VoIP world many quite simple processes have been created for managing fraud, e.g. prepay, near real time billing, know your traffic patterns. Does this learning apply to the web world?

That’s a wrap for Day 2.