Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

I continue to be intrigued by the concept of virtual worlds and the ability of them to simulate/replace the physical environment. I find the concept of integrating virtual and real conference rooms (Sun has a demo of this) to be interesting. Much as a play is transformed when the actors "break" the 4th wall between them and the audience, this concept has the capability of radically changing both the virtual world (the play) and the real world (the audience). How could the unique relationship between the audience and Ferris Buehler have been achieved absent his initial dialog about; "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it."

Now another wall is coming down. The Nortel Contact Center team in Galway has used the capabilities in our Contact Center 6.0 application to integrate real people into Second Life (www.secondlife.com) as on-demand avatars. This technology enables agents or experts to be "teleported" into the virtual world on-demand as they are needed. So, when a customer comes to the virtual world, an agent with the right skills can "appear" to help. This enables presence (in many virtual locations) without having to actually have a human there at all times. Imagine wandering help kiosks that only involve agents when there is actual need for interaction. Or a virtual store where every rack is an avatar that can instantly assume the identity of a salesperson as the customer needs services. The critical transition is from services being on-demand to on-need, where need can be determined by the state of the virtual environment. A good way to characterize this is virtual customer care.

The implementation is based on SOA and allows the Customer Care functions to be developed as a composite application using environments such as WebSphere or .net. The services exposed from the Contact Center application are based on innovations introduced in CC 6.0. Nortel's Contact Center and Second Life integration allows Agents to operate in a fully blended environment, i.e. servicing voice calls, instant messages followed by emails, followed by second-life requests - using Nortel's skills-based routing technology. Detailed avatar information can be utilized by Nortel Contact Center routing technology to associate when the agent appears (so the avatar is not male and the voice female). This brings a whole new dimension to calling line ID. For example, th agent could be tuned to the demographic characteristics of the coustomer. This enables both generic avatars as well as avatars that are specialized to the agent. This allows the experience to extend from the virtual world into the real world.

Full demos of this functionality are available in Nortel Customer Partnering Centers and Executive Briefing Centers. As the technology is based on the available CC6.0 product, general availability of the Second Life (and other virtual worlds) customer care application will come soon.

I believe this is just the beginning of blurring the line between the virtual world, the physical world and the human world. I am excited that Nortel is leading in this transformational area.