WTFR or, “Where to Find Revenue,” is an acronym that gets straight the inherent value of WebRTC, as understood by John Carfano, our friend from Dr. Goodwell fame.
Dr. Goodwell, you may recall, was a telemedicine solution employing Microsoft Messenger that came out at a time when cameras and microphones were system add-ons, not functions embedded on both your computer and your smartphone. Anyway, the point John made to me was that Ian Small was riding the correct train of thought in his presentation at WebRTC World. Summing up, Ian was trying to rent a castle in which to hold his family reunion, and he ended up with the correct model because the call agent was dealing with a high value call.
For the carriers a minute is a minute and talk is cheap. But in a call center, the value of the call is calculated by a formula: dollars spent versus per call length. In many call centers, though, the array of selection is everything under the sun - with no knowledge of which calls are going to generate what sales. If you want to really take advantage of WebRTC, though, you should be focused on how to make the web-add values to conversations and not enabling a web call.
Let’s face it, we can make WebRTC into the equivalent of POTS, or even worse, we can have WebRTC ring a telephone. Either way, we are not gaining anything. Likewise we can replicate Skype, LinkedIn and Facebook, and all we will have to show for it is another place to go.
If you are on the web you have analytics - lots and lots of analytics, WebRTC is a chance to change the value of any given call.
During my carrier days, I had some customers in transportation and some in financials. My customers in financials never thought twice about redundancy because the dollar / bit were too high to risk an outage. For my friends with the buses, the calls were not connected to the revenue and therefore the cost for redundancy was too great.
The goal with WebRTC should be on finding where the revenue adds value to the call. High-end websites deserve high-end WebRTC experiences. I recognize that a phone makes all calls, but a website is something specialized. A lot of shopping sites are specialized these days and the experience that WebRTC gives to those sites should also be specialized. I also recognize that there are lots of ways to make money, but if we can make the high-end work, the high tide will raise all boats.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
