For starters, disparate departments from customer service to sales can access and fully understand the complete history of a customer interaction and act upon any included layer of analysis. “With vCons, our agents gain perfect recall. Every interaction becomes actionable, transparent and transformational,” said Jill Blankenship, founder and CEO of Frontline Group, a provider of AI-enhanced contact center and BPO services. Frontline Group earlier this month co-announced an alliance with Strolid to embed vCons into the contact center. vCons will first go live within Frontline’s BPO operations and will power upcoming pilots with 211 contact centers across the U.S. “We’re not chasing trends,” Blankenship continued. “We’re building the care model the future requires – faster, smarter, more human. With vCons, we don’t just answer calls, we remember people. And we respond better every time.” Meanwhile, vCons significantly enhance privacy and data management capabilities, argue experts at vons.org. Due to the structured nature, a vCon allows companies to more easily track and store data, and when necessary, delete personal data contained within conversations and then validate that it has been removed, thereby facilitating compliance with data privacy regulations such as GDPR. To ensure the authenticity of the conversation record, vCon supports integrity checks such as digital signatures, helping to guarantee that the vCon has not been tampered with since it was created. “vCons promote transparency by supporting an ecosystem of tools, applications and providers that exchange very sensitive data in a well-known and testable format,” McCarthy-Howe explained. “vCons enable confident answers to ‘Is there personal data in this conversation? and ‘Who created this vCon?’”. The standardization offered by vCon also paves the way for industrywide analytics, continued vcons.org. “By enabling the anonymized sharing of specific data points across different companies or even entire industries, vCons can facilitate collaboration on crucial issues such as fraud prevention or the identification of best practices, all without exposing sensitive business information,” said the group. Perhaps the most pertinent to our current time and state, vCons provide a valuable standardized input for applications involving AI and machine learning. AI algorithms can more effectively process and learn from conversational data when it adheres to a consistent structure, leading to improvements in areas such as natural language processing and automated customer service, explained proponents at vcons.org. “AI systems can chat, summarize and analyze, but they can’t remember. Once a customer conversation ends, the insight is gone unless it’s manually captured or re-fed into the system,” added executives at TeleCloud. “Each vCon becomes a machine-readable ‘memory file,’ allowing AI to reference past conversations, learn over time and improve responses without retraining from scratch.” Indeed, vCons are AI-ready from the start, they continued, including timestamps, speaker identity, summaries, sentiment scores and even consent tracking, ensuring high-quality, structured data that machine learning systems can rely on. “You know exactly which vCons were used to train which models, making compliance not only possible but cost-efficient,” TeleCloud executives concluded. Ultimately, the need to manage and potentially delete customer data from conversations requires a more unified and standardized approach than is currently in place. vCons offer a standardized structure backed by the IETF, allowing conversations to be shared, stored, redacted and analyzed similar to any other critical business data. The end result is new possibilities for AI, analytics, compliance and collaboration across every customer interaction and channel. o vCon Vocab Conserver: The conserver is a data platform designed to extract conversations from business phone systems, transform them into actionable insights, and send that data into common business tools such as spreadsheets, Salesforce and no code toolsets. Conserver platforms provide the infrastructure to implement vCons at scale and more easily integrate them into a tech stack. SCITT: Short for supply chain integrity, transparency and trust, SCITT refers to a set of standards being developed by the IETF to ensure that digital assets, such as vCons, can be verified across digital and physical supply chains. While vCons enable capturing and sharing of conversation details, they lack mechanisms for proving compliance with privacy regulations and consent management. SCITT addresses this by providing an immutable, append-only transparency ledger. JSON: JavaScript object otation is a lightweight data-interchange format that is easy for humans to read and write, and easy for machines to parse and generate. It is primarily used to transmit data between a server and a web application, serving as an alternative to XML. vCon are written in JSON. Sources: Conserve.io; IETF; JSON.org 25 SUMMER 2025 | CHANNELVISION
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTg4Njc=