Business conversations have gotten more complicated. One customer interaction nowadays can start via web chat, progress to a phone call and conclude over email. Internal business teams, meanwhile, communicate and collaborate across messaging apps and conferencing tools in addition to voice and email.
All the while, the data generated during these interactions often gets locked within the specific and proprietary platforms – call recordings are stored within phone systems, chat logs within messaging applications and email threads in their respective clients. This fragmented reality makes it difficult to gain a unified view of a customer journey and hinders the ability to integrate data between disparate systems for comprehensive data analysis. The upshots are an incomplete understanding of customer interactions, potential missed opportunities and duplicated efforts.
Into this picture enter vCons, or virtualized conservations. An open standard designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a vCon captures the full context of human interactions across channels such as voice calls, video, chats, text or email platforms into a single, structured, portable and secure container. Effectively breaking down data conversation silos, vCons turn data that was once scattered, unstructured and difficult to act upon into data that can be centrally tracked, secured and managed, placed into files that are standardized, structured and ready for proper analysis. For providers of commoditized UCaaS and CCaaS services, vCons effectively shift the narrative, argued Thomas McCarthy-Howe, chief technology officer at vCon pioneer Strolid, and one of the authors of the IETF’s vCon Internet-Draft. Their value propositions, he said, now go from, “We manage your calls” to “We unlock your customer insights,” and “We provide SIP trunks” to “We power your business intelligence.”
According to the lore, the idea for vCons originated when Brian Galvin, former Genesys CTO and current owner of Galvin Patent Law, LLC, casually commented about the lack of a vCard equivalent for conversations – hence the moniker “virtual conversation” or vCon. Similar to a vCard, which enabled the definition, interchange and storage of a person various points of contact, a vCon is the container for data and information relating to a real-time, human conversation. That data may be derived from traditional phone calls, conferences, SMS or MMS messages, web chats, email threads, etc., and can include transcripts, participants identity information, videos, audio recordings, metadata such as timestamps and location, tamper protections, certifications, post conversational analysis and attachments of files such as documents and spreadsheets exchanged during the conversation.
vCons also are often described as a type of PDF document for conversations. Similar to how a PDF allows anyone with a reader to view a document regardless of the software used to create it, vCons are intended to create a widely accessible and easily shareable format for conversational data that can be understood and processed by various systems. vCons are written in JSON (JavaScript object notation), an open standard file and data interchange format, meaning they are machine-readable, tamper-proof, encrypt-able and interoperable across systems. In other words, a vCon standardized conversation container establishes a common method of storage and interchange, and supports identity, privacy and security efforts, therefore providing a safe and secure way to carry conversations from the network elements that create them to the applications that analyze them.
“[vCons] aren’t just for storing conversations; they’re for understanding, sharing and protecting them,” stated executives at cloud phone provider and early vCon adopters TeleCloud.
By turning data that was once siloed and difficult to use into information that is structured, accessible and analyzed, vCons provide numerous features and benefits to industries with high volumes of customer interactions, as well as to providers of communication services. And some of those benefits couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.
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 enhances 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 industry-wide 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.
