Mike Sheridan, Senior Vice President of Strategy, Aspect
In 2009, contact center professionals are being squeezed on three different fronts. First, they have fewer people resources. This is true from an IT support perspective, but also from an operations perspective. The second challenge is budgets have been slashed. Almost every contact center manager I talk to is going into this year with a much reduced budget from 2008. And, the third challenge is that contact center professionals have to deliver better metrics this year than they did the year before. In this challenging economic environment, there's no let up at all in delivering on those metrics.
As we look at the contact center landscape, we recognize that previous technology generations— with complex, siloed capabilities— can't support this new reality that we have here in 2009. The good news is that unified communications (UC) provides the technology needed today and Aspect is bringing this unified communications model and capabilities to the contact center. To do that, Aspect introduced unified communications applications for the contact center, built on a Microsoft .Net web services platform. Each of these UC applications brings targeted capabilities from Aspect’s platform products, Aspect® Unified IP™ and PerformanceEdge®. And the unified communications applications address customer service, sales or collections processes very specifically geared towards the operational metrics that you and your agents must deliver against.
Because the UC applications take advantage of the power of software to break down these communications barriers in the contact center, customers get the benefit of paying less and getting better business results. These UC applications can help companies achieve 10 percent operational improvements or more.
One example of operational improvements through the UC applications is with Streamlined Collections™, which helps collections managers segment early stage debtors from later stage and address their unique collection situations within one system. This is especially important today because early stage debtors could be offered the voice portal capabilities of Streamlined Collections and really free up collectors who can work with late stage debtors.
Another example is Productive Workforce™, which gives contact center managers greater insight into how agents are performing against business metrics, not just against things like average handle time but against real business metrics around service, sales or collections. Productive Workforce allows for schedules to be allocated, and not just within workforce management with the typical ways, but using quality scores. And, Productive Workforce can ultimately help reduce call handling cost across the contact center and reduce agent attrition. Again, all of these unified communications applications deliver these benefits at a reduced cost from previous generations' technologies.
No matter where contact centers are on their unified communications journey, they can begin to take advantage of cost savings and productivity benefits of these unified communications applications right now.