1. Aspect has focused extensively on integrating unified communications (UC) capabilities into its contact center products. Please explain how your contact center products leverage these capabilities in your unified communications applications for the contact center and how it benefits customers?
Aspect leverages unified communications capabilities through the applications designed for the contact center, which are fully integrated with Microsoft Office Communications Server. For instance, Seamless Customer Service™ delivers all of the tools needed for comprehensive call response, including comprehensive inbound routing, coordinated voice self-service to live service and Ask an Expert functionality, which is extensively used at Aspect, to provide integrated assistance.
Through the improved collaboration across the enterprise and in the contact center, customers have reaped results that save time, money and improve their customer relationships. Through Aspect’s own implementation of this solution, we have seen increases in first day resolution, call hold time reductions and increased customer satisfaction. It also provides significant benefits for customer service agents, streamlining agent activity by decreasing time spent on each call, locating available key experts and improving call resolution results.
2. What will be Aspect’s major areas of focus for the remainder of 2010? What are your “major growth areas?
For the remainder of 2010, Aspect is focused on continuing to embed unified communications capabilities into our core contact center offerings -- especially with the launch of the new capabilities in future Microsoft OCS releases. We have also been focusing significant R&D efforts on a highly distributed system for high reliability under a single interface that enables companies to work efficiently in distributed contact center environments and achieve local survivability through the use of survivable nodes.
As you may know, survival nodes are an architectural design that ensures that companies achieve business continuity or operational survivability. In a survivable node architecture, a contact center can have pools of agents distributed across a number of physical sites, and if there was to be a failure of the network between the remote sites and the centralized data center, the local site can operate without experiencing an outage – achieving local survivability. This idea of survivable nodes is very innovative and something that clearly puts Aspect ahead of the competition.
We are committed to delivering extended capabilities in unified communications applications and collaboration capabilities for the contact center, along with the platform products. With significant enhancements in the platform products over the next few quarters, we expect each release to gain more momentum and deliver powerful business solutions to our customers. Another significant platform that we expect to grow significantly is SharePoint, as it plays an exceptionally important role in enabling collaboration in the contact center.
3. What unified communications applications for the contact center have had the most user acceptance?
The unified communications applications for the contact center that have had the most user acceptance have typically been Streamlined Collections™, Blended Interaction™ and Productive Workforce™.
The success of Streamlined Collections reflects the urgency that companies see in being more effective and efficient in their collections processes, as well as staying within compliance with increasing governmental regulations on outbound dialing. The combination of dialing and IVR has also provided companies the options to use more automation in their early stage collections processes and to take more proactive steps in contacting their customers.
The growth that we’ve seen in Blended Interaction validates our overall value proposition that customers are looking for more unified solutions to meet their customer collaboration needs across inbound, outbound, and multiple channels. Having the ability to leverage agents to handle inbound or outbound contacts dynamically provides a great benefit to contact centers to maximize agent utilization, and also helps to uplift customer satisfaction, as customers can be connected with the best skilled agent for their needs whether they are calling, browsing the web, sending an email, or being proactively contacted. Workforce Management is a value added element of Blended Interaction that allows contact centers to optimize staffing and schedules in these blended environments.
Productive Workforce has also been an extremely successful unified communications application, because it combines workforce, quality, and performance management into a single application that increases productivity in contact centers and back offices, while reducing liability. Staffing tends to be the most expensive component of any contact center or back office budget, so anything that can be done to optimize staff productivity, goes a long way towards improving the budgetary outlook.
As more of Aspect’s legacy ACD customers migrate, we anticipate them to adopt Seamless Customer Service™. And as businesses look to have a comprehensive view and optimize the workflow for their resources in line with their corporate goals, we will see increased adoption of our Productive Workforce™ application.
4. What has been the uptake of the use of UC capabilities in the contact center, such as presence or IM/chat?
Many of our customers are utilizing presence and IM/Chat as key elements in the contact center, but, in most cases, this functionality runs on independent platforms. Our customers and the market clearly see the business benefits of integrating presence and IM/chat on a unified platform. They have expressed great interest in using this functionality on a unified platform, but just have not made the leap yet. Based on our research and the current buzz we’ve been hearing in the market, we expect this to be a strong growth area, and expect significant uptake as customers roll out their unified communication deployments.
5. There are many competitive workforce optimization offerings. How does Aspect differentiate your offerings from your competitors?
The breadth and depth of Aspect’s product portfolio are key differentiators. Aspect’s robust, standards-based workforce optimization solutions for the contact center are the most comprehensive and flexible available today, giving both Aspect and customers deploying Aspect solutions a clear competitive advantage.
Aspect PerformanceEdge® is an IT-ready Microsoft .NET-based Web services platform product that synchronizes workforce optimization capabilities including workforce management, quality management, campaign optimization, performance management, and coaching and eLearning. By enabling these capabilities across a unified platform, customers can achieve dramatic improvements in bottom-line business results across the enterprise and in the call center.
Many competitors claim to have similar functionality, but their solutions are limited and less robust. For example, some competitors don’t have outbound or ACD features, but do have workforce management and quality management capabilities. And then there are other vendors with strong PerformanceEdge-like capabilities (workforce management, quality management, etc.), but no outbound or ACD.
Aspect not only has the market-leading workforce management product, but also market-leading outbound solutions. This provides a unique and powerful value proposition to customers. In addition, the out-of-the-box integration capability of Aspect’s products- with products from other vendors- presents business, technology and cost-saving advantages that the competition cannot provide.
6. Please explain what your partnership with Microsoft brings “to the table”.
The alliance between Microsoft and Aspect is much more powerful than a simple partnership. Recognizing Aspect’s market leadership, Microsoft made an equity investment in Aspect, tapping us to design the Aspect Unified IP contact center solution to interoperate with Microsoft’s platform for software powered voice and unified communications.
The unique blend of expertise between the two organizations allows each to bring a best-practices approach to the development of a joint solution that we believe is building momentum in redefining how companies interact with their customers.
Our close, strategic relationship enables both companies to influence the other organization’s roadmaps and feature sets. Aspect can play a significant role in the way the Microsoft is approaching the contact center and the way the contact center is integrated with the enterprise.
7. There appears to be a trend to attempt to manage the various customer touch points within the enterprise. In addition, several workforce management software vendors are trying to apply their staff and forecasting software to other areas of the enterprise. What is Aspect doing to manage the customer experience beyond the enterprise?
In managing the customer experience beyond the contact center, Aspect’s workforce management and PerformanceEdge capabilities work across the enterprise, and are not just limited to the contact center. We have been very innovative and held a leadership position because we have always known the power of staffing and forecasting and have certainly applied this within our own organization. And through the powers of unified communications and collaboration, along with the wide array of products and solutions, we have seen tremendous improvements in our own contact center and with our customers. Over the last three quarters, we have seen a 9% increase in customer satisfaction for first day resolution.
We fully understand that even though the main touch points of an interaction may be in the contact center, there are many peripheral contact points. There may be interactions outside of the contact center – for instance with the use of outsourcers. We have found that more than 10 percent of transactions are completed outside of the contact center, so incorporating unified communications and collaboration allows us to provide a better customer experience.
Another area that Aspect manages the customer experience is by incorporating federation in the contact center through unified communications, which is relatively unique. Federation means that there is a sharing of presence information across multiple presence system. This is especially important as you move from the contact center to the enterprise and then to various stops within the enterprise so the transactions are more seamless and not disjointed when looking for a contact outside of your organization. We have seen improvements in our own contact center and with our customers.
8. What areas do contact centers need to be thinking about as they plan for future implementations/technology investments? How are customer requirements/demands changing the way companies think about these interactions and how they manage these changing expectations?
Customers and their demands are always changing. It is imperative for the contact center to understand these requirements and to know that the technology is already there and exists, but they just need to utilize it to its full potential. Creating a better and more efficient customer experience plays a key role in differentiating from the competition.
Examples of such customer demands may be greater accessibility, or having a larger number of integrated channels including voice, web, chat, IM, email, etc. and the desire to quickly identify and reach the right resources in the contact center or the enterprise. Consumers need to get to the right person who will solve their problem the fastest. They want the agents to know who they are and why they are calling. Not only do they want to choose what channel they communicate with, they want to be able to move from channel to channel with their information intact. Organizations running contact centers need to manage and address these changing expectations by ensuring that they are using their technology to the full capabilities.
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