1. What new products and services can we expect from Aspect over the next twelve months?
Every addition to our product portfolio presents an opportunity to expand the offerings and functionality we provide customers and partners. In the next 12 months, Aspect will continue to add new features and functionality to the capabilities of the unified communications (UC) applications for the contact center, especially around tighter integrations and an expanded reach into the enterprise to ensure that companies can see the most benefits out of a UC strategy. We’ve been seeing a lot of interest in our UC applications and the Ask an Expert feature, so we’ll continue to focus on ways for organizations to leverage Microsoft UC technology with their contact center solutions.
2. Aspect has acquired several companies over the past few years. What have been the major challenges to integrating these various organizations?
Most of the recent acquisitions that Aspect has made over the last several years have been designed to add specific capabilities to existing solutions. Because there were clear requirements dictating the acquisitions, the integration process of adding performance management to Aspect’s workforce optimization functionality and Web services functionality to key solutions has been seamless overall.
3. Aspect is placing a great deal of emphasis on Unified Communications (UC) applications. What applications are of most interest and are being implemented by your users?
We’re seeing extensive interest in our UC applications for the contact center, especially Blended Interaction. Blended Interaction provides all of the capabilities that companies need in their contact center, including inbound, outbound, voice portal, Internet contact and workforce management. Companies using Blended Interaction have the capabilities to reduce cost and complexity by eliminating costly CTI expenses, handle inbound and outbound calls with the same agent, deliver automated proactive care using outbound self service and staff the right agents with the right skills at the right time to reduce staffing costs.
Additionally, Blended Interaction and our other UC applications for the contact center offer the Ask an Expert functionality using Microsoft Office Communications Server. OCS can be leveraged as the voice application for non-contact center resources. The Ask an Expert feature is a unique offering that many companies have been interested in leveraging in order to improve first call resolution and subsequently enhance the overall customer experience.
4. What are the most significant obstacles to the adoption of UC applications by users?
One of the most significant obstacles to UC adoption is demonstrating a quick return on investment due to the current economic environment. Companies can increase ROI of UC applications if they consider the impact on business processes and communication needs.
Next generation technology is required to help companies overcome these obstacles and reach operational goals, but with less complexity and reduced costs than the previous generation. Software powered Unified Communications underlies the next generation of technology to meet these requirements. It directly addresses the challenges of proprietary, siloed and hardware intensive CTI architectures.
Aspect is focused on helping demonstrate the ROI that can be experienced through UC applications that are designed to provide specific capabilities that companies need based on business processes. As a result, companies will see reduced maintenance costs, reduced staffing costs, and improved customer satisfaction.
5. Aspect has a significant number of competitors in the UC market sector. What are your most significant differentiators in comparison with such companies as Avaya, Cisco, Interactive Intelligence, etc?
There are three major players in the UC space: Microsoft, Cisco and IBM —and any vendor that doesn’t align themselves with one of these “UC Big Three” will find it difficult to compete. Through our strategic global Microsoft alliance, Aspect is certainly in a position to cater to both the enterprise and the contact center with key unified communications applications. But, we’ve taken that a step further.
We have built out a services organization that is a clear differentiator in the UC market. At this point in the adoption curve, companies need services and support to provide business solutions, rather than point products, and ensure that the enterprise and contact center technologies seamlessly interoperate and are fully utilized for greater choice, control, and maximum business impact. The vendor that offers these standards-based, interoperable solutions coupled with high-touch, high-level services will be the one-stop UC shop. And, that is where Aspect is focused.
Additionally, Aspect provides deep expertise of unified communications from deploying Microsoft OCS across our 20 offices around the globe. The lessons learned from our UC implementation, combined with our knowledge of deploying mission critical voice applications, directly translates into practical knowledge for our UC services team to share with our customers and other organizations.
6. Are there situations where they would be integrated?
UC is largely first being deployed in the IT environment as a test process and then slowly being extended across the rest of the enterprise. The contact center is also a great starting point for deploying UC capabilities because functionality like presence (also known as agent state) is already known in the contact center. UC applications for contact centers are ideal in a number of different verticals for different business processes.
For example, for a company looking to improve customer service business processes, Seamless Customer Service™ is ideal. These organizations need to lower maintenance costs, gain visibility to the customer experience, and gain real time control of customer interactions.
Additionally, for organizations that need to improve collections processes, Streamlined Collections™ addresses their contact center needs. Collections companies are dealing with rising delinquency, charge off and roll rates, missing collection opportunities, high collector attrition and regulatory concerns.
7. How has the economic downturn affected the decision making process for users?
Historically in times like this, IT investments are more likely to stay on track while other business expenses get axed, precisely because we expect technology to save us money. The technologies of unified communications (UC) offer particular promise for driving efficiency and productivity. By extending existing investment and optimizing IT infrastructure, UC reduces total cost of ownership by consolidating servers and multiple vendor solutions, eliminating the need to invest in and manage separate systems for email, instant messaging, voicemail and conferencing. And, it enables companies to better support a virtual workforce, allowing them to save money on physical office space and reduce travel with better video and audio conferencing and collaboration.
Companies that are evaluating UC need to demonstrate a quick ROI to move forward with any decisions regarding deployment. Aspect was able to demonstrate a quick ROI through our deployment of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 across our global offices. Since deploying the solution, Aspect has been able to reduce conferencing costs by close to $1 million per year. Additionally, the elimination of PBXs and the reduction of travel expenses contributed to an average annual cost reduction of $1.6 million per year.
Clearly, UC has the capability to lower operating costs across a company—organizations just need to be able to recognize where the benefits lie and how to demonstrate the ROI to capitalize on a UC implementation.
8. How has it affected your R&D and marketing investments?
Aspect understands the needs of our customers in a challenging economic environment and continues to add value to our product portfolio, but we’re not just innovating for the sake of technology. We’re investing in new capabilities that will bring incremental value to companies by reducing costs and improving processes. For example, the combined capabilities of Blended Interaction™ have helped companies reduce staffing costs by 15 percent, increase agent productivity by 10 percent, and improve service levels by 15 percent.
Like many of our customers, Aspect is looking to get the most out of our investments, and this holds true for research and development and marketing. Our unified communications strategy has helped us optimize our business processes by streamlining communications across the company. We’ve deployed Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 Release 2 across multiple sites, enabling our dispersed workforce to identify executives’ availability— helping our business see more benefits on two fronts: the individual productivity and the workforce productivity side. Now, staff updates that used to take an entire day of emails, voicemails, and returning calls now take just 15 minutes. Thanks to unified communications, Aspect’s interactions are faster and more productive, and helping the company save more than $1.2 million dollars.
Additionally, Aspect is leveraging virtual events to complement our event marketing activities. By launching a virtual world, UC World (www.ucworld.com), the company has been able to bring unified communications professionals together to learn about global UC deployments and network. UC World is instrumental in sharing lessons learned in Aspect’s OCS deployment, and is an effective way to meet other UC professionals without managing a traditional tradeshow or conference.
9. Since Aspect has such a broad array of applications, do you run the danger of losing focus on such “bread and butter” applications as your workforce management software?
Aspect continues to deliver leading capabilities for contact centers in the form of combined features and functionality that our customers have been able to leverage for improved customer care. For example, the UC application for the contact center, Productive Workforce™, provides all of the workforce management capabilities that Aspect has offered in the past, coupled with advanced quality management and performance management capabilities. By leveraging these capabilities together, companies can easily pinpoint areas for improvement in their business processes and quickly make decisions and adjustments to improve contact center interactions.
Additionally,2009 industry reports from analysts from PELORUS Group and Frost & Sullivan recognize Aspect as the market leader in the workforce management market, demonstrating that Aspect is maintaining a leadership position due to our deep understanding of workforce optimization in the contact center and back-office processes.