1. Aspect is in many sectors of the contact center market: workforce management, IP, customer center integration, analytics, monitoring, etc. Please explain the company's overall direction in the near term and over the next two years?
As you mentioned, Aspect has earned a strong leadership position within the contact center industry. For nearly two decades, we've been a leader in contact center innovation, which includes ACD, IVR, CTI, and multi-channel blending technologies, workforce management, outbound dialing, reporting and analytics, and VoIP. Aspect is committed to developing contact center solutions in response to the business needs of its customers across multiple industries including transportation, financial services, insurance, telecommunications, retail, outsourcing, as well as large government agencies.
As our Uniphi architecture and product roadmap demonstrate, over the next two years, we aim to build on that track record by continuing to lead in areas that enhance the contact center and expand the capabilities of the investment in workforce, equipment, and infrastructure that customers have made. Our product roadmap addresses this by focusing on the latest technologies currently gaining traction such as speech recognition, reporting and analytics, performance optimization, and integration with other mission-critical enterprise applications. The advent of IP in the contact center will also bring many advantages to businesses both large and small. Our roadmap includes the rollout of new products designed to help customers transition to IP at their own pace and fully leveraging their existing technology investments.
2. With such an expansive product offering, how do your sales channels handle the multitude of products?
Aspect's broad product set gives our sales channels the power and flexibility they need to solve more complex problems for our customer — the ones that hold the promise of a much larger ROI for them. Our sales efforts focus on understanding customer needs and then putting together a more tailored solution pulling from our various products and services. Aspect's product depth and breadth permit sales to showcase a wider array of functionality and the flexibility to help customer arrive at the solution most suited to their particular needs. And, those needs can be quite diverse. For example, some businesses have a strong need for new voice and self-service applications; others need to combine workforce management with self-service voice response in order to create more reliable schedules. We accommodate such diverse needs and much, much more. Here's another example: as a company adds additional contact centers in new locations or acquires new ones through a merger or acquisition, they have two certainties: 1) Aspect will be there with proven, reliable solutions to handle the challenge; and 2) We've been there many times before with other customers. This is a great comfort to our customer base. We believe they are better served by our broad understanding gained from nearly 20 years of experience implementing contact center solutions to more than 3000 companies worldwide. Our “point solution” competitors cannot match this.
3. Which of your CRM/Contact Center solutions do you believe will provide Aspect with the most significant growth in the near future?
Our approach with our customers is more important than any one product. Part of our strategy is to create a healthy, mutually dependent, and beneficial relationship with our customers. With that in mind, we work diligently with customers to understand and help define their customer-care strategies and analyze how their customers contact them, what their customers are looking for, and how they feel about the services they are getting. Then we turn to our robust products, services, and alliances offerings to develop the best solution possible.
Here's an excellent example of how this approach helped one of our customers reduce costs, improve service, and drive revenue. The customer, a home-shopping giant, found that a high percentage of its repeat customers wanted a self-service system instead of a live agent. They wanted to quickly punch-in an order and get off the phone. Within two days of launching the new Aspect Customer Self-Service automated solution, this customer realized $50,000 in new sales — $30,000 of which was in the first afternoon alone — and all without adding a single sales person or service rep. This is because the business started with its customers' need first, just as Aspect does.
From a long-term perspective, we believe there are six significant market trends, which we're addressing these through our solutions. The trends are
- VoIP: Businesses are leveraging existing investments by gradually introducing IP into their contact centers
- Multi-channel Contact Centers: Call centers are evolving to include multiple channels of communications
- Open, Standards-based Solutions: Contact centers are multi-vendor environments, and open-systems solutions are designed to be interoperable with third-party applications in order to address the complex demands of heterogeneous environments
- Remote Contact Centers: Remote centers can offer labor savings and around-the-clock service
- Workforce Management and Optimization: Personnel and labor costs represent the highest percentage of contact center costs
- Analytics and Consolidated Reporting: The first five trends combine to create the need for analytics applications that let users monitor their entire contact center operation effectively, identify problems rapidly and make informed decisions
Aspect's open Uniphi architecture is designed to address these market trends and is the framework of our solution roadmap. Our Uniphi architecture brings together workforce, information, and communications into reliable, multi-product solutions focused on helping businesses address these trends in innovative ways and at a pace that suits their needs.
4. Aspect's first quarter financial results were encouraging. What can we expect for the remainder of this year?
Yes, we were pleased with our first-quarter results and see them as reflecting improvement in our business fundamentals. While no one knows exactly what the future will bring, I can tell you that we have a strong operating model and balance sheet, and we are committed to growing our core business.
5. Aspect is making a major investment in IP Telephony. In a market that is rapidly becoming more crowded, how does Aspect differentiate its IP offerings from such companies as Avaya and Cisco?
IP is simply a network-transport technology. In order for it to be successfully used in contact centers, the right infrastructure, the data center, and contact center domain expertise are crucial. Contact centers are complex environments in which many dynamics related to the workforce, customer communication channels, and business data come into play. Knowledge of how to manage those dynamics for optimal results is the key to success. Therefore, it's a risk to work with vendors with IP expertise without any contact center expertise. The fact that Aspect brings nearly two decades of leadership and innovation in the contact center space is an important differentiator.
Our customers tell us they want to leverage their existing technology investments. Many companies are implementing IP in more manageable phases first before deploying it on a wide-scale basis. Providing solutions for a mixed PSTN and IP environment to help bridge the transition to IP are essential. Aspect's Uniphi product portfolio allows customers to successfully manage that transition by helping them migrate to IP at their own pace. Many vendors only offer an all-or-nothing approach, including the dreaded forklift upgrade, in order to take advantage of IP today.
We believe that IP in the contact center is going to happen despite the skepticism of a few years ago. In fact, most of our customers across the globe are at least planning for IP today, and some have already begun to integrate it into their existing environments through our recommended hybrid approach.
6. Aspect is marketing SER's complementary monitoring product, SERTAINTY. Since Aspect does not have a monitoring product, what is the rational for this partnership?
Currently the focus of our work with SER is on providing enterprise-class, intelligent outbound dialing solutions. The relationship does allow for expansion beyond that. Aspect and SER are working on a phased development effort to integrate SER's outbound dialing solution into the Aspect Enterprise Contact Server. The Aspect Enterprise Dialer is a result of our joint effort and is available to customers today. The integration will also deliver consolidated inbound and outbound reports on agent productivity and contact center operations. The objective is to deliver a unified solution that addresses the problems associated with having separate outbound and inbound systems. There is a clear market need for tightly integrated contact center architectures, and by teaming with SER, we are able to offer a streamlined inbound/outbound environment to our customers. In summary, SER's solutions complement our product line well and help us maintain our reputation for offering customers a complete and integrated best-of-breed contact center portfolio.
7. Aspect has both a direct sales organization and an aggressive partner program. Where do the majority of the sales come from? From your experiences, what partner relationships work the best?
The majority of Aspect sales come from our direct sales organization. However, we utilize an extensive partner ecosystem that includes an indirect channel of resellers, leading systems integrators and complementary technology providers. Successful alliances result from teaming in the market to deliver the most reliable, best-performing contact center technologies possible. Aspect looks to team with companies that lead their categories and understand the needs of their customers. Our alliances are built on the premise that customers want the best solutions in the least amount of time and at a competitive price. Our most successful alliances are with companies that help us expand the market for our combined offerings.
8. If you look into your crystal ball, what type of economic, buying environment do you believe that we can expect for companies in the CRM/Contact Center technology sector?
Businesses are still careful about avoiding the over-spending syndrome that occurred in the late ‘90s. Because of this cautiousness, our customers are demanding that their technology investments produce fast and quantifiable ROI, which our solutions absolutely do.
Therefore, it is no surprise that we see a trend toward the purchasing of “new and improved” versions of products that have proven to deliver real business benefit and measurable ROI before. The reason for this trend is that supporting technologies like processors and operating systems have advanced significantly in recent years, and the newer versions of contact center products leverage these foundation technologies to deliver mission-critical reliability through affordable, easy-to-administer solutions. ACDs are a good example of this because the best products on the market today encompass an array of functionality and readiness within a single unit. Workforce Management and IVR are two other examples. Both of these technologies have come a long way in the past few years. Workforce Management now encompasses analytics to help optimization contact center performance. IVRs now offer the most advanced and reliable speech-recognition technology available today and deliver more user-friendly interfaces.
In conclusion, I invite anyone interested in learning more about Aspect, our views, and our solutions to call 1-888-412-7728 and sign up to receive free educational whitepapers and invitations to informative webcasts. Our annual eBIZ User Conference is being held in New Orleans this October.