Chelmsford, Mass., 10 March 2008 - Aspect Software, Inc., the world’s largest company solely focused on the contact center, today announced a corporate strategy to educate the market on the critical role the contact center must play in the development of an organization’s overall unified communications strategy. The company’s all-in-one, IT-ready Aspect® Unified IPTM and PerformanceEdgeTM solutions will help power unified communications for the contact center. A series of upcoming product enhancements designed to ensure seamless interoperability between Aspect Software solutions and unified communications applications will further support this initiative.
Unified communications for the contact center streamlines and enhances customer-facing business processes with complete visibility and control – and enables businesses to seamlessly extend those processes beyond the traditional boundaries of the contact center to reach knowledge workers or subject matter experts in the enterprise in order to enhance collaboration.
It is important for organizations to include the contact center as part of their broader unified communications strategy because customers can be a key beneficiary of the value that unified communications brings,” said Bern Elliot, research vice president at Gartner. “To succeed, enterprises should leverage contact center technology broadly into their enterprise, and similarly contact centers should understand how to leverage enterprise UC technology into their operations.”
A recent independent survey of contact center managers and agents1 shows that 10 percent of all customer interactions must be taken outside the traditional boundaries of the contact center and into the enterprise to be properly addressed.
“When we did the math on this, we were startled. Aspect customers manage about 125 million interactions a day, which means they have to reach into the enterprise an average 12.5 million times. Every day,” said Mike Sheridan, senior vice president of strategy at Aspect Software. “When you start to multiply that across all of the companies and contact centers out there, the numbers get completely out of hand. And, because the interactions are going outside the contact center, it is significantly more challenging to safeguard a satisfactory customer experience and ultimately produce a positive business result. But we know there’s a better way. And that’s why Aspect is committed to educating the market on the value of unified communications for the contact center.”
Aspect Software provides all-in-one, IT-ready solutions that reduce complexity, lower costs and increase business agility by consolidating all contact center functionality into standards-based software that is easily deployed, managed and propagated throughout the enterprise. This gives both business and IT managers optimal choice of technology and greater control to gain improved visibility into the performance of the organization’s customer service, collections or sales processes.
"Aspect believes that organizations of all shapes and sizes need a unified communications strategy that takes the front lines of customer contact into account,” added Sheridan. “The contact center already has the experience, applications and processes needed to reduce the amount of time it takes to get calls to knowledge workers, to record those calls for quality of service and provide reports to track how well the whole process is working. Without the contact center insight, organizations are at an extreme disadvantage when it comes to crafting and executing a unified communications strategy, and most importantly, delivering the experience today’s consumer demands and deserves."
Aspect will support its unified communications for the contact center strategy with current versions of Aspect Unified IP, a comprehensive session initiation protocol (SIP)-based voice over IP (VoIP) unified contact center solution and PerformanceEdge, the industry’s first contact center optimization suite. The company will also release new versions of those products to deliver interoperability with unified communications software products to enhance collaboration between the enterprise and the contact center.
Subsequent releases of Aspect Unified IP will enable organizations to route interactions to enterprise experts based on presence and willingness, generate enterprise-level reports of these interactions, and utilize workforce management to forecast expert demand.
“Aspect is the only company that offers contact centers a true unified approach to managing all of their customer interactions using a single software platform. Our customers have reported that Aspect unified solutions have helped decrease staffing expenses up to 40 percent and improve customer retention up to 20 percent,” said Sheridan. “This unified approach is absolutely the gateway to executing a successful unified communications strategy because it allows contact centers to seamlessly and easily extend routing rules, reports and quality assurance out to the enterprise. No other company can bring the contact center and the enterprise together the way our solutions can.”
In addition to upcoming product releases, the company will support its unified communications launch with marketing campaigns, its Contact Center: Unplugged blog, an updated website, and educational tools like white papers, web seminars and training. For more information on unified communications for the contact center, a white paper is available, “Unified Communications…Keeping the Customer in the Equation” or please visit www.aspectcometogether.com.
1Source: An Evaluative Report of the Knowledge Worker’s Role in the Contact Center, Conducted by Leo J. Shapiro and Associates for Aspect Software, December 14, 2007
About Aspect Software
Aspect Software, Inc. founded the contact center industry and is now the world's largest company focused solely on unified communications for the contact center. Our all-in-one, IT-ready solutions help two-thirds of the FORTUNE Global 100 and a variety of small and medium enterprises to communications-enable their customer service, collections and sales & telemarketing business processes. For more information, visit www.aspect.com.
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Aspect, Aspect Unified IP, PerformanceEdge and Aspect Software are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Aspect Software, Inc., in the United States and other countries. The names of other companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
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