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Aspect Maps Out UC Product Plans |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Tuesday, 11 March 2008 |
Contact Centre software specialists, Aspect Software, has embarked on a corporate strategy to educate the market on the
part the contact centre plays in an organisation's
overall unified communications strategy.
Key to the company's
plans is the ability to extend communications beyond the contact centre
to include other part of the organisation in customer-facing business
processes, but without loss of the monitoring and control functionality
traditionally associated with call centre operations. Exemplifying the
need to bring expert knowledge workers from outside
the contact centre into the business process, Aspect recently found
that 10
per cent of all customer interactions need to have input beyond the
traditional customer facing staff to properly addressed.
Accordingly, Aspect's Unified IP and PerformanceEdge solutions will help
power unified communications for the contact centre, while a series of
upcoming product enhancements will deliver seamless
interoperability between Aspect Software solutions and unified
communications applications, says the company.
"It is important for organisations to include the contact centre 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 centre technology broadly
into their enterprise, and similarly contact centres should understand
how to leverage enterprise UC technology into their operations."
Aspect
says its customers deal with about 125 million interactions a day. Ten
per cent translates to 12.5 million interactions requiring input from
beyond the callcentre every day.
Mike Sheridan, senior vice president of strategy at Aspect
Software said: "When you start to multiply that across all of the companies
and contact centres out there, the numbers get completely out of hand.
And, because the interactions are going outside the contact centre, 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 centre."
"Aspect believes that organisations of all shapes and sizes need a
unified communications strategy that takes the front lines of customer
contact into account," added Sheridan. "The contact centre 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 centre insight,
organisations 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 plans to introduce SIP-based VoIP for its Unified IP solution
and will ensure the PerformanceEdge optimisation suite can deliver
interoperability with unified
communications software products to enhance collaboration between the
enterprise and the contact centre, it said in a statement.
Subsequent releases of Aspect Unified IP will enable organisations to
route interactions to enterprise experts based on presence and
willingness, generate enterprise-level reports of these interactions,
and utilise workforce management to forecast expert demand.
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