Aspect Rolls Out UC Strategy

Aspect Software yesterday announced its new strategy to bring unified communications capabilities to its contact center solutions. Specifically, the company announced that it will soon be introducing enhanced versions of Aspect Unified IP and PerformanceEdge which are fully interoperable with existing unified communications solutions.

This, of course, could have been expected – I mean, after all Aspect is one of the largest providers of contact center solutions, and the adoption of unified communications is starting to pick up steam. Considering that so many enterprises already use their contact center telephony systems for communications across most, if not all of the organization (linking together different divisions, departments, remote offices, etc., that are geographically dispersed), it makes perfect sense for contact center platform makers such as Aspect to endow their products with UC capabilities (and many have already done so – for example, TouchStar just recently introduced its new “Unify” product, a browser-based product that facilitates true seamless UC across the enterprise). With these advanced, all-IP solutions and their amazing call routing capabilities, an enterprise can make its contact center system the “communications center” for the entire organization.

 

The advantage of bringing UC to the contact center is that it ushers in the next iteration of the “informal contact center,” where the walls, or barriers if you will, that separate the contact center from the rest of the organization are dissolved, and other “knowledge workers” within the organization can be used as resources for handling customer complaints and a wide range of other issues. To deliver superior customer service, agents need the ability to quickly and effortlessly “escalate” calls and put the customer in contact with someone else in the organization who has the exact skills or expertise to help that customer quickly. With UC in the contact center, agents have multiple means for reaching out to these knowledge workers – via IM, via email, via Web chat -- even video chat. Furthermore, with UC in the contact center, managers, supervisors and executives have the ability to reach personnel in the center (and view their “presence”) and get the information they need – quickly, effortlessly, and in the mode they prefer. With UC, not only can processes be seamlessly extended beyond the traditional boundaries of the contact center, with the ability to reach knowledge workers or “subject matter experts” in the organization, all collaboration across the organization is streamlined and enhanced.

 

“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,” explained Bern Elliot, research vice president at Gartner, in yesterday’s news release from Aspect. “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.”

 

For now Aspect is basing its unified communications for the contact center strategy on its current versions of Aspect Unified IP, a comprehensive session initiation protocol (SIP)-based VoIP unified contact center solution, and PerformanceEdge, its workforce optimization suite. The company reportedly plans to release new versions of these products which will be interoperable with other unified communications software.

 

The company claims that future 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.”

 

For more information about Aspect’s new UC strategy, check out Tracey Schelmetic’s article and Rich Tehrani’s blog entry from yesterday.