Aspect Adds New Features, Capabilities, to its Productive Workforce Offering

Call center solutions provider Aspect has reportedly added new features and capabilities to its Productive Workforce offering, including “cradle-to-grave” interaction tracking, enhanced security and compliance, improved alerting, redundancy, system management, and increased features for outsourcers, allowing for full-time call logging and quality recording in mid- to large-sized call centers.


The company claims these new features improve business processes across multiple agents, sites and platforms.

Productive Workforce (aka PerformanceEdge Quality Management 3.0) now includes security and payment card industry compliance capabilities for financial services organizations and e-commerce companies, including enhanced encryption for secure transmission of recordings over the network and in storage – as well as auto-generation of encryption keys and customer-provided key input and audit trail reporting and automatic pause/resume functionality to prevent recording sensitive data (e.g. payment information).

The system also sports a more scalable architecture enabling mid- to large-sized call centers to record and monitor multichannel interactions across several locations for thousands of agents, thus facilitating “centralized” search and administration for multiple sites or even home based agents.

The new “cradle-to-grave” recording capability means speech self service interactions can now be recorded in addition to agent-customer conversations and “tied” together for ease of playback providing additional insight into total contact quality and agent performance.

The re-vamped system also offers improved agent management capabilities: For example, supervisors can leverage live monitoring of agent audio and screens for quality and training purposes as well as for real-time assistance during a customer interaction. Supervisors also have the ability to go from live monitoring to ad-hoc recording with a click of the mouse. The solution also offers expanded coaching capabilities and advanced scorecard features for improved performance management and training opportunities.

The system also now gives outsourcers new recording features that let them access recordings of interactions by team, port or skill via secure partitioning features. Audio and screens for all outsourced agents, including outside the firewall, can be recorded and monitored.

Aspect (News - Alert) has also added new redundancy capabilities to ensure business continuity, as well as advanced error trapping capabilities for enabling proactive system monitoring and alerting.

Finally, the system sports new integration capabilities enabling the recording of calls, screens, emails and chats on third party applications in departments outside the call center.

“Quality management is a mission-critical function that provides insights into agent, departmental and enterprise performance,” said Donna Fluss, president, DMG Consulting. “Supporting the quality management function with feature-rich applications helps contact center managers deliver on their two top goals: providing an outstanding customer experience and increasing agent productivity. With the new quality management capabilities within Productive Workforce, Aspect has taken significant steps towards delivering a more functionally-rich and PCI (News - Alert)-compliant quality management solution.”

 

“The newest quality management features of Productive Workforce are helping us improve the quality and consistency of our customer interactions,” added Demetric Anamateros, vice president of sales and customer service, RCN (News - Alert). “Having the ability to monitor agent audio and screens in real-time as well as record the interaction on-demand helps us gain greater insight and control over the level of service we’re providing, which is critical to our customer care strategies. New system management features such as enhanced encryption and advanced archiving will allow us to ensure recording security while providing ease of administration.  Aspect has continued to deliver the capabilities we’ve needed to pinpoint areas for improvement in our contact center operations and ultimately improve customer satisfaction.”

Aspect made news earlier this week when it announced changes in its executive leadership in an attempt to overhaul its strategy and marketing initiatives. Senior Vice President Andy Bezaitis will now oversee product management and Laurie Cairns will shoulder the task of brand building and marketing.

Earlier this month Aspect announced that it had won the 2009 PilotHouse IP Contact Center Award based on a customer survey report from Nemertes Research.