Enterprise Transformation as the Future of UC: Aspect Keynote at ITEXPO

Unified Communications is production-ready and businesses are missing out on a huge opportunity if they’re failing to embrace the technology, an official with a Chelmsford, Mass.-based company that focuses on unified communications in the contact center told a standing-room only crowd of more than 200 listeners packed into an auditorium for a keynote address during ITEXPO West 2009 in Los Angeles.

 

Mike Regan, vice president of unified IP development at Aspect told dozens of IP communications and IT professionals, C-level executives and media members during his speech – held on the first day of the three-day event – that UC’s use in the contact center especially has been shown to yield cost-related benefits, among others.

 

And that’s partly because the consumers with whom many contact center agents interact themselves are familiar with “presence” technologies such as IM and chat, and their patience has dried up accordingly.

 

“Consumers are becoming very demanding and if they hav ea bad experience, they will let others know about it,” Regan said.

 

Aspect, which has a strong relationship with Microsoft and leverages the software giant’s OCS R2, found a way to blur the traditional contact center barriers by using UC. Regan cited a survey which found that more than 10 percent of calls into contact centers required expertise from someone outside the center itself.

 

But how to effectively – and quickly – route that call to the appropriate person? For Aspect, the answer is in UC applications.

 

The company, Regan said, used a tightly integrated platform with various Microsoft technologies to leverage what he called “rich presence.”

 

“It has worked very well,” he told the crowd.

 

Here’s a broad sketch of how it works: Someone calls a contact center, and that individual is serviced by an application running on the unified IP platform. The center attempts – through the software – to handle the call without routing it to an agent, through self-service technologies. If that doesn’t work, then the caller is routed to an agent, the caller’s relevant information pops up on screen and if it’s determined that the individual there cannot answer the call, then the traditional next steps – taking down information for a call-back or placing the caller on hold for an extended period of time – are avoided.

 

The agent uses presence technology and gauges, through Aspect software, the level of expertise required to get the caller’s questions answered, and then finds information on who is available to answer the call, and a connection is established.

 

That sounds simple – but the benefits that UC can yield certainly are not.

 

In addition to so-called “soft benefits” such as major productivity gains, an improved sense of community and changes in the concept of communications to a “clicking” approach – Aspect has seen hard benefits such as reducing conferencing costs by more than 80 percent on an annual spend of $1.2 million.

 

“We also have seen long-distance calls reduced by 50 percent with SIP trunking,” Regan said. “And we’ve seen local telephony costs reduced by 50 percent in North America and the EMEA region.”

 

Regan, who joined Aspect last summer when the company purchased BlueNote Networks, a Tewksbury, Mass-based outfit he helped found, has been working in voice and data networking delivery for about two decades.

 

In that span, he has led product development as communications companies that include Ciena Corporation, Octave Communications, Castle Networks and Unisphere Networks, a Siemens subsidiary. In Aspect – a company that IT market research firm Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) today declared the leader in the North American workforce management market – Regan helps lead a company whose unified communications applications for the contact center leverage software to target operational objectives with specific capabilities.

 

His comments on Aspect’s specific approach to UC in the contact center followed an overview of UC’s development in general, from “personal UC” to what he called “enterprise transformation” – where communications are extended outside of a company to customers and partners to improve collaboration.

 

“We’re doing a little of that today,” Regan said. “The enterprise transformation is where all this is going to head. I don’t really think we’re there yet.”

 

But it’s clear that UC has evolved quickly. Personal UC would include technologies that help individuals accomplish tasks more efficiently – technologies geared toward personal productivity. That developed into what Aspect calls “collaborative UC,” where workgroups communicate more efficiently in both planned and ad hoc activities. What followed, Regan said, was “enterprise UC,” where business processes themselves start to change, by improving process performances at an enterprise level and on a scale beyond what is offered by personal or group UC.