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By Rich Tehrani

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Tom Chamberlain, Director of Business Process Marketing for Aspect Software (News - Alert), recently sat down with me to discuss IP communications and Aspect’s responses to common customer demands.

 

With its singular focus on improving company-customer interactions, Aspect Software provides a complete contact center product portfolio, using both traditional voice and Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) (SIP)-based Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), to improve customer service, collections, and sales, and telemarketing processes. Read more about the company here.

As a leader in the contact center space for more than 30 years, we have significant experience with both traditional telephony and VoIP architectures, giving us the necessary knowledge to help our customers seamlessly bridge earlier technology investments with new technology and capabilities.  We fully stand behind the use of open standards — a key component of VoIP — in the contact center for a number of reasons.  They are vendor neutral and, therefore, provide customers with more options; they make contact centers more productive; and they give us a solid platform upon which we can develop new technologies that easily interoperate with other contact center solutions. Because we believe SIP and other open standards are good for our customers, we are committed to continuing to invest in open standards, and we are working hard to incorporate them into the majority of our solutions.  All Aspect Signature and Unified IP products have SIP capabilities.  The neutrality provided by SIP makes it even easier for our customers to interoperate all of their Aspect Software solutions with systems and applications from any other SIP-enabled product.

As application standards continue to become more widely deployed, SIP opens up exciting new possibilities for businesses.  For example, presence management allows SIP-enabled contact centers to detect a user’s availability on a network and route communications to that user at the most appropriate device.  Many companies will use presence management to extend customer service and sales from the contact center throughout the organization. They will be able to set up their systems so that when employees turn on their SIP-enabled devices, they will be automatically registered as “available” to the network.  Companies will then be able to couple this information with business rules that specify which calls or types of calls can be routed to any specific device, and when and how these calls should be handled if the device is busy.  By factoring skills-based routing parameters into presence-based routing rules, agents will be able to immediately “find” and collaborate with subject matter experts to solve complex customer issues or, in extreme circumstances, transfer customers for additional assistance.  With SIP, companies will have the ability to enable anyone within the organization with customer service or sales knowledge to become a valuable resource for handling customer interactions.

Contact centers today are facing many challenges including trying to integrate multiple systems, business rules, reporting and administration.  The reality is these integrations are often chaotic, inefficient, and very costly — and, most importantly, they hinder the contact center from meeting its customer demands and strategic objectives.  With multiple systems in play, the experience that customers receive is different, depending on whether they contact a company via telephone, email, or Web chat; agents lose productivity because they are logging in and out of systems all day long to accommodate spikes and valleys in traffic.  Also, business leaders lack the ability to truly see what is happening with employees or customers at any given time.  Identifying the source of an issue in an integrated environment may take hours or even days, since there are so many products tied together, and making any little change to this type of fragile arrangement can be a daunting, if not crippling, task.  Our customers are looking for a way to break this tyranny of integration and regain control of the entire contact center and their customer relationships.

How are you answering their demands?

Aspect Software is always listening to the needs of our customers and looking for ways to meet their contact center needs. Addressing the need for reduced complexity and increased flexibility in the contact center, Aspect Software’s premier Unified IP product — Aspect Unified IP — is architected and built from the ground up to include multiple applications, such as automatic call distributor (ACD), predictive dialer, speech-enabled Voice Portal, Internet contact via email or chat, recording, quality management, and unified reporting and administration.  By administering, managing, monitoring, and driving the performance of the contact center — inbound and outbound calls, emails, chat sessions, faxes, staffing, productivity, and more — from a single unified platform, contact centers can increase flexibility, reduce complexity, lower costs, inspire customer loyalty, and enhance productivity.

One of the trends that we will see more of in the future is the use of open standards.  For example, products with SIP capabilities make it easier for customers to interoperate all solutions with systems and applications from any other SIP-enabled product because they are vendor-neutral.  However, SIP is not the only standard that we will see more of in the future. Other established standards, such as VoiceXML (News - Alert), Web Services, and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), are piquing the interest of companies that are looking for more flexibility and control in the contact center.  Our subject matter experts are contributing to the development of some emerging standards, such as State Chart XML (SCXML) and VoiceXML 3 (VXML3), which we believe will greatly benefit our customers.

 

Another key trend we will see more of in the future with contact centers is the interest in a fully synchronized performance optimization suite.  By connecting workforce management, quality management, campaign management, and performance management solutions, contact centers will be able to easily control costs, enhance service levels, and align performance to support strategic goals.  Companies are always looking for a competitive advantage and a fully synchronized performance optimization suite will help these adopted to consider everything and know what happened in the past, present, and forecast future trends, and act immediately on this information, by making goals-driven adjustment intraday and within any defined time period.

 

Unified solutions are another trend that will definitely grow among contact centers.  Typically, contact centers face many challenges, including trying to integrate multiple systems, business rules, reporting, and administration. The reality is that these integrations are often chaotic, inefficient, and very costly.  In this environment, the experience that customers receive is different, depending on whether they contact a company via telephone, email, or Web chat and agents lose productivity because they are logging in and out of disparate systems all day long. A unified solution can help control the chaos in the contact center by administering, managing, monitoring, and driving the performance of the contact center from a single unified platform.  A unified solution can help contact centers increase flexibility, reduce complexity, lower costs, inspire customer loyalty, and enhance productivity.  Most importantly, a unified contact center puts control in the hands of those closest to the customer — the company’s business managers.

What sorts of things will we be hearing about during your presentation at ITEXPO (News - Alert)?

I will be participating in two panel discussions focusing on the growing trend for IP in the contact center. In “Develop an Effective IP Strategy,” I will discuss the key features of IP technology, how it should be approached by contact centers of all sizes, the vast range of measurable benefits IP can generate in the contact center, and how to develop a successful implementation strategy.  At the “IP Contact Center Shootout,” I will discuss the IP contact center solutions currently available in the market with other contact center experts.  Attendees will be able to hear about growth areas in the contact center industry, customer care strategies across collections, customer service and sales and telemarketing, and the benefits companies are seeing in implementing IP contact center solutions.

To stay competitive, companies need to fully understand all of the benefits IP contact centers can offer.  In the panel discussions I am participating in, attendees will be able to hear about what we are seeing with our customers and the benefits they have experienced from implementing VoIP.

 

VoIP can be an extremely valuable tool for contact centers because it can be tightly incorporated with other solutions to provide an increased level of flexibility, efficiency, and cost savings.  Many companies and contact centers today are recognizing that VoIP is a credible and realistic option.  They are planning to implement it in the near future to gain or maintain their competitive advantages — either deploying it all at once or incrementally, as dictated by their budgets and needs, but deciding whether or not to migrate to VoIP is a complex decision that is unique to each organization.  VoIP has the potential to open up a whole new world of possibilities, but following pre-determined procedures and selecting the right partners can make all the difference.  So, these panel discussions will provide valuable information to companies to help them make the right decisions in IP strategies and implementation.

 

What do you want the industry to know about your company?

Aspect Software founded the contact center industry and is now the world’s largest company solely focused on IP and traditional voice-based products and services for customer service, collections, and sales and telemarketing business processes. Each day, Aspect solutions power more than 125 million customer-company interactions at thousands of in-house and outsourced contact centers around the globe.  Aspect has more than 30 years of experience helping contact centers manage their customer service, collections and sales and telemarketing business process. 

 

Aspect Software understands the value and benefits that SIP can bring to the contact center, in particular the considerable flexibility that it can provide in technology deployments. As a company, we’ve been incorporating SIP capabilities into our products for years and we’ve seen the positive impact that it has had on our customers contact center business process.

 

What’s the best resource to learn about latest trends in the IP communications industry? Why, INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO, of course. ITEXPO West 2007 is just around the corner—this year it’s being held at the Los Angeles Convention Center in California, Sept. 10-12. Preview sessions, speakers and exhibitors—then register to attend.