According to a recent independent survey of contact center agents and supervisors, more than 10 percent of all customer interactions require reaching outside the traditional boundaries of the contact center to get inquiries resolved.

Improving this whole process can reduce the number of these calls outside the contact center, improve first call resolution, and ultimately have a significant impact on a company’s bottom line.

This open forum discussion will address audience questions submitted prior to and during this 60-minute Web Summit regarding how unified communications can change the way that companies interact with their customers by enabling them to extend out into the enterprise beyond the traditional boundaries of the contact center to reach knowledge workers.

Aspect Software and Microsoft believe contact centers are a key component of any successful unified communications strategy which focuses on the customer and this will be discussed and/or debated during this Summit.

Additional talking points that will be addressed:

• Steps to integrating a unified communications strategy into your contact center.
• Most effective ways to balance consumer demands against bottom line realities and top line objectives.
• How consolidating all contact center functionality into standards-based software that is easily deployed, managed and propagated throughout the enterprise, will give both business and IT optimal choice and control.
• How presence servers can enable Unified IPTM agents to have visibility to a list of available Experts/Knowledge Workers within the Enterprise (along with their current presence data)
  and engage them in the communication with the customer.

After the presentation, the Web Summit will be open for a live Q&A. Be sure to have your questions ready!

Michael Sheridan

As senior vice president of strategy and marketing, Mike Sheridan is charged with ensuring that Aspect Software products and services accurately and distinctively meet market needs, both today and for the future.

Mike fuses the disciplines of architecture, product management and marketing to make certain that the company’s solutions meet the needs of today’s rapidly shifting contact center demands.

With more than 20 years of experience in telecommunications and high-tech industries, Mike serves as a key strategist for Aspect Software, with a critical eye for identifying emerging and evolving markets and a knack for defining solutions to serve them.

Mike most recently held the position of vice president of strategy and marketing at Concerto Software. Prior to that he was director of global strategy and marketing at Rockwell FirstPoint Contact. He has also held sales management positions at Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories. He worked at Hewlett-Packard for 13 years in a variety of sales, customer service and information technology roles.

Mike earned a master’s degree in computer science and telecommunications from DePaul University and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and technology from Bradley University.

Art Schoeller
Director of Industry Initiatives
Microsoft

Art Schoeller’s role at Microsoft is to help shape and execute the Unified Communications go to market strategy with Accenture and Avanade. This predominantly involves managing the Next Generation Workplace initiative which is available in 25 countries and includes extensive vertical market solutions for Unified Communications.

Art Schoeller's 30 years of experience spans the computer, communications and software industries. He is best known in the contact center industry for his accomplishments with CTI by helping to establish standards and solutions to grow the market in its early stages while at AT&T/Lucent. He lead the team that partnered with Novell to establish the CSTA standard. This standard continues to this day to be the default CTI interface for contact center and telephony integration applications. In addition he has had vice president and director level roles in product management and marketing for conferencing, collaboration, and unified messaging products while at AT&T/Lucent (today Avaya) and Dictaphone.

Art also filled leadership roles in analyzing these markets while holding director level positions at Gartner Group and Yankee Group. In these roles he did industry leading research on the transition to VoIP, multi-channel contact centers and speech recognition technology.

Art has a dual BS degree in Computer Science and Computer Engineering from Brown University.

Erik Linask
Associate Editor (Moderator)
Technology Marketing Corporation

In addition to his work with TMC’s IP Communications publications, Erik is a contributor to TMCnet. Prior to joining the TMC team, he was Managing Editor at Global Custodian, a global securities services publication, where he also managed the magazine’s survey research. Erik began his professional career at management consulting firm Leadership Research Institute.