Contact Centers to Gain Greater Choice and Control with Aspect Unified IP 6.5

By Susan J. Campbell

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

Contact centers will soon have an advanced option to rely on for helping to drive customer service, collections and sales and telemarketing business process goals. Aspect Software (News - Alert), Inc., the global company focused solely on the contact center, has announced that on June 28 of 2007, Aspect Unified IP 6.5 will be generally available.

 

This session initiation protocol (SIP)-based Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) unified contact center solution delivers automatic call distribution (ACD), predictive dialing, voice portal capabilities, Internet contact, workflow management, multichannel recording and quality management.

 

The Aspect Unified IP 6.5 will also offer an embedded voice portal for advanced speech recognition and text-to-speech; advanced outbound list management; multi-tenancy and partitioning to support a Software as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) model.

 

"Aspect Software is unique in its understanding of what consumers want from contact center interactions and is adept at empowering organizations to satisfy those consumer wants while managing their own business realities," said Ian Jacobs, senior analyst at Frost & Sullivan, in a Thursday statement.

 

"Using SIP-based VoIP, this Aspect Unified IP release offers a complete set of rich features and functionality in a unified manner that enables businesses to have the choice and control they need to be effective."

 

Aspect Unified IP is designed to reduce complexity and provide the control and choice that businesses demand. The solution suite enables organizations to better respond to the changing consumer. For the small- and medium-sized contact center, Aspect Unified IP reduces costs and simplifies administration by providing complete functionality on a single server for as many as 100 agents.

 

For the enterprise contact center, Aspect Unified IP can support tens of thousands of agents through centrally managed, linked systems. Aspect Unified IP also provides enhanced hosted capabilities to enable Application Service Providers (ASPs) with multi tenancy, security, and partitioning delivered in a SaaS model. The product is also designed to provide IT with the power to select their transport of choice using either open source VoIP, such as Asterisk (News - Alert) IP-PBX, closed source VoIP or traditional voice.

 

"Aspect Unified IP evolves the unified functionality nearly 800 contact centers have come to rely on with the addition of best-of-breed features from our Signature ACDs, predictive dialers and voice portal," said Gary Barnett, chief technology officer and executive vice president at Aspect Software, in Thursday’s statement.

 

"Our focus has always been on providing our customers with solutions that best fit their needs. Aspect Unified IP can satisfy the varying requirements of the smallest contact center all the way up to the largest enterprise contact center and enables organizations to unlock and utilize functionality as their business demands."

 

Regardless of the industry sector that they are serving, contact centers around the world are under increased pressure to improve the interaction experience for the consumer. To do so, the center must have several elements in place to run smoothly and achieving such a balance is not easy.

 

Enter a company like Aspect. This particular vendor has the experience and the proven success in the contact center industry to provide centers of all kinds with the type of applications they need to meet demands of the consumer today, and anticipate the demands of the consumer tomorrow. Such an approach will lend well to any contact center whose focus remains on the satisfaction of the customer.

 

Aspect Unified IP 6.5 is the next release for those customers currently using Aspect® EnsemblePro™. This version includes localization in Simplified Chinese and English. Subsequent releases of the product will be announced over the next several months and will include localization for Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Thai, Japanese, Traditional Chinese and Korean.

 

 

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.