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Aspect , a global contact center solution provider, is offering competitive Unified Communications (News - Alert) solutions for the industry. Over the last year, the company has been making rapid strides towards its strategic transformation from a pure play contact center solution provider to a unified communication provider. In sync with the new strategy, Aspect (News - Alert) tied-up with Microsoft to develop a roadmap designed to make it easy for organizations to leverage the contact center in their UC initiatives.

Back in April Aspect announced Aspect Unified IP 6.6 along with an enhanced version of Aspect's Advanced List Management solution, version 3.0 SP2, TMCnet reported . TMCnet recently got an opportunity to interact with Rajeev Soni, general manager India and Mid-East, Aspect, to discuss company's feat and challenges during its transition to a full-fledged communications solution provider for the contact center industry. Our exchange follows:

TMCnet: Tell us briefly about Aspect's new ventures?

Rajeev Soni: Aspect recently acquired Quilogy Inc., a nationally recognized IT services firm, headquartered in Saint Charles, Mo. The acquisition has added collaboration capabilities to Aspect's unified communications services portfolio to help organizations improve business processes with the combined capabilities of these technologies. Bringing together unified communications and collaboration software applications with systems integration (SI) capabilities allows customers to achieve business objectives more effectively than through services or applications individually. Also, one of the other significant developments at Aspect is the alliance with Microsoft (News - Alert) that has entered its second year. This relationship has been important for us, as we worked to achieve our shared vision of enabling organizations to transform enterprise business processes and offering contact centers unified solutions without compromise. Amidst this past year's economic climate, we continued to see strong interest in our UC applications and their ability to streamline companies' interactions both internally and with customers and prospects. And, with the addition of collaboration expertise to our domain expertise, our UC Services practice has even more to offer companies that need to reduce costs and streamline business processes, both critical keys to success now more than ever.

TMCnet: Which are the key markets for Aspect? Which are the new markets in focus?

RS:The APAC market continues to be an important focus area for us. Infact I must add that this market for Aspect continued to grow at a good pace despite the recessionary trends observed globally. Markets like India, China and Philippines hold a lot of business potential for us. Therefore, these markets will continue to be our strong focus areas even going forward

TMCnet: What is Aspect's Unified Communications strategy? How does it help organizations achieve their goals?

RS: According to Gartner (News - Alert), Unified Communication offers the ability to significantly improve how individuals, groups and companies interact and we at Aspect recognize that. Our strategy is clear and simple which is the belief that UC is a journey that begins with enhanced individual productivity, and progresses to heightened workgroup collaboration, communications-enabled business processes and transformative customer and partner communications.  By extending a unified communications strategy to encompass customer-facing processes, enterprises can leverage the routing, reporting, queuing, workflow, workforce management and scheduling, monitoring, training and coaching processes and applications that have been honed by the contact center. These applications can then be extended across all customer-facing employees - even enterprise-based knowledge workers - to enable them to shorten problem resolution cycles, quickly answer customer inquiries and more effectively up-sell services or products to perspective customers.

In fact, even internally at Aspect, we recently completed the global unified communications implementation of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2. This is an important testament of the fact that Aspect as an organization has demonstrated its expertise in planning and implementing a cohesive and comprehensive unified communications strategy that allowed the company to be very successful, including exceeding expectations on the initial timeline, ROI and finishing the entire deployment ahead of schedule.    

TMCnet: What's Aspect's offering for contact centers faced with communications challenges?

RS: Aspect has introduced six new UC applications for the contact center that use software to target operational objectives with a specific set of capabilities. The UC applications utilize the capabilities from its Aspect^® Unified IP^™ and PerformanceEdge (News - Alert)^™, Microsoft .Net Web services-based platform products to help companies enhance their customer service, collections, and sales and telemarketing business process. These UC applications leverage a software-based UC architecture to help companies reduce communications silos while leveraging presence for specific customer-facing business processes. These include:

• Seamless Customer Service^™delivers the tools needed for comprehensive call response, including coordinated self-service/live service and integrated assistance to improve first call resolution and enhance the overall customer experience.
• Blended Interaction™provides inbound, outbound, self service and workforce optimization capabilities. By eliminating complex integration and providing common management, reporting and administration, Blended Interaction gives contact centers greater visibility, control and staffing efficiency in your multichannel contact center to enhance customer satisfaction and improve business results.
• Streamlined Collections^™automates early stage collections and enables expert agent engagement for a more effective delinquent account targeting strategy so contact centers can get more promises to pay faster, reduce servicing costs and write-offs, and improve collections results.   
• Optimized Collections^™ utilizes performance, workforce and campaign management to enhance contact and calling strategies by applying the right resources at the right times to increase right party contacts, lower staffing costs, improve collector effectiveness and collections results.
• Productive Workforce™delivers the tools and processes to help you optimize resource utilization and adopt a continuous improvement culture. By motivating agents throughout their workforce lifecycle, contact centers can service more customers with fewer agents, reduce customer interaction costs, and improve customer service, sales and collections results.
• Productive Workforce™ for Aspect® eWorkforce Management™delivers the tools and processes to help Aspect eWorkforce Management users optimize resource utilization and adopt a continuous improvement culture. By motivating agents throughout their workforce lifecycle, contact centers can service more customers with fewer agents, reduce customer interaction costs, and improve customer service, sales and collections results.

TMCnet: What types of organizations benefit the most from these solutions?

RS: Aspect has in-house and outsourced customers managing customer service, collections, and sales interactions across variety of industries ranging from financial services, telecommunications, transportation to retail, government, aviation etc. Aspect Software powers contact centers for:

                • 7 of the top 7 Global Airlines

                • 8 of the top 10 Global Telcos

                • 9 of the top 10 North American Health Insurers

                • 8 of the top 10 Global Banks

                • 8 of the top 10 Indian Outsourcers

                • 7 of the top 9 Global General Merchandisers

TMCnet: What are the new trends in unified communications in terms of its adoption among enterprises?

RS: Let me share a scenario with you. According to contact center supervisors and agents, 10.3 percent of all telephone inquiries they handle on a daily basis require assistance from knowledge workers in other departments. Therefore, we've seen companies developing special Unified Communications strategy and ensure contact centers are a part of the scheme of things. Such strategies throw up a number of opportunities to hone the entire customer experience, as well as continue to improve employee productivity across the entire enterprise.

Another key trend in the space is the adoption of UC among Enterprises with large end-user interaction, such as FMCG companies, Telcos etc, since it enables better customer connect, and enables the Enterprise to deliver higher customer satisfaction and therefore drive loyalty. Two key variables are implicit in building a creative UC strategy for such Companies. One is the end customer, along with an understanding of the tools that the customer uses to connect to the company. The second is the contact center, where agents can use the UC infrastructure to boost and extend the effectiveness of the customer experience. This offers the opportunity for people with relevant expertise, outside the contact center, to become part of the knowledge pool that can be tapped by the agent during the customer interaction. Here, performance optimization technologies, long a staple in the contact center, present a unique opportunity to extend the UC best practices enterprise wide.

TMCnet: What is your business strategy to tap the growing domestic market?

RS:According to reports from NASSCOM, India's domestic IT-BPO market will reach a whopping INR 662 billion with an estimated growth of 12 percent by FY09-10. Clearly, India offers a lot of opportunity for Aspect's business today especially the Tier I and Tier II regions. Hence, our software is specially packaged for the domestic market which offers localization into 8 different languages along with flexi models. Also, these offerings do not require a lot of investments in terms of money. Moreover, keeping in mind the current business requirements, we are also looking at providing pay-as-you-use model to our local businesses.

We also foresee web 2.0 technologies generating huge business potential for enterprises. That apart, it will clearly also enhance productivity among enterprises. Lastly, our other main focus will be increasing our channel network in tier 2, Tier 3 cities.