Unified Communications (UC) specialist Aspect Software has launched six new applications it claims can improve contact centre productivity by 10 per cent and cut maintenance costs by twice as much.
They claim the new approach also enables Aspect customers to improve customer satisfaction by eight percent, and to increase first call resolution by five percent.
Aspect has also launched a one million dollar UC demo centre at Singapore’s OUB Plaza, which it says will give customers and partners hands-on training and demonstrations of UC at work in the contact centre and the enterprise.
Aspect maintains that UC applications are ‘the next generation technology required to meet the operational goals of contact centres’. UC, they say, is ‘a brand new way to use the power of software to target operational objectives with specific capabilities’.
The announcement comes in the wake of the latest IT Nation: Tech Trends and Enterprise Priorities research by MIS Asia magazine–www.mis-asia.com–soon to be released, which found that Asia Pacific enterprises seem to be losing some enthusiasm for investing in unified communications in the current economic downturn. UC came in third as the initiative expected to face funding cuts in organisations with more than 1,000 staff, after IT Services Management (ITSM) and green IT.
Better service and business processes
According to Aspect, the UC applications use the capabilities from its Aspect Unified IP and PerformanceEdge Microsoft.Net Web services–based platform products, to help companies enhance their customer service, collections, and sales and telemarketing business process.
The applications are claimed to directly address the challenges and expense associated with ‘the previous generation of proprietary, siloed and hardware-intensive computer telephony integration (CTI) architectures’.
Aspect senior vice president of strategy and marketing, Mike Sheridan, said the new UC applications, coupled with Aspect’s UC Services practice, enable Aspect to deliver a full range of UC solutions across the enterprise and in the contact centre.
“The UC applications were designed with a specific purpose in mind to help organisations improve particular business processes–such as customer service, sales and collections–while at the same time reducing ongoing expenses,” Sheriden said.
“Because the UC applications use targeted software capabilities, they empower business users to manage and change the system dynamically and help free up IT for other projects.”
A powerful statement
Blair Pleasant, president & principal analyst, with communication convergence markets and technologies firm COMMfusion, said the new UC applications were a powerful statement from Aspect to the market.
“The company is clearly committed to bringing specific capabilities for different business processes that will help companies as they adopt a unified communications strategy and bring the contact centre into these initiatives,” Pleasant said.
‘By introducing the UC applications, Aspect is demonstrating its understanding of the importance of integrating UC with business processes and the ability to deliver software and services tailored to a company’s requirements.”
