Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Aspect Software Declares War in Workforce Optimization Market

November 21, 2014

We may be closing in on the holiday season and a time of “good cheer,” but reality is that competition in business is a 24/7/365 affair. And, depending on whether you are a competitor or possible customer, it looks like this holiday season thanks to a new initiative by customer experience solutions provider Aspect Software you are either looking at a possible lump of coal in you X-mas stocking or a valuable present. The reason is Aspect has dropped the gloves in the hotly contested Workforce Optimization Market, and competitor Nice and Verint are in for a pre-holiday surprise.


Take that!

Aspect has fired an opening salvo in what is likely to be a WFO war by announcing an aggressive campaign targeting companies using the aforementioned NICE and Verint WFO solutions. As Aspect tells it, “The program aims to attract WFO users looking to upgrade to Aspect's sleek and modern user interface by offering an unmatched level of integration across WFO components and take advantage of the business conveniences and financial benefits of the Aspect Cloud, a global data center and telco infrastructure supporting Private Cloud, SaaS, PaaS and Managed Services portfolios.” 

Starting with a declaration that older technologies are just not up to snuff in terms of cost and compliance, Aspect is looking to create a sense of urgency to migrate in competitors’ installed bases. They are also promising WFO-contact center integration in the future as icing on the cake to drive what it sees as even greater collaboration and productivity benefits.

"In order to address the needs and behaviors of today's rapidly changing consumer, organizations are constantly looking for better ways to intelligently manage consumer interactions while also reducing the cost of those interactions. And it's not an easy challenge," says Mike Bourke, senior vice president and general manager, Workforce Optimization "Aspect Workforce Optimization not only ensures organizations have the right number of agents, with the right training, in the right places, at the right times for the best customer experience at the lowest cost, its intuitive graphical user interface offers a cloud-ready suite of best-in-class products to efficiently guide agent planning, scheduling, management, recording, surveying, coaching, eLearning and analytics. All this creates intelligent, timely and effective response and delivers exceptional ROI."

After explaining the benefits of its WFO solution, Aspect gets to its offer of enticement. It goes as follows. Current NICE or Verint customers replacing premise or cloud WFO solutions are eligible for program pricing.

  • Program terms:
    • Requires 3 year minimum contract term
    • Promotional discounts apply to all 3 years
  • Discount varies according to solution size:
    • If purchasing between 250-1000 licenses of each application, up to 30% discount off standard list for 1 or 2 of the core products (QM, PM, WFM)
    • Up to 40 percent discount if you buy the full WFO suite
    • If purchasing more than 1,000 licenses of each application:
    • Up to 40 percent discount off standard list for each item
    • Up to 50 percent discount if full WFO suite is purchased

Since this is the opening shot in what is likely to be a rather significant war how NICE and Verint respond is going to be interesting. They are likely to question the characterization of their offers and are sure to move on the incentive side of things to keep their bases happy.  Stay tuned. WFO was a hot market before this announcement by Aspect and things have definitely gotten a lot warmer.  




Edited by Maurice Nagle



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