Customer experience management, a process that many companies today see as the answer for flawless customer support, is largely impossible without a broad platform that pulls together all elements of the customer journey. The piecemeal approach – once a standard in contact centers as they added communications channels and media bit by bit over time, often from separate software solutions – is no longer a viable option for companies that need all customer information in the same place at the same time and accessible for all employees who touch the customer experience. Contact center solutions need to evolve beyond voice plus “add on” channels that may or may not be integrated with the central support platform and telephony.
Today, the lines between workforce optimization, customer relationship management, contact center interaction management are beginning to blur. It’s no longer enough to manage different media channels such as phone and email on the same platform. The effects that workforce optimization, for example, have on the customer experience are too powerful to manage them apart from one another, and many vendors are recognizing this and tailoring their offerings to be unifiers for jobs that were once accomplished with point solutions. Many companies are also recognizing that what happens with employees inside the contact center has a direct effect on what happens with customers outside the contact center.
A recent study by Forrester of the Contact Center Interaction Management (CCIM) market for large contact centers for the third quarter of 2016 placed Aspect Software on top as a leader with its Aspect Unified IP product, a comprehensive, software-based, contact center platform. It’s another major accolade for Aspect, after market research and analysis firm Frost & Sullivan named Aspect Software winner of its 2016 Global Company of the Year Award in the Workforce Optimization Industry, for demonstrated excellence in growth, innovation and leadership.
In its evaluation of the CCIM marketplace, Forrester chose eight significant providers of customer experience platforms to lead the pack. The company noted that the leaders of the CCIM are those companies that recognize that non-voice channels need as much priority as voice channels, and are not simply “nice to have” features to bolster the customer experience. According to Forrester’s report, Aspect has been an exemplary leader in non-voice channels in contact center solutions for many years, including interactive text response on SMS, chatbots on Facebook Messenger that are integrated with the contact center ecosystem, and automated and agent-assisted self-service chat applications.
“While anchored in voice, contact center interaction management vendors need to ensure that they are proactively positioning themselves for non-voice channels,” Forrester said.