Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Contact Center Solutions Week in Review: Aspect, Calabrio, Serenova

May 13, 2017

The cloud, customer engagement, customer satisfaction, expansion, and workforce management in the contact center were among the key themes in Contact Center Solutions this week.

Aspect has come out with a new cloud-based version of its Aspect Via Workforce Management solution. The software-as-a-service offering provides a variety of capabilities, including forecasting and scheduling, unlimited what if scenarios, real time-alerts, and the option to use Aspect Mila Natural Language Understanding or Aspect Inform personal assistants.  


The new cloud WFM solution for the contact center is expected to be available in Australia/New Zealand, Europe, and North America by the end of this quarter.

Speaking of Aspect, the company recently published a blog that differentiates between customer satisfaction and customer engagement.

In the piece, Aspect’s Bernhard Santjer says that satisfied customers typically have had their baseline expectations met but usually return to a position of neutrality about your organization. Meanwhile, he adds, customer engagement creates brand evangelists who share your social media posts, make recommendations to friends, and forgive you if you make errors.

“Customers don’t feel valued when they have to take the time to contact the companies they do business with about issues that the company should already know about like service outages,” he wrote. “At the same time, sending out mass text messages with no way to respond doesn’t give your customers warm fuzzy feelings either. When proactive outreach is done right, it can help organizations maximize productivity, customer satisfaction, and contributions to the bottom line.”

As speaking of workforce optimization, contact center as a service provider Serenova recently integrated its solution with that of Calabrio. The latter company delivers analytics related to workforce optimization.

“A contact center’s most valuable asset is its people, and yet, if not properly managed, can be one of the biggest drains on the customer experience,” said Vasili Triant, CEO of Serenova. “The integrated solution provided by Serenova and Calabrio gives our joint customers the insights and capabilities needed to effectively manage agent performance and maximize their customer experience.”

Making the people and processes in the contact center is an important effort for many organizations. But in some cases, contact centers simply need to bring on additional people to address demand. That’s what happened with Smart Link, a company with an Avaya powered contact center in Saudi Arabia.

Smart Link recently announced plans to add 600 new full time agents at its facility. The makeup of that facility’s employees is now 70 percent female. And reports on the expansion talk about how this is an example of one company that is creating new work opportunities for women in that region of the world.





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