As anyone who gets their hands dirty trying to manage critical systems in a call center knows, identifying technology needs and purchasing new technologies is the easy part. The headaches come from integration. The average contact center uses at least a half dozen applications (sometimes up to a dozen or more), and with the number of applications, the size of the integration migraine increases.

Aspect (News - Alert) Software, Inc. and OpenSpan, an application integration company, today announced the general availability of the OpenSpan integration with Aspect's PerformanceEdge quality management application. The integration with OpenSpan allows Aspect Software to extend Aspect quality management functionality, such as screen capture and call tagging, to record all back-office interactions with applications across the enterprise, helping companies gain insight into overall agent performance and create actionable plans to enhance productivity, performance and the customer experience.

The OpenSpan Platform integrates applications, automates business processes, extends functionality and builds new composite applications so companies can realize immediate value on their IT investments.

“The OpenSpan Platform is the perfect complement to PerformanceEdge because it extends the scope of quality management to the business and enables contact centers to more easily achieve their operational and customer satisfaction objectives,” said Brad Murdoch, vice president of product management, OpenSpan Inc. “The integration of the PerformanceEdge quality management application and the OpenSpan Platform means that contact centers can now gain insight across the entire customer interaction.”

The Aspect Quality Management and Open Span integration delivers a common desktop interface to applications, such as CRM tools, e-mail or other systems to enable back-office recording and call tagging. This allows the company to evaluate overall performance, identify areas for improvement, and make immediate adjustments to further enhance the complete customer experience.

“Businesses are continuously looking for better tools for monitoring customer interactions, and the OpenSpan integration will provide Aspect Quality Management customers beginning-to-end insight into the entire customer interaction,” said Brian Derr, vice president of quality management solutions at Aspect Software. “This integration adds value to our PerformanceEdge suite, which is designed to give companies a holistic view of the contact center and help them make intraday adjustments to ultimately align performance to support business goals. Aspect Software is committed to leveraging our relationships with innovative technology partners, like OpenSpan, to provide solutions that can help companies evaluate overall performance and improve the customer experience.”

Aspect Quality Management now has the capability to start, stop, pause and resume recordings based on agent desktop activity, such as when an agent flags a call as high priority in the CRM system or when an agent creates and sends an email.  This means interactions can be categorized in more ways, and accessing recordings during searches is easier and faster. In addition, now related interactions can be tied together so users can see the full history of a customer’s interaction, all without programming. As a result, contact centers can increase agent efficiency, improve the customer service and make certain they are meeting quality levels in multichannel and back-office environments.

For more information about Aspect, visit www.aspect.com. For more information about OpenSpan, visit www.openspan.com.