At ITEXPO East 2012 in Miami, TMC spoke with Serge Hyppolite, vice president of product management at Aspect. Hyppolite said that Aspect was now focusing on the next generation of customer contact solutions. With customers now possessing so many new venues to obtain information and communicate with businesses, the customer is setting the agenda and determining how he or she wants to interact with a business.
Hyppolite said that companies had to accept that customers would now dictate their communication platform preferences. Aspect was developing solutions to help businesses cope with this change and provide multiple channels for customer interaction and feedback.
Aspect’s solutions allow companies to leverage existing assets and solutions to meet this demand, Hippolite said, explaining how Aspect assists businesses to connect with their customers over new media platforms. He noted that social media plays a critical role in what he terms “Customer 2.0” interactions. Hippolite went on to discuss enterprise reaction to social media’s impact on branding and customer service.
Hyppolite also touched on the result of companies failing to address social media communications and the way Aspect assists businesses in targeting their response to social media references. The features of Aspect’s workforce optimization tools and its analytics tools in determining which social media mentions companies should respond to, and how to do it effectively, were mentioned. The way companies can best structure their cross-department responses to customer feedback was also covered.
How Aspect leverages with ongoing relationship with Microsoft and the services the companies have developed to expand contact center services were explained during the interview. Hippolite noted that Microsoft and Aspect had worked to provide complimentary and broad-based solutions to address customer contact needs.
Social media had emerged as a self-service channel, Hyppolite said, but also as a communication channel and would ultimately provide an opportunity for businesses to deliver proactive customer support. He revealed some of Aspect’s unified contact center solution capabilities in regard to supporting call center operations with an eye toward improving agent-customer interaction.
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