Stewart Bloom, CEO and president of Aspect Software, Inc., a privately held IT company founded in 1973, recently said he has noticed a “big shift” in the contact center industry – one where “the landscape has gone from numbers to quality service.”
His statement derives from his experience at Aspect Software, which has become a global provider of unified communications, collaboration services and software. The company has many years of experience providing back-office support and has a global role in offering next generation customer contact and enterprise workforce optimization solutions. Having operated in the Philippines for 10 years now, he has seen a trend in the contact center industry that revealed a shift from productivity to profitability.
From his point of view, the contact center is no longer just about operatives handling incoming or outgoing calls professionally and providing prompt, efficient and reliable support for each and every call taken; it’s also no longer looking upon what the average time is spent for one call in responding to customers. Rather, the focus of the contact center agents is now on doing a better job at engaging in the cross-selling/upselling.
What’s more, he remarked on how this shift in contact centers function has played a crucial role in helping to establish new customers more efficiently. He dubbed this approach a “relationship revolution.”
At a recently hosted convention at Shangri-La Mactan, Cebu, Bloom was joined by Chris Koziol, president and general manager of Aspect’s Interaction Management, in front of a gathered audience—customers who came from different parts of the world—who spoke of the shift. Koziol said it is “being fueled by the new demographic coming into the workforce, and a consumer population with more disposable income.”
He also mentioned that consumers have now higher expectations for the way they want to be served; therefore, in order for contact centers to achieve their goals of delivering “remarkable consumer experience,” companies need a solution that will maximize their resources and adopt improvements in the workplace.
He proposed Aspect’s Unified IP, a software-based, unified platform that is able to fuel innovative unified communications (UC) and collaboration functionality. It “leverages seamless integrations with Microsoft Lync and SharePoint 2010 to easily search and engage experts across the enterprise,” Aspect’s site states.
Aspect’s Unified IP is designed to be an all-in-one, IT-ready solution that can help companies drive growth and deliver the tools and processes required in a contact center. Through it, customers can get the most out of their technology investments, while maximizing operational efficiency and effectiveness.
The CEO and president of Aspect believes that its next-gen unified contact center software will not only help enterprise contact centers to connect people, but will also help ensure a “productive workforce.” As well, companies are able to realize new levels of cost savings and productivity gains, on top of having a business solution that is able to transform its call center(s) and enrich customer interactions too, Bloom said.
Aspect Software Unified IP is said to offer more than just customer contact capabilities for inbound, outbound, voice portal, Internet contact, multichannel self-service and proactive contact functionality; it can also provide value-add solutions and a true global innovation engine that is able to exceed the needs and expectations of customers.