With the majority of customer interactions in the contact center now being handled via a plethora of self-service channels, contact centers today need to raise their game and address omni-channel customer journeys rather than isolated phone calls – and even emails.
But satisfying the omni-channel customer could only be successful if companies provide customer information proactively to their agents.
Jim Freeze, Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer at Aspect Software
“If consumers are unhappy, they tweet; many companies ignore that at their own peril,” said Jim Freeze, Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer at Aspect Software, a provider of fully-integrated customer interaction management, workforce optimization, and cloud solutions. “The shift to omni-channel communications has given customers limitless ways to make their voices heard, whenever, wherever and however they choose. There is an increasing expectation of customer service to suit their requirements, resulting to a consumer relationship revolution.”
Freeze was in the country to launch the Aspect Workforce Optimization 8.0 (WFO 8). Aimed at the contact center and BPO industry, WFO 8 is a fully integrated solution that unifies the three most important facets of modern contact center management: customer interaction management, workforce optimization and back-office operations.
Freeze explains that the WFO provides greater user experience for agents and supervisors while developing a tighter integration between the front and the back office. Freeze emphasized on the customizable, intuitive and easy-to-use graphical interface of the WFO 8, which “appeals to a workforce who grew up with an iPod with one button on it.” In addition to tighter data and functional integration, all components of WFO 8.0 (Workforce Management 8.0, Aspect Quality Management 8.0 and Aspect Analyze 8.0) use a common look and feel.
“WFO 8 will help companies in increasing productivity of the workforce as the day-to-day tasks will take less time leading to an overall improvement of morale, greater agent autonomy and efficiency as the system will provide faster access to information, all in one place through simple icons and configurable widgets and dashboards,” said Edwin Ong, Director of Marketing and Channels, APAC & Middle East. “Overall the user friendly user interface will lead to a broader use of the system with agents not shying away from using the more powerful but erstwhile considered complex work for optimization features.”
Edwin Ong, Director of Marketing and Channels, APAC & Middle East.
WFM 8’s new back office performance capabilities will allow for better management of business processes and workflow in the back office as well as blending of back office and front office workforces. With the ability to provide more accurate forecasting, scheduling and tracking of back office personnel, companies will be able to optimize employee schedules to meet specific business requirements leading to dramatic improvement in the efficiency of most back office operations.
“Internationally, as per industry analysts, early adopters of back office workforce optimization solutions are realizing significant savings, ranging from 20 percent to 40 percent,” shares Richard Loberas, Regional Sales Director.
Aspect’s Back Office Optimizer, which has been growing steadily in market share, will further amplify the improvements in WFO 8 with real-time work allocation and reallocation based on demand, resource availability and skill, and service level goals along with pre-configured views into operational efficiency and effectiveness.
Quoting a 2010 McKinsey & Company study, Jim added, “Today’s worldwide back office labor pool represents 15-20 percent of the global company’s labor force. This workforce performs tasks whose outcome directly affects service delivery including loyalty enrollment, payment processing, order fulfillment and service activation. Many of these back office processes are manual or accomplished through ten or more systems and involve 40 percent of the back office labor pool. Enterprises are finding that this efficiency deficit is a difficult task to address.”
According to a commissioned study of customer service strategy decision makers conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Aspect Software, 42 percent of respondents said that they are unable to effectively manage the end-to-end workflow of interactions primarily because of un-integrated applications.
Answering UpgradeMag.com’s question regarding how Aspect Software could help contact centers that are suffering from Big Data overload, Ong explained that their solutions address this problem through speech analytics, CRM integration and desktop analytics.
Alliance with LiveVox
At the launch, Freeze unveiled that Aspect Software and LiveVox, a provider of cloud contact center solutions for business process outsourcers, have entered into a strategic alliance to deploy, market, and sell a comprehensive portfolio of cloud-based services and solutions. Under the agreement, Aspect and LiveVox will collaborate to deliver industry-leading SaaS and PaaS solutions.
The strategic alliance will enable LiveVox to expand its product set to include Aspect’s market-leading WFO and multi-modal self-service/IVR suite, bringing significant new cloud capabilities to its BPO customers in North America. Aspect will become the exclusive distribution arm for LiveVox’s cloud solutions outside of North America.
Aspect and LiveVox will implement a joint go-to-market arrangement that will leverage Aspect’s global reach and resources while identifying immediate cross selling opportunities.
Under the terms of the partnership, Aspect will integrate its existing cloud-based solutions with the LiveVox platform in the Aspect global data center and telco infrastructure to ensure economies of scale are maximized. The combined offering will be marketed as “Aspect BPO Cloud, powered by LiveVox”.
The integration of Aspect and LiveVox’s SaaS platforms creates a comprehensive cloud-based contact center portfolio, according to Freeze.
