Meet Consumer 2.0

Consumers are increasingly troubleshooting support issues with their peers, voicing their opinions and seeking product information through social networks and online communities. This presents an opportunity and a challenge for companies, as the consumer’s newfound collective intelligence puts the customer in the power seat. This next-generation consumer expects to interact with companies how and when they want, and to be delighted with their experience. Be it via SMS, chat, email, these consumers expect a rich experience tailored to each communication channel and managed by the appropriate expert. What’s more, as consumers tend to remember and voice the bad customer experiences over the good, and it’s increasingly important to ensure they are only having positive interactions.

In response, astute organizations are developing and deploying strategies to address growing requirements of the new consumer –Consumer 2.0–, enabling support of robust multi-mode customer engagement that combine proactive outbound communications and rich self-service experiences that can be escalated to a knowledgeable agent at any point. This is what the next generation of customer contact is all about.

What is your organization doing to support these increasingly demanding and social media-savvy customers?

Read the Aspect white paper on considerations organizations should take to meet their customer’s needs.

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Technology Considerations for the Avaya Roadmap

Author: Mike Ely, Director of System Architecture

Since Avaya/Nortel announced their product roadmap, it has given both key stakeholders and the market the opportunity to step back and examine what this means for their businesses. While there are myriad technological implications now and in the future, following is the Aspect perspective on a few of the issues that seem of greatest interest based on market feedback.

SIP – Businesses have long known the importance of session initiation protocol (SIP), which Avaya now is embracing, too. SIP brings dynamic capabilities that Aspect has long recognized as essential to elevating the customer experience.  SIP reduces complexities across your contact center by delivering a common protocol that connects all the people, processes, systems, and applications that support the communications infrastructure.  In doing so, it increases flexibility, interoperability, and scalability, and opens the gate to a whole host of new applications that can help to enhance agent productivity and improve customer service, while at the same time allowing retention of existing infrastructure investments.

The issue, however, is that focusing on SIP is relatively new to the Avaya roadmap. Customers and prospects should look for a SIP interoperability policy from Avaya in order to fully understand the implications of leveraging proprietary SIP applications. Contact centers should carefully vet the levels of additional charges could be required to SIP-enable existing switches to work directly with the Aura environment. The alternative is that they will continue with their TSAPI computer telephony integration (CTI) solution – which should be displaced by IP-based integration – without fully leveraging a SIP backbone. Thus, Avaya-Nortel customers may not be able to standardize their contact center applications on a multi-vendor hardware infrastructure. Aspect has long recognized the importance of standards-based solutions in that they do not lock organizations in to proprietary applications or hardware as they look to enhance and upgrade as needed to address business objectives.  

Unified Communications and Collaboration – Avaya has not yet outlined a specific strategy related to bringing unified communications and collaboration capabilities to their Aura platform. This has implications for Nortel customers who’ve developed strategies around Microsoft technology, and should raise some questions from those who are still forming their unified communications plans. Customers who’ve planned around Microsoft technologies should ask whether the Aura communications backbone will enable them to leverage Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) as a unified communications infrastructure – or will they have to start over with a new unified communications platform?  In addition, companies should compare the number of components and communications infrastructure complexities of an Aura and if it will provide the key unified communications functionality and office integration that Microsoft OCS provides.  They need to examine if it will be a redundant component complicating management and if it will increase the cost compared to a rich OCS deployment.

What are your thoughts about the future of the Avaya roadmap?  Are there other important technology considerations?

Mike Ely is the director of system architecture at Aspect. Aspect is a global software and IT services firm specializing in applying Microsoft unified communications and collaboration to help customers achieve optimal results through enhanced business processes across the enterprise and in the contact center.  For more information, visit www.aspect.com.

Follow Aspect on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/AspectUC. 

Other opinions on the Avaya/Nortel roadmap can be found:

• Phone Plus – http://www.phoneplusmag.com/hotnews/avaya-nortel-integration-reaction-mixed.html
• DestinationCRM – http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/news/2240016122/Avaya-Nortel-roadmap-shows-no-clear-path-to-UC-in-the-contact-center

UC Strategies – http://www.ucstrategies.com/in-the-spotlight/our-views-on-the-avaya-nortel-roadmap.aspx

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Applying Collaboration Tools to the Enterprise

Author:  Kevin Schwartz, EVP of Aspect Global Professional Services

There is no doubt that “collaboration” is a hot topic of late. And, while there are varying ideas of what collaboration entails and what it really has to do with unified communications (UC), we are confident in the benefits that collaboration can provide to organizations. 

As Andy Bezaitis wrote in his last blog , collaboration capabilities provide significant opportunities to improve workflows and increase first call resolution in the contact center.  Collaboration will also play a big role in improving processes across the enterprise as well, which translates into greater productivity, reduced costs and improved results within the enterprise and between the enterprise and its customers.

Collaboration tools, like Microsoft SharePoint, are playing an increasingly larger role in communications-enabling of business processes (CEBP) for the enterprise as part of a larger UC deployment. The important thing with both UC and collaboration is that by surrounding software applications and platforms with systems integration (SI) capabilities, organizations will be able to achieve specific goals and objectives better than they could if they were just using services or applications alone.

As unified communications and collaboration capabilities converge, there are a number of ways that companies can apply these new technologies to enhance business processes across key functional areas, including:

• Customer Interaction
• Customer Collaboration
• Customer Acquisition
• Field Service Management
• Payment Processing
• Web presence
• Data Management, Analytics & Reporting
• Data Integration

Some examples of how collaboration tools, coupled with UC, can positively impact areas of the business include:

• Leveraging video and web conferencing tools to create virtual meetings to create, update, or review content in real time. 
• Utilizing IM, presence and screen sharing capabilities to quickly resolve issues across multiple locations or even across departments. 
• Creating a central content repository for employees – as well as potentially partners and customers – enabling easy access to information and providing the presence on the expert associated with that information and the ability to seamlessly communicate with the person through UC tools if more data is required.

The interesting thing about collaboration is no matter where it’s being applied, it can have immediate results.  It can be applied to individual productivity, workgroup productivity, and communications-enabled business processes and will yield benefits in each area.

Has your company begun leveraging collaboration tools? What are some of your initial results so far?

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Unified Communications and Collaboration: Opportunities for the Contact Center

Author: Andy Bezaitis, Senior Vice President of Product Management

We’re starting to see that companies looking at unified communications (UC) deployments have also been evaluating the benefits of collaboration technologies.

Since Aspect just announced the acquisition of Microsoft National Systems Integrator (NSI) Quilogy , I thought I would discuss the specific opportunities collaboration brings to contact centers, provide an overview of what collaboration is, and explain how it can deliver benefits by providing concrete examples of its application. 
I think it’s important to first define collaboration.  Like UC, it is being defined in a number of different ways.  Gartner has segmented collaboration into four different elements:

1. Communication
2. Coordination
3. Communities
4. Social Interaction facilitation

And, the tools that support these elements can be divided into two categories (which do have some overlap):

- Non-real time tools shared document repositories like SharePoint, wikis, enterprise search, blogs (like Contact Center: Unplugged), and of course e-mail.
- Real-time tools for conferencing like Live Meeting, IM and social messaging text messaging or micro-blogging tools like Twitter

Aspect has already demonstrated the value of desktop sharing and leveraging enterprise knowledge workers in the contact center  through the use of real-time UC capabilities, so let’s look at additional benefits and implications of using collaboration tools in the call center.

By integrating collaboration capabilities within UC applications in the contact center, companies will be able to take advantage of the groundswell of social media   to fundamentally change workflows and business processes.  They will be able to take raw content– structured and unstructured data – and turn it into information that drives action.  This means a wealth of opportunities to improve productivity and communications (and ultimately the overall customer experience).  Let me give you a few examples of the benefits that collaboration tools can bring to the call center. 

- Use data from customer and partner communities, social media and websites
- Tie results from post-call surveys or responses to emails and notifications to individual customer records
- Leverage portals and enterprise search to bring additional enterprise content and analytics into the contact center
- Make structured and unstructured contact center  content (including call recordings) consumable and actionable by other departments
- Use search capabilities to monitor customer conversations around key topics (such as (“closing account”) by linking SharePoint into customer facing emails, instant messages(IMs), simple message syndications (SMSs), web conversations, and social networks

Next, we’ll be looking at the significant benefits that collaboration technologies can bring to the enterprise, so be sure to check that out next week.

In the meantime, I’d like to hear about ways in which you are thinking about using social technologies and other collaboration technologies in your call center.

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