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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Global Communications Leaders Join Forces to Clear UC Interoperability Hurdles

The movement to respond assertively to an industry challenge that has hindered widespread unified communications adoption recently took a bold step forward. The newly formed Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) alliance of key technology leaders represents an organized, intensified focus on enabling standards-based, inter-vendor unified communications interoperability. With an expanding roster of supporting member companies, the potential for change is reaching critical mass.

Corporate IT leaders and others responsible for new technology investments have had many reasons to put new infrastructure expenditures on hold. Budget dollars have simply been too scarce in the lean economy of the past two years to overlook interoperability concerns. But just as companies’ interest in unified communications’ potential to improve productivity and efficiencies has grown, so has their restlessness for access to the business value of the technology’s capabilities.

The UCIF promises to help the industry break free of lingering restraints. The alliance is pursuing an agenda that will benefit both customers and vendors. By identifying common customer scenarios and leveraging existing industry standards, they’ll be able to resolve interoperability issues that have slowed the momentum of adoption and deployment of unified communications. UCIF members will also benefit from simpler, more cost-effective multi-lateral testing capabilities that replace ad hoc interoperability testing.

As a company that holds a long-standing position that strongly favors developing solutions using standards-based technology, Aspect welcomed the opportunity to join UCIF. Actively working with other like-minded members, we expect to play a continuing role in helping customers fully leverage unified communications through application integration. Our ultimate goal is to help focus our customers’ efforts on deploying new technology that will deliver the greatest benefits, without investing valuable budget and resources in making technology interoperate. With the collective efforts of UCIF members, the market will benefit from faster availability of interoperable UC solutions.

How can your organization benefit from UCIF efforts?

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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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Some Thoughts on the New Avaya-Nortel Roadmap

Author: Gary Barnett, CTO, Aspect

Working within an organization that has experienced a number of noteworthy mergers and acquisitions over the years, I am well aware of the challenges that are faced internally with bringing two companies together in a seamless fashion (or at least seamless to the customer). Having done this many times in the past, we understand how challenging it is to bring together two different companies products and this one will be particularly difficult knowing the breadth of the offerings and size of the companies.

The Avaya and Nortel merger has certainly given many in the business pause . The merger brings the company a larger customer pool, but the customer does not necessarily stand to gain much in the way of new capabilities.  In fact, they may have to deal with a number of challenges and pain points.  The two companies have spent many years executing on very distinct strategies and developing solutions that are not compatible.  And when they were separate entities that was a logical approach.  This new entity has a monumental task in front of them in trying to integrate platforms and people, and still keep their existing customers satisfied.

I’m sure most customers of either Nortel or Avaya, are trying to get a handle on what exactly this means to them and their business.  Having had to address these same questions and concerns from our own customers over the years, I thought I would take this opportunity to help identify some of the things that you may want to look out for in the next 6, 12 or 18 months.

• • UC Future Strategy/The Microsoft Relationship – Nortel had a relationship with Microsoft to deliver unified communications (UC) to the contact center and the enterprise that didn’t progress too far and has come to an end.  And, Avaya has been developing its own stand-alone UC strategy with proprietary solutions.  This will potentially require one customer or the other to abandon its UC strategy in mid-stream.  Most analysts have stated that no single vendor can provide everything that an organization will require for a complete UC strategy, so this will compel customers to develop an understanding of how this will impact a future UC direction and who will provide the full capabilities needed to execute on that strategy.
  • Product Compatibility – Avaya has announced that it will select  the best of breed solutions to provide the greatest value to its customers.  But where does this leave the customer who has already invested significantly in the platform that’s not going to be supported in the long-term? Customers will need to determine if there is a clear migration path for future investments or if this is going to require a forklift implementation.  And most importantly will the new solution actually yield the capabilities and results they’re looking to achieve?  The company has a history of stopping and starting the development of unified solutions, and from the roadmap discussion it looked as if that wouldn’t be available for several more years, so it could get worse before it gets better by having to integrate multiple points across numerous applications.
  • Customer-Facing Contacts – Whether you work with Avaya through a partner or directly with the company, there is bound to be duplications with your customer-facing contacts, which will inevitably resulting in staffing adjustments. Whether these changes happen all at once or gradually over time, you should plan to weather some changes that may not all be to the good. Customers may have to deal with people that don’t know their business and don’t understand the solution and the problem is compounded with a channel strategy where all partners are not necessarily on board with the go forward plan.  And, when customers contact the support group, they may be routed differently than they were in the past and they may not be treated the same way.  Asking how all of these changes will impact a customer’s day-to-day operations is key.

The road ahead for Avaya and Nortel customers will be a challenging one. For those involved, it is important to go into this with eyes wide open. Current customers need to know what to be on the lookout for and to ask the right questions.

What are some of the other challenges that you think are important to consider when your vendor mergers with another company?

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Can UC Really Improve Your Customer Service?

Author: Gary Barnett, CTO, Aspect

We’ve been talking with customers about unified communications (UC) for quite some time. We’re finding that many people understand how deploying UC across the enterprise can increase employee collaboration and productivity, and significantly lower costs, such as those associated with conferencing and telephone usage. We’re also finding, however, that a lot of people are still unclear about where the contact center fits in. So, I thought I’d take some time to share with you a real-world example of how Aspect has implemented UC across our own global contact center environment with multiple locations and languages.

You may already know that earlier this year, Aspect completed a company-wide deployment of Microsoft’s UC solution, Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2. We immediately began to see the benefits from this new technology. But, being in the contact center business, we really felt like we needed to take the capabilities one step further and use it to radically improve the service we were providing to our customers.  So, we implemented Seamless Customer Service, a unified communications application for the contact center, and transform the way our Aspect® Technical Services team was communicating with our customers.

Now, thanks to Seamless Customer Service and its Ask an Expert feature, our support personnel has access to UC capabilities such as presence detection, instant messaging (IM) and conference calling, which gives them instant visibility to worldwide contact center resources and those in the enterprise who are available to assist with customer inquiries. Ask the Expert enables the support engineer to quickly and easily use presence identification and skill criteria to find an available expert and rapidly address customer questions that may not be available in the knowledge base. They can call anyone in the enterprise by pointing and clicking (no need to use valuable seconds looking up phone numbers and dialing the phone), and even route a customer interaction directly to that expert if necessary. This eliminates the wait time to request assistance and effectively expands the pool of available resources for the Aspect support center.

We immediately began seeing measurable improvements in key customer experience metrics after implementing Seamless Customer Service and OCS in our contact centers. In the last year, call hold times have been reduced by 76 percent from an average of 2.5 minutes per call to just 44 seconds per call. Our overall first day resolution rate has increased by seven percent and the time to reach a support technician with the correct skill set has improved by eight percent.

Thanks to Seamless Customer Service, we’ve improved our call routing through our worldwide resource pool to the most appropriate available resource based on factors such as product, language, region and issue severity. Clearly, the right UC capabilities can mean measurable improvements in customer satisfaction for any global contact center environment.

Are you ready to fit your contact center into your UC strategy?

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Surveying the Market: Bridging the Enterprise and Contact Centers

Author: Andy Bezaitis, Senior Vice President of Product Management

Since I’ve moved into my new role as head of product management at Aspect, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with several companies from around the globe and gain more insight into what they’re planning for 2010 and beyond for their contact centers. One common trend that I’ve noticed is that more organizations are looking at the bridge between the enterprise and the contact center— through unified communications.

The companies that I’ve spoken with are not alone in these plans. In a recent survey of more than 1,300 participants, Nemertes Research found that more than 52 percent of organizations will be bringing unified communications into the contact center in the near future. I found this stat to be very telling on the direction of the contact center industry. Clearly, companies are moving to architectures that support unified communications strategies, and are looking at technologies such as IP infrastructures, presence engines, instant messaging tools and other applications that can help manage virtual contact centers or remote agent workforces.

The report also surveyed the participants for feedback on contact center vendors. They gave the highest marks to those vendors that offer professional services and systems integration offerings to support UC deployments across the enterprise and the contact center. This is seen as a clear differentiator in this market – a vendor that understands the broad need of the enterprise and the contact center.

The voices of hundreds of companies were heard loud and clear: organizations have been integrating (or will soon deploy) UC technologies into their contact centers, and the right software and services are key to their vendor selection. They want platforms that standardize their investments across the Enterprise and allow for software integration to their many systems. Services experience deploying mission critical voice will be table stakes as these customers select their suppliers.

Where is your organization in terms of bringing in unified communications into your contact center operations? What are the key services and capabilities that will be key to your rollout strategy? How does software figure into your long-term strategic thinking?

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Culture and Technology Go Hand in Hand

Author:  Jamie Ryan, CIO at Aspect

Unified communications is as much about a company’s culture as it is about technology. You see, for years people have been sending emails on computers and using separate devices to initiate and receive phone calls and retrieve voicemail messages. They’ve been going through the motions of making phone calls and leaving voicemail messages but, until now, they haven’t actually had the ability to see someone’s presence and proactively pick the best communication channel.

Because of UC, Aspect employees no longer have clunky old phones sitting on their desks. For some, the idea of losing their traditional phone was somewhat of a radical concept that was difficult to swallow – no more traditional phone? Nope. Instead, our employees now plug their headsets into their computers and “click” on a phone number or just type a person’s name, rather than dial, to initiate a phone call. This change was more than just a physical change, getting rid of telephony hardware. It required a philosophical shift. With UC, it becomes less about making the phone call, sending the email, or leaving the voicemail message. With UC, it is entirely about communicating.

To get our organization ready for this monumental shift in thinking, our IT group shared detailed information with our employees at every step along the way. We also provided each employee with a brief but thorough training session to help them get used to the new features and capabilities available through OCS.  And, we were available to answer any questions that popped up after employees had transitioned.

I’d be remiss if I led you to believe that end users were the only ones to face a cultural shift. Every IT organization will also experience changes with a UC implementation. Here’s why. In completely separate data and voice environments, IT usually owns the data network and facilities or the contact center owns the voice network. Voice and data have fit neatly into these little boxes for quite some time. But, UC blurs the boundaries by converging voice and data, and making it possible to look at voice, voicemail, conferencing, email, IM, and the network as one service. This inevitably brings up organizational challenges that companies need to address as they navigate through the UC planning process. Some important questions are: What does each department own today and how will that change with the UC deployment? Who will manage the new, converged network? Who will they report to?

I’m more than happy to talk to you in detail about the paradigm that organizations must overcome when they deploy OCS. What questions do you have?

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Choose Your Functionality Wisely

Author: Jamie Ryan, CIO at Aspect

When it comes to Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS), one of the most challenging aspects is determining what functionality and capabilities to deploy and where to deploy them.  Why is this so tough? Because whatever you decide will greatly change the way every single person across your entire organization conducts business and communicates, every single minute of every single day. And, while I can promise you the change will be for the better, the thought of that is just plain scary.

So, how do you know what to do? In Aspect’s case, we knew that we wanted to use OCS for enterprise voice, but we didn’t know much about the needs of our key business and IT stakeholders.  So, at the front end of the project, we pulled together a cross-functional group of our key stakeholders to learn about what tools they were currently using, and what difficulties they were facing with those tools.  We also spent quite a bit of time talking about their business strategies, metrics and measures.

After meeting with our key stakeholders, we had a pretty good idea about what they needed from us in order to do their jobs more efficiently. We had gleaned enough information to develop our communication and collaboration priorities, identify cost saving opportunities, and outline our desired pace of change. In case you’re wondering, we opted to take advantage of nearly all of the capabilities Office Communications Server 2007 R2 had to offer, ranging from conferencing capabilities to Instant Messaging and Presence.  In addition, we decided to deploy a full UC strategy versus just OCS voice as we had first considered.

We would soon come to realize that determining our core functionality was only the tip of the iceberg.  We also needed to figure out what type of capabilities we wanted people working in their offices to have, versus people working from home. Nearly one quarter of Aspect’s employees work from home or in remote offices and hundreds more travel on a regular basis, so this was another big consideration. Our IT group ultimately decided that it was important to provide a common interface for all communications to every single person in our company so that each employee, regardless of their position in the company or geographic location, would have the exact same communication functionality. We wanted usability to be ubiquitous everywhere. I’m happy to say that we’ve achieved that objective.

What OCS functionality is of most interest to your organization?

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