Aspect Blogs

Insight to Help Build the Customer-Centric Enterprise

There’s an old saying (or curse), “May you live in interesting times.” This is particularly apt for the world of customer experience. The pace of change virtually guarantees that things will be interesting for the foreseeable future.

 Consumers are embracing new technologies and new ways to communicate, and the impact is far-reaching: with the world of information available to them, consumers have become much more proactive in finding answers for themselves—and much less patient when companies can’t resolve their issues.

As reaching out to the contact center becomes a last resort for customers, the stakes grow higher. Consider recent research by Datamonitor/Ovum, which surveyed 5,000 consumers across 16 countries on their attitudes and expectations for customer service. From the study:

“In virtually every country, customers ended at least one relationship per year due to poor service. Across all countries surveyed, about 7 in 10 consumers have ended a relationship.”

Clearly, it’s not hyperbole to regard every interaction with your customers as make or break. Without the right tools and functionality, the contact center is at a distinct disadvantage in addressing customer issues. Business continuity also takes on added importance: if the contact center platform isn’t robust enough to be dependable in all settings, the company is at risk of alienating customers at critical times.

In a given year, businesses may be susceptible to the impact of natural disasters or other events that threaten their operations. The tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011, reinforced the need for thorough disaster planning and recovery, and contact center operations are a critical function in such situations.

Against this backdrop, companies should ensure that their systems deliver dependability and availability in line with industry standards. What may have been an acceptable level of service even a few years ago might now be lagging behind the competition and consumer expectations. The failure of Amazon’s EC2 cloud offering in April of last year, which continued over a full business day, and the reaction by its customers and media demonstrated how dramatically expectations had changed.

Aspect has long understood the importance of business continuity to contact center operations, and our commitment to providing dependable solutions informs every phase of our development process. Recently, Aspect asked Miercom to conduct a full evaluation of its next-generation solution Aspect® Unified IP 7® to verify that it delivers the mission-critical high availability demanded for today’s customer contact environment. View the complete summary of Miercom’s test report to see how Unified IP 7 earned Miercom Performance Verified certification.

Find out more about how your business can enhance its contact center capabilities without disrupting existing operations, register for the March 27 webinar: High Availability for the Contact Center: Ensuring Customer Service Continuity. Experts from Miercom and Aspect will share their insights on meeting evolving customer expectations, with advice to help you limit or eliminate the experience of downtime for customers interacting with your contact center.