Luxury Car Owner’s Manual Gets a High-Tech Makeover
by Chris O'Brien on April 12th, 2012
We’re proud to announce that the Hyundai Equus Owner’s Manual has earned Aspect the distinction of being named an Official Honoree in the 16th Annual Webby Awards, in the Mobile category of Utilities and Services (Tablets and All Other Devices.)
Hyundai’s objective for the Equus was to set it apart from its current line of vehicles and attract the class of buyers who would appreciate its performance and understated elegance. In doing so, Hyundai worked with Aspect developers to create a first-of-its-kind application to be given to each new Equus owner along with a shiny new tablet computer – a searchable, intuitive owner’s manual and reference guide that also schedules service appointments, pinpoints dealer locations, provides interactive feature demonstrations and more.
Like most car owners, I have an owner’s manual. And I take it out of the glove compartment every six months when I realize I still don’t remember how to reset the dashboard clock to account for Daylight Savings Time. Of course, my little car is nowhere near the caliber of vehicle that is the Hyundai Equus, Hyundai’s entry into the high-end luxury category of cars among the likes of the Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Jaguar. To compare the features of my car to those of a luxury-class vehicle? Well, I’m guessing it’s a little like comparing a Razor scooter to a carbon-framed Trek road bike.
The success of Equus sales (exceeding its yearly forecast within the first six months) indicate how much consumers appreciate the smart integration of technology into everyday life, especially when we see applications pushing the boundaries of what’s been done before, solving old problems in new ways.
Our congrats go out to each member of the Aspect Digital team, as well as the marketing division of Hyundai for their creativity, vision and innovation. For more details, read the full announcement about the Webbys and the other honorees, as well as our press release.
SWPP Announces Finalists: 2012 Workforce Management Professional of the Year
by Jane Hendricks on March 5th, 2012
In just a few days, several Aspect colleagues and I will be heading to Nashville for the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP) Annual Conference. Excitement is in the air! In addition to the usual buzz about meeting up with workforce professional colleagues, we’ve just learned that three Aspect Customers are among the five finalists for the 2012 Workforce Management Professional of the Year award.
Finalists were selected by the SWPP Board of Advisors from nominations received on the SWPP website, submitted by call center employees and business partners over the past 12 months. The recipient of this annual award, according to SWPP, is someone who not only understands the importance of contact center staffing, but also sees that workforce management is as much an “art” as it is a “science.”
Congratulations to these three Aspect® Workforce Management® customers, who have been named finalists by the SWPP Board: Michael Ellis of Suddenlink Communications; Kristin Goldman of Ameriprise Financial; and Cynthia Stevenson of Citi.
It gives us a great deal of pride to be affiliated with these three stand-out individuals. It’s exciting to see the kind of positive impact they’ve brought to their organizations, and knowing our solutions had a role to play in their success is especially gratifying. We are thrilled to see their accomplishments recognized, particularly by such a respected institution as SWPP.
The other two finalists are: Chad Andree of CenterPoint Energy; and Robert Dobson of InterContinental Hotels Group.
Winner to be Announced at SWPP Annual Conference
As I mentioned, my bags are packed for Nashville and I’m looking forward to representing Aspect at the SWPP Conference, where we expect to hear the official announcement of the 2012 winner. My fingers are crossed for all of our nominees!
If you plan to be on site with us as well, I hope you’ll take the time to stop by the Aspect booth and attend our sessions. My colleague Eric Hagaman, Product Strategist for Workforce Management, will be offering valuable tips during the 60 Ideas in 60 Minutes. And I’ll also be presenting:
Managing Your Front and Back Office Workforce with Quality in Mind
March 7, 10:45 AM – 12:00 PM
Plus, don’t miss the session by Aspect customer Brighthouse Networks:
Getting the Most Out of Your Workforce Management Investments
March 9, 10:15 AM – 11:00 AM
We’re looking forward to seeing you!
Contact Center Efficiency Doubles Agent Sales Per Hour for Chinese Financial Services Company
by Tim Dreyer on March 1st, 2012
Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China is an integrated financial services conglomerate with insurance, banking and investment businesses at its core. Their vision is to become an internationally leading integrated financial services group by leveraging its insurance, banking and investment businesses to achieve long-term, stable and healthy growth. 
To accomplish this, Ping An recognized that telesales would be the ideal channel to reach these potential customers, offering greater flexibility and efficiency versus relying heavily on branch offices and agents.
Because the company believes that their success depends heavily on the dynamic customer contacts in their telemarketing campaigns, Ping An determined that it needed an advanced solution that could help it improve outbound call campaign accuracy by effectively detecting answering machines, fax machines, or busy signals.
In addition to maximizing agent productivity, the company was also interested in advanced call blending capabilities so that sales agents would be able to manage inbound inquiries when there is an influx of customer service calls. They also wanted to reduce the costs and the complexity of integrating disparate point solutions.
Spoiler Alert: They selected a solution from Aspect.
Through the company’s five contact centers and 10,000 agents managing inbound customer service calls and outbound sales and telemarketing calls, Ping An is seeing a significant improvement in telesales productivity. With answering machine detection (AMD) accuracy of up to 95 percent, the Aspect® Unified IP® solution allows agents to reach customers and prospects more effectively. As a result, agents are more adequately prepared to sell because they know when a call is connected that they will be talking to a person and not a machine.
The agents’ sales pitches particularly are more productive with the assistance of predictive dialing capabilities. By implementing this feature, Ping An’s agents increased their everyday customer contacts by more than 100 percent. Both the customer contact volume and overall revenue have had dramatic growth.
Agent productivity is top-of-mind for companies looking to realize a return on their contact center investment. Ping An has experienced:
- Improved outbound call accuracy by almost 40 percent
- Enhanced agent productivity
- Increased sales per hour by up to 100 percent for individual agents
- Minimize the management effort by centralizing all systems
The deployment of Aspect Unified provides Ping An with the great potential to deliver on the next generation of customer contact with Aspect.
Golfbreaks.com Selects a Joint Solution from the New Aspect-Dell Relationship
by Tim Dreyer on February 23rd, 2012
We are excited today to announce a new strategic relationship with Dell Services aimed at enabling customers worldwide to acquire end-to-end next-generation unified communications solutions incorporating hardware, software, services and support from a single vendor. Centered on Microsoft® collaborative technologies, the relationship also gives customers the flexibility and scalability to tailor their private branch exchange (PBX) and contact center solution to best fit their needs. 
Many large organizations are viewing contact centers as a primary customer engagement point and increasingly as a revenue generation engine. However outdated telephony infrastructures or poorly connected contact centers can result in missed or dropped calls and negatively impact customer service. This can result in missed sales opportunities and potential damage to a company’s brand.
Golfbreaks.com, Europe’s leading golf tour operator, is one of the first joint customers of the Aspect-Dell relationship. Golfbreaks.com experienced the downside of an aging telephony platform that could no longer keep up with the service demands of their customers so the company sought out a contact center solution built upon an open, capable and affordable software platform. They are implementing a Microsoft-based unified communications solution including a full multimedia contact center infrastructure to replace its older PBX platform.
Due to increasing volume, which let’s face it, is a great problem to have, Golfbreaks.com required a way to meet the increased customer demand without increasing headcount and to basically do more with less. The lack of channel integration was putting a strain on their agents and systems, increasing administration time. With new support for SMS and email, as well as tight integration with their CRM system, Golfbreaks.com’s customer should find booking with them easier and quicker than ever.
So the point of the post, aside from announcing the adorable offspring of our new relationship, is this: your platform might be good enough for you, but is it good enough for your customers?
Things We Heart
by Chris O'Brien on February 14th, 2012
I admit it, I’m feeling the love. It’s Valentine’s Day after all, and when you work with folks who are as passionate about customer contact as the people at Aspect, the love tends to spread.
Here’s who we’re feeling particularly amorous toward right now:
Tim Dreyer hearts ZDNet:
“Paul Greenberg had an excellent post recently, Social Media Companies Make Moves, which talks about four social media companies making an impact in the customer-facing and employee focused technology marketplace.”
Chris O’Brien hearts lifehacker:
“Lifehacker is, quite simply, a treasure trove of brilliant ideas. I love finding out that there are simple solutions to problems I never even realized I had. If life were a product or service… Lifehacker would be the answer to a better customer experience.”
Jane Hendricks hearts Forrester’s Kate Leggett:
“I personally love Kate Leggett’s blogs – all of them. I’d have a hard time picking just one but her recent one on Data Quality is a beauty. Not only is she visionary, she is very well grounded in the practicalities of the customer experience and what the contact center can deliver and how they can do it better.”
Who do you love? What are your favorite blogs and must-reads? Let us know!
Measurable Results from a Customer-Centric Strategy
by Chris O'Brien on February 8th, 2012
The decision to refocus or restructure an organization in favor of a more customer-centric model is a bold move, but it’s one that is becoming more common as customers consistently demonstrate how much of the power they now wield in today’s social marketplace.
This was the goal of India’s largest paint company, Asian Paints. With customers
in more than 65 countries and a 25,000+ dealer network, most of Asian Paints’ direct interactions took place with its dealers. Therefore, the company not only needed to respond to evolving consumer demands and expectations for better service, responsiveness, consistency and knowledgeable consultancy, it needed to provide exceptional, convenient phone service to its dealers.
The only way to realistically achieve these goals was to focus on becoming a truly customer-centric organization. To do that, Asian Paints needed a next-generation customer contact platform capable of managing both customer and dealer communications, and optimizing agent productivity and responsiveness.
When selecting a solution provider, Asian Paints did its research. Mr. Deepak Bhosale, Chief Manager, Systems, explained the company’s decision:
While we were researching different vendors and getting references, the best remarks and kudos were given from customers using Aspect to organize its customer interactions. Since we wanted a cost-effective way to have several solutions in our contact center, Aspect was the right choice for us. We needed a little bit of everything, improved quality interactions, dealer interaction and high operational efficiency.
Working with Aspect to implement a next-generation customer response and dealer management system, Asian Paints made it easy and convenient for both dealers and customers to do business with the company – from placing quick and convenient orders, to consulting with an expert on paint color choices.
As a result, Asian Paints achieved measurable successes:
- 80% increase in dealer satisfaction, as well as improved customer satisfaction
- 40% drop in average call handle time, due to increased visibility into caller’s information and history
- Improved contact center agent productivity
- Reduced wait time resulting from access issues
- Increased service availability window, leading to an effective 40% reduction in workforce
By improving customer interactions and organizational productivity, Asian Paints hopes to reinstate customer confidence and build customer loyalty, particularly among customers who had moved to competing brands during periods of poor customer service.
Read the full Asian Paints case study.
Companies can no longer afford to think customer service doesn’t matter. In many markets, the customer experience is the competitive differentiator.
Have you found this to be the case in your industry? Tell us about it in the comments.
“Inbound, Outbound, Successbound”
by Chris O'Brien on January 23rd, 2012
In a tug of war between resources and customer service, nobody wins. Organizations experiencing this uneasy push-pull may be struggling through periods of rapid growth, budget constraints, rapid turnover, or a change in roles brought on by a new strategic direction. Whatever your challenges, today’s consumers are unrelenting in their expectations of a consistently superior customer experience.
Businesses that continually put the customer first are those that manage to successfully
command consumer attention in the crowded marketplace, and are rewarded with long-term customer loyalty.
One such organization is Germany-based contact center outsourcer, 020-EPOS. Urged by its high-profile clients to proactively engage with customers in a more targeted and personalized manner, 020-EPOS needed a solution that would help it maximize outbound and lifecycle management strategies, while taking advantage of optimal choice and flexibility.
020-EPOS conducted an exhaustive review of all potential solution providers before selecting Aspect to develop its integrated call center solution.
One of 020-EPOS’ key requirements was the ability to reliably support, integrate and route multichannel contacts. At the same time, the solution needed to offer comprehensive, state-of-the-art dialing, callback and call blending capabilities, in order to ensure a smooth transition between inbound and outbound operations.
Another key consideration was 020-EPOS’ desire to route callbacks and returned emails to the same account teams that had initiated those contacts. As Georg Jansen, Managing Director at 020-EPOS explained:
“Outbound campaigns generate inbound contacts and inbound calls gather information for outbound. In order to be successful, both have to be managed professionally, that is why we act upon the maxim Inbound, Outbound, Successbound.”
020-EPOS was able to articulate its forward-thinking vision for customer experience through Aspect’s next-generation customer contact solution. This led to achievement of a number of specific benefits:
- Improved agent utilization due to soft blending capabilities and Workforce Optimization, which enables managers to adjust outbound/proactive activities when inbound call volume is high.
- Higher closing rates, resulting from inbound calls being routed back to the same teams that initiated the contact.
- Higher productivity through the use of skill-based teams rather than channel teams.
- Comprehensive, measurable quality assurance by applying defined quality criteria to all sequences of the customer dialogue.
Read the full 020-EPOS case study.
Aspect helps great organizations do what they do well, even better. What are the obstacles to your achievements right now? Are you in the middle of a tug of war between resources and customer experience? Tell us about it in the comments below.
A UC Reality Check with Nemertes Research
by Kelly Burke on January 12th, 2012
Despite the promise of unified communications, many companies still struggle with challenges such as creating an effective business case, measuring results, choosing the right partner (or partners), and developing an effective organization.
Join me on January 26, together with Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research, for A Unified Communications Reality Check webinar.
Using real-world cases studies and benchmark data gathered from hundreds of end-user organizations, this hour-long webinar will answer many of the questions that may be preventing an organization from moving forward with a more efficient, cost-saving UC solution.
We’ll explore:
- What solutions companies are currently deploying and why.
- How to build a business case and measure success.
- How to develop organizational, vendor, partner, and technology road-maps.
- What role Microsoft® should play in an enterprise UC strategy.
- How to integrate enterprise UC strategies with application platforms.
- The proper role of “the cloud” in your technology infrastructure.
Join our live presentation on Thursday, January 26th at 1 pm ET by pre-registering now. Or, upon completion of the event, we’ll offer a recording you can view online.
We’re looking forward to a great discussion during A Unified Communications Reality Check that promises to provide valuable insight that will help your business advance its UC strategy and realize greater business efficiency.
Winning Strategies are Founded on Data and Insights, not Gut Feelings
by David Harper on January 4th, 2012
In the not-too-distant past, companies had to get by without real-time information and business intelligence. It’s not that they didn’t have the information; often critical data resided in disparate systems across multiple departments. So it was extremely difficult to aggregate, synthesize, and analyze without committing significant time and energy.
Because of this dynamic, companies came to rely on people who had a strong gut instinct. In the heat of the moment, with make-or-break decisions, these individuals could be depended on to divine the right path based on their experience, knowledge of the business, and ability to read the tea leaves. (Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole book on this topic.)
There are obvious problems with this scenario: what about the other 99.9 percent of us who don’t happen to have this gift? Or worse yet, what happens when the “gut feeling” turns out to be dead wrong?
Thankfully, technology has progressed to the point that companies no longer need to stake their future on the resident gunslinging clairvoyant.
How is this possible? Well, I am happy you asked. The answer: with Insights.
SQL Server 2012 features a range of new capabilities, including Data Insights. This tool will allow business users to combine data in many ways that ETL (extract, transfer, and load) developers have been able to use for years. They will then be able to take their data and, using the new enhancements of PowerPivot, exploit the data on their own. Want to share your findings with the rest of the team? Look no further than Power View.
With these new tools, not only can the right data be identified and translated into business insights, but every member on the team can access the information. This is definitely an exciting time for data and business intelligence.
I personally am super excited to be venturing to Redmond to learn from some of the product team all the new features of SQL Server 2012. I will report back with my findings. Our goal at Aspect is to be “production ready” by the time SQL Server 2012 is released to manufacturing. Stay tuned for more details.
Recommended Reading: Be Our Guest (The Disney Customer Experience)
by Chris O'Brien on December 28th, 2011
Interestingly, when you overlap three black circles in just the right way, a large percentage of the global population will associate this symbol with a mouse-eared icon by the name of Mickey. The Disney brand is among the best at connecting with its target market on a significant, emotional level. And that market is not just children. Adults also answer Disney’s seeming siren-song of dreamy Princess magic and animation-themed escapism, routinely setting their sights on Disney’s highly rated hotels and parks as vacation destinations.
Those in the customer service industry would argue that Disney’s long-term success and enthusiastic customer base – who interact online in every way from fan blogs, to podcasts, to planning sites – is no mere accident of product popularity. Based on Walt Disney’s firmly held tenets of customer experience, the company has effectively institutionalized processes for creating “magical” experiences.
This, in fact, is the case Ted Kinni of Disney Institute presents in his new
book “Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service.”
Relatively simple keys to success are often overlooked by businesses in their rush to market. Develop the best product you can. Train your staff well to deliver exceptional service. Learn from your experiences, and celebrate your successes. This is by no means a magic formula, but it does set up a framework that begins to feel a little bit like magic when executed effectively.
Much has been written about Disney and customer experience with an eye toward capturing and replicating the secret sauce that Disney liberally applies in its management and business best practices. “Be Our Guest” provides a valuable, insider’s look at the business processes Disney Institute teaches, which for me was reason enough to pick up this book.
As Disney has demonstrated, customer experience can be a key competitive differentiator in a marketplace that must continually lobby for consumers’ attention. Creating magical, memorable experiences at every point of service effectively edges Disney ahead of the competition in terms of customer loyalty.
We saw this principle succeed with one of our clients, Asian Paints. Asian Paints had identified substandard customer service as a potential factor behind lagging customer loyalty, with customer experience being a key differentiator among its competitors. In response to increasing demands for better service from both its customers and dealers, Asian Paints implemented a next-generation customer contact solution through Aspect that enabled the organization to focus on becoming truly customer-centric.
Asian Paints’ results speak for themselves, including a remarkable 80% increase in dealer/customer satisfaction. You can read more in the full case study.
If there is a secret sauce in the Disney way, it lies in the magic that happens when organizations are inspired to elevate the customer experience. As the man behind the mouse said, “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.”
Improving the way companies communicate internally and externally with their customers is an important objective for all organizations. This blog is focused on levaraging the collective knowledge withing Aspect.