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.
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.
Now: Customize Communications from Aspect
by Chris O'Brien on November 29th, 2011
Are the email communications you receive from Aspect relevant to your industry? Do you hear about the types of solutions that are of interest to you?
You’ve asked, we’ve listened!
The Aspect Subscription Center has made some important enhancements to help meet your demand for relevant, timely, informative communications.
Take a moment to visit the Subscription Center and opt in by telling us a few basic facts about yourself and the type of communications you’d like to receive. If you already subscribe to Aspect emails, you can now update your profile with your subscription preferences.
In addition, the Subscription Center is a convenient place to subscribe to RSS feeds for Aspect Blogs and press releases.
Take charge of your inbox, and tailor the information you receive to suit your preferences and unique business needs.
Winning over the entire organization in an IT implementation
by Jamie Ryan on April 25th, 2011
Obtaining executive support and buy-in for IT initiatives is crucial. But that’s just one piece of the puzzle. A completely different challenge is to ensure that the rest of the organization understands the benefits of any new technology so that they fully embrace it.
As soon as employees don’t buy in to the new system, you’re sunk. People will find every reason the new solution can’t work instead of helping find ways to make it work. When that happens, the time and resources you’ve devoted to the new system have been wasted, and you are spending time reselling the idea vs. celebrating a successful deployment.
For Aspect’s OCS implementation, we had a couple other obstacles. Our workforce is distributed in 23 offices around the globe. Each location had become accustomed to and comfortable with its own platforms and systems. Getting employees to embrace a new technology is always tricky; when you throw in different languages, cultural norms, time zones, and geographies, the potential for resistance increases significantly. So we had our work cut out for us.
Companies getting ready to embark on a similar path should be sure to address three areas:
Understand your constituencies. CIOs need to be aware that each part of the company cares passionately about having specific types of functionality. While the executive team is much more focused on the financial and strategic implications of an IT effort, the rest of the organization will need to find ways to be productive with the solution. So CIOs ignore the administrative assistants, department managers, and functional employees at their own peril. Lots of companies have botched implementations by ignoring key parts of the organization.
Clearly communicate the value. Most people are averse to change unless there’s a well-defined benefit. For an IT implementation, CIOs must be timely and transparent so that employees understand what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how it affects them (the “what’s in it for me?” factor). With an enterprise-wide implementation such as OCS, you can imagine what the reaction would have been if the only thing that people understood was “we are losing our phones” instead of “our phones are being replaced by a fully integrated UC solution.” We were very diligent about sharing timelines and rationale to ensure that people were fully aware of all changes and how they would be affected.
Get people involved. Prior to rolling out OCS to the entire organization, we conducted pilots—not just to test the technology, but also to create champions for the new system. In my experience, getting people from various groups involved early in the process is critical. By including representatives from multiple functional groups, we were able to convert doubters into our biggest boosters. There’s no more effective way to drive adoption than for employees to hear from their coworkers about a cool new technology and how it’s improving their productivity.
I should note that the ease of adoption for OCS and later Lync greatly facilitated all of these efforts. Employees were able to get up to speed quickly, the interface was intuitive, and the benefits were immediately tangible. Our migration from OCS to Lync 2010 took just under five weeks. During that time, we upgraded 100 percent of our employees, across 23 sites, in 13 countries. A deployment of that size and scope only happens when people across the enterprise believe it’s a winning proposition.
Assessing the hard and soft ROI of unified communications
by Jamie Ryan on March 2nd, 2011
For companies that are thinking of adopting a unified communications (UC) platform, one of the lingering questions is verifying the return on investment (ROI). Even though the economy is recovering and IT spending is predicted to rise more than 5 percent this year, any major technology investment must be rigorously analyzed and justified before committing resources.
In a previous post, I highlighted the bottom-line benefits that Aspect has captured in implementing Microsoft Lync (and its predecessor, OCS) in our offices around the world. A little background: two years ago, Aspect made a commitment to implement a UC platform for our entire global workforce—1,900 employees in more than 20 offices. We achieved substantial cost savings—$2 million of annualized spending in the first 12 months.
Our experience at Aspect is consistent with a Forrester Consulting study on the total economic impact of Microsoft Lync on a composite organization. Forrester estimated a 337 percent risk-adjusted ROI, with a payback period of 12 months. We actually achieved an ROI within nine months of adoption.
As we moved from OCS to Lync, we saw additional savings via an 80 percent reduction in our server footprint. …Read more >
Huge cost savings and rapid ROI with Lync
by Jamie Ryan on January 31st, 2011
When Aspect replaced Microsoft OCS with Lync, it had an immediate impact on our entire organization. A few facts tell the story:
- Deployed to 1,900 employees in 22 countries just 5 weeks after Lync’s general availability (GA)
- No training required to move from OCS to Lync
- Reduced server footprint by 80 percent
- Achieved ROI in just 9 months
For more details, check out this video:
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.