CHELMSFORD, Mass., 12 February 2009 — Aspect, a unified communications (UC) solutions provider, today announced the company is introducing six new UC applications for the contact center that use software to target operational objectives with a specific set of capabilities. The UC applications utilize the capabilities from its Aspect® Unified IP™ and PerformanceEdge™ Microsoft .Net Web services–based platform products to help companies enhance their customer service, collections, and sales and telemarketing business process.
 
UC applications from Aspect include:
 
· Seamless Customer Service™delivers the tools needed for comprehensive call response, including coordinated self-service/live service and integrated assistance to improve first call resolution and enhance the overall customer experience.
 
· Blended Interaction™ provides inbound, outbound, self service and workforce optimization capabilities. By eliminating complex integration and providing common management, reporting and administration, Blended Interaction gives contact centers greater visibility, control and staffing efficiency in your multichannel contact center to enhance customer satisfaction and improve business results.
 
· Streamlined Collections™automates early stage collections and enables expert agent engagement for a more effective delinquent account targeting strategy so contact centers can get more promises to pay faster, reduce servicing costs and write-offs, and improve collections results.
 
· Optimized Collections™ utilizes performance, workforce and campaign management to enhance contact and calling strategies by applying the right resources at the right times to increase right party contacts, lower staffing costs, improve collector effectiveness and collections results.
 
· Productive Workforce™delivers the tools and processes to help you optimize resource utilization and adopt a continuous improvement culture. By motivating agents throughout their workforce lifecycle, contact centers can service more customers with fewer agents, reduce customer interaction costs, and improve customer service, sales and collections results.
 
· Productive Workforce™ for Aspect® eWorkforce Management™delivers the tools and processes to help Aspect eWorkforce Management users optimize resource utilization and adopt a continuous improvement culture. By motivating agents throughout their workforce lifecycle, contact centers can service more customers with fewer agents, reduce customer interaction costs, and improve customer service, sales and collections results. UC applications leverage a software-based UC architecture to help companies reduce communications silos while leveraging presence for specific customer-facing business processes. For example, Seamless Customer Service offers contact center managers comprehensive control and visibility over the customer experience as they traverse from self-service to live agent assistance, and extends the interaction to the enterprise, as necessary, with the Ask an Expert capability powered by Microsoft Unified Communications. Ultimately, Aspect customers can improve customer satisfaction by 8 percent, increase first call resolution by 5 percent, improve productivity by 10 percent, and reduce overall maintenance costs by 20 percent.
 
The new UC applications, coupled with Aspect’s UC Services practice, enable Aspect to deliver a full range of UC solutions across the enterprise and in the contact center. To learn more about UC applications from Aspect, please visit www.aspect.com.
 
Quotes on UC Applications
 
Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst, COMMfusion-
 
· “These new UC applications are a powerful statement from Aspect to the market— the company is clearly committed to bringing specific capabilities for different business processes that will help companies as they adopt a unified communications strategy and bring the contact center into these initiatives. By introducing the UC applications, Aspect is demonstrating its understanding of the importance of integrating UC with business processes and the ability to deliver software and services tailored to a company’s requirements.” Mark Good, Vice President of Information Systems, LCA Vision, Inc.
 
· “Customer care and the contact center are very important to our strategic objectives. We’ve been using the capabilities of Productive Workforce in our two contact centers and have seen a number of benefits, including increased productivity and reduced costs. Implementing all these capabilities from Aspect has helped us centralize our reporting for greater flexibility and control, and has opened the door for us to leverage unified communications in the future.” Larry Kasten, Assistant Vice President, CNA Surety
 
· After deploying the Productive Workforce capabilities from Aspect, we have seen a number of improvements in our contact center. Having these capabilities packaged together from one vendor has helped in deployment and maintenance costs, in addition to increasing agent productivity and improving customer care. Clearly, implementing a UC application from Aspect could help any company hit the ground running with a UC strategy. Mike Sheridan, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Marketing, Aspect-
 
· “The UC applications were designed with a specific purpose in mind to help organizations improve particular business processes– such as customer service, sales and collections -- while at the same time reducing ongoing expenses. Because the UC applications use targeted software capabilities, they empower business users to manage and change the system dynamically and help free up IT for other projects. These offerings, coupled with Aspect’s UC Services practice, deliver a true unified communications solutions portfolio of software and services.”
 
· “Aspect and Microsoft share a vision of software-powered UC solutions that address companies’ requirements throughout the enterprise and in the contact center. The new UC applications and Aspect’s unified communications solutions portfolio further demonstrates the company’s commitment to streamlining communications processes for all its business customers using Microsoft UC.”
 
About Aspect Unified IP
 
Aspect Unified IP is an IT-ready Microsoft .Net Web services platform product that unites customer contact capabilities to help organizations execute on their unified communications strategies.
 
About PerformanceEdge
 
PerformanceEdge is an IT-ready Microsoft .Net Web services platform product that synchronizes workforce optimization capabilities to help organizations execute on their unified communications strategies.
 
About Aspect
 
Aspect provides software and consulting services that turn the potential of unified communications into real business results across the enterprise and in the contact center. Applying 35 years of insight and experience, Aspect helps two-thirds of the FORTUNE Global 100, as well as small and medium enterprises, power their business processes with communications. For more information, visit www.aspect.com.
 
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Aspect, Unified IP, PerformanceEdge, Seamless Customer Service, Blended Interaction, Streamlined Collections, Optimized Collections, Productive Workforce, eWorkforce Management, PerformanceEdge Performance Management, and Aspect Software are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Aspect Software, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. The names of other companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.