Aspect’s tag line is “Call Centre Solutions for Best Customer Engagement”. However, with the contact centre industry – and contact centre customers - demanding more and more on a regular basis, a call centre solution is no longer enough to enable the best customer engagement. I looked at Aspect’s revised CCaaS portfolio to see how what they are doing to further empower business to drive customer experience outside of a simple call centre experience.
Aspect’s CCaaS catalogue is now made up of five core solutions: Customer Engagement Platform, Workforce Optimisation, Call Centre, Self-Service and Fraud Detection.
Customer Engagement Platform
Aspect Via is the flagship CCaaS product. The Via in the name clearly indicates that this contact centre product allows your business to process transactions via the medium of their choosing. Aspect has been quick to recognise that different customers prefer to contact a business in different ways.
Understanding your customers’ customer is the most important factor to consider when buying new contact centre software. So, ensuring all channels are covered makes that decision easy.
Aspect Via supports the following channels:
- Voice
- Web Chat
- Social Media
- SMS
- Mobile
Just as important offering the channels to customers, Aspect Via combines these in an omni-channel manner. This means when a customer calls in, the agent also has access to previous web chat sessions or SMS interactions. The customer experience becomes more streamlined and productivity levels are improved for the contact centre, the customer interaction and the caller.
The Customer Engagement Platform also caters for self-service for proactive users that prefer to seek information themselves rather than wait for an available agent. For example, millennials often opt for self-service options as I now. Whilst writing this post, I am on hold for a call and a web chat, so I have sought the information myself via the self-service FAQ sections.
So, if your customer base is predominantly made up of tech savvy millennials that don’t want to wait on hold, they will likely choose your self-service options on your website. By combining self-service and a plethora of communication channels, the Aspect omni-channel offering looks more up to date than ever.
Workforce Optimisation
Outside of functionality and customer interactions, a large part of contact centre planning revolves around planning resource and reacting to spikes in inbound volumes. This is where workforce optimisation solutions come into their own.
To plan front and back office resource, contact centres now recognise that data is available to do this job for the contact centre manager. Rather than make an educated guess for headcount at any given time of the day, the data available from historic call volumes can best predict how many agents are required.
When infrequent call patterns occur, workforce optimisation solutions can also react in real-time to overflow teams or pull in resource from other teams with relevant skills. Aspect now offers workforce optimisation as a standalone product or a bolt onto their CCaaS offering. This further enhances the “one back to pat” quality that customers are looking for when shopping for new contact centre software.
Aspect’s workforce optimisation suite includes:
