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Summary
Aspect and Microsoft have announced an agreement to work together to deliver unified interaction handling to both the contact center and other locations across the enterprise. The package they will offer integrates the Aspect Unified IP platform and Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007; together, they will support interaction handling through multiple channels and in different business units. Ventana Research believes this is an important step to aid companies as they struggle to provide a consistent customer experience across all touch points.

Assessment
Handling customer interactions is far from being the exclusive responsibility of the contact center. Our benchmark research into customer interaction handling shows that in addition to the obvious business units – sales, marketing, customer service and the contact center – two areas, Finance and mobile workers such as field engineers and sales personnel, each handle interactions as well in 17 percent of responding companies. Others involved are home-based workers (10 percent) and Manufacturing (4 percent). The research further showed that to support this distributed customer support process, 49 percent of companies have deployed a voice over internet protocol (VoIP)-enabled infrastructure at least partially across the enterprise, 36 percent have a VoIP-based contact center, and 24 percent of companies have made their networks session-initiated protocol (SIP)-enabled so they can support multiple device types.

In view of these developments, it is not surprising that Aspect and Microsoft have announced a strategic partnership to improve the ability of companies to address some of the business issues that arise from distributing interactions across the organization. The partnership yields a tightly integrated packaging of the Aspect Unified IP platform and Microsoft’s Office Communications Server. The Aspect software platform includes automatic call distribution, predictive dialing, a voice portal, interaction  management of Web-based chat and collaboration, workflow management, multichannel recording and quality management applications. It supports centralized administration, unified routing across multiple contact channels, and centralized contact center reporting from multiple data sources. Also included is a voice portal application that supports speech self-service and live customer assistance. The Microsoft Office Communications Server supports software-based VoIP, presence (the ability to identify who is logged onto the network and available to handle interactions), IM and Web/audio/video conferencing. It is built on the Active Directory service, which uses a single directory of users for communications management.

Together, they allow an organization to manage interactions with customers in the contact center and also where needed across the enterprise, both to the same high standards. One of the most significant features is the support of presence, which allows an agent who cannot resolve a customer interaction to quickly identify who else is available with the right skills and knowledge and transfer the interaction to that person. Using the provided collaboration tools, the agent and knowledge worker can then decide how best to support the customer.

Market Impact
The contact center market is awash with partnerships that range from simple collaborative sales and implementation agreements, to technical agreements that allow one vendor to build integration software that allows the products to interoperate, to resale agreements that allow one vendor to sell the other partner’s products as a bundled package. However, the partnership between Aspect and Microsoft stands apart, in that the two companies are working together to develop a tightly integrated solution that addresses a key business issue: effective distributed interaction handling. Combined, the Aspect platform and the Microsoft server create a very strong platform that allows companies to manage customer interactions consistently regardless of where they occur and optimize the use of resources to ensure the customer receives the best possible experience.

Recommendation
Recent benchmark research from Ventana Research shows that companies recognize they are not delivering consistent, high quality experiences to their customers. Furthermore, they are not realizing the cost savings they expected, largely because too many interactions are not being resolved on the first attempt. Ventana Research believes that at the core of the problem is inconsistency in how interactions are handled by different business groups and across different communication channels. Many of these inconsistencies are due to poor processes and a lack of consistent information. However, it is also true that many companies are not aware of software products that could help them manage interactions more consistently and to a higher standard. We therefore recommend that companies examine the capabilities delivered by this integrated package to see if and how it might help them improve the way they handle customer interactions.

Related Research Notes:
Customer Performance Management Research Agenda for 2008

Managing the Customer’s Phone Call Experience