Author:  Roger Sumner

I recently spent several days in Atlanta with more than 600 of our customers, attending our annual user conference, the Aspect Customer Experience (ACE).  Despite the fact that I was greeted by snow when I arrived (I was hoping for a radical departure from this year’s blustery Chicago winter), I learned a lot from listening to our customers and had a great time at the event.  I heard about organizational successes, learned more about contact center pain points, and also was able to brainstorm with many of our customers about innovative ways to solve unique problems. 

For those of you who were unable to join us at ACE, I thought today would be a great time to fill you in on some of the highlights.  As you can probably tell from Mike and Gary’s recent blogs, unified communications (UC) for the contact center was top-of-mind at this year’s event. While some companies aren’t quite ready to implement UC for their contact centers, they are definitely thinking about it and seeing that it is a tangible option for improving customer experiences.  In fact, nearly every customer I met with at ACE asked me for more details about how they might leverage unified communications and engage the right people within their own company and ours so they could get the ball rolling.

Performance management was also a hot topic.  Companies are still looking for and the most appropriate way to assess contact center performance.  They are looking for tools and metrics that can measure the strategic value of the contact center.  They want common, visualization tools that can be leveraged in the board room, as well as with all levels of management down to the individual service representatives. They want to be able to provide executives with a snapshot of key operations and financial data, while helping agents see how they contribute to the overall well being of the company. Keith Dawson, a senior analyst for Frost & Sullivan and an expert in customer experiences, did a great job addressing this topic in the keynote speech he presented on the first day of the conference.

There were some other particularly memorable moments from ACE 2008. Everyone in attendance at the conference had the opportunity to observe two world-class contact centers in action when Coca-Cola and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution each provided tours of their facilities.

The crowning moment took the shape of an Aspect Software customer presentation, which created significant buzz. With hard numbers in a very powerful presentation format, one of our large global banking customers was able to demonstrate to his contact center colleagues how a huge organization like his is leveraging Aspect Software products to achieve its goals.  He provided the audience with an overall picture of the company and the technology it’s currently using, and delivered information about his company’s plans to move forward with UC and virtual environments.  

It is an exciting time to be in the contact center industry as the contact center assumes even greater importance within the enterprise.  I’m personally looking forward to helping you with your journey, and I can’t wait to hear all about your progress when we meet at ACE 2009!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Contact Center Technology, Customer Service/Consumer Demands, Performance Optimization, Unified Communications for the Contact Center. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.