Author:  Gary Barnett
The word “support” can mean many things to many people.  But, when a contact center manager thinks of receiving “formal support” from a vendor for a particular solution, they generally envision something that extends from A to Z, comprising installation, deployment, post-deployment, and everything in between.
Consumers beware – especially in the open source [...]

Author:  Jim Mitchell
Consumers across Europe are definitely not ambivalent when it comes to contact center experiences.  When their interactions are good, they’re really good, but when they’re bad, well … you can see for yourself.
This year’s Aspect Contact Center Satisfaction Index(tm) results for typical contact center experiences in Europe aren’t much different than last year’s, [...]

Author:  Gary Barnett
Walmart.com is getting a lot of attention, or I should say “flack,” for a story that recently appeared in the New York Times. According to the publication, the online retailer is embarking on a “Customer Contact Reduction” program, whereby it will virtually push its customers to help themselves - resolving issues or answering [...]

Author:  Gary Barnett
This week marks an exciting time for Aspect Software and the contact center industry at large.  During the past 30 or so years, we’ve developed and delivered a number of innovative, best-in-class solutions that have enhanced our customers’ business processes.  Yesterday, we announced our latest - PerformanceEdge™, the industry’s first contact optimization suite [...]

Author:  Jim Mitchell
A common complaint that I hear is that companies are just spending too much time trying to get their disparate contact center systems to work together. Some contact center managers tell me that they dedicate too much energy and money to getting their systems to work together and they wish they could just [...]

Author:  Roger Sumner
Aspect Software has been talking about the importance of session initiation protocol (SIP) for quite some time.  Now the company is putting its money where its mouth is.  Last week, we publicly challenged our peers in the contact center industry to guarantee the compliance of their SIP-enabled solutions with SIP 2.0 devices, and [...]

Author:  Jim Mitchell
A few months ago, Aspect Software announced that we had successfully demonstrated interoperability of our product portfolio with BandTel’s Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunking. As I have visited with customers in the recent months, I have received many questions about why SIP Trunking is important, so I thought I would address this topic [...]

Author:  Roger Sumner
In my last blog, I mentioned the importance of meeting your customers’ needs with your self-service system.  This is a two-fold challenge.  Of course you need to design your system so that you are providing the information that will meet your customers’ needs.  But, you also need to make it as easy as [...]

Author:  Gary Barnett
A few months ago BT INS, an IT software consulting firm, released the results of its Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) survey.  I read about it on NetworkWorld.com.  While the survey sample size was rather small (it consisted of 157 IT professionals), I still found the results interesting.  A few things jumped out [...]

Author:  Jim Mitchell
Continuing along the lines of my last blog posting, today I will be talking a bit more about agent Empathy and Advocacy.  I think this is a particularly important topic, and one worth discussing at length, as research tells us that 50 percent of consumers who have good interactions will conduct more business [...]