Microsoft, Aspect Partner on Contact Center UC
Microsoft Corp. is continuing its quest to partner up with synergistic companies, hot on the heels of the latest fruit born from its unified communications alliance with Nortel. This time it has announced a deal with contact center guru Aspect Software Inc.; a multiyear strategic alliance will link contact center agents into enterprise-wide UC. Microsoft is also taking an equity stake in Aspect but declined to say for how much.
According to a conference call conducted from VoiceCon 2008 in Orlando, Fla., Aspect will design its Aspect Unified IP contact center solution to interoperate with Microsofts UC platform, the Office Communications Server. The result will offer functionality like the ability for a call center agent to escalate a customer call to an expert elsewhere in the enterprise by leveraging presence to ping him or her for an answer via multiple channels, like IM or video chat. The idea is to increase first-call resolution metrics.
The Microsoft OCS platform provides a software platform for the enterprise to function more ideally, explained Jim Foy, president and CEO at Aspect. So the contact center will now be able to operate more easily and more ideally with the enterprise.
Informal networking already goes on to leverage local experts, but its impossible to measure or coordinate, he added. Now there is a means of connecting individual agents to experts elsewhere in the enterprise to increase the probability of first call resolution. More than 10 percent of all contacts don’t get resolved within the first call, but now we can provide instant access to other workers while preserving the context of the customer call to the contact center.
Microsoft is collaboratively involved in defining the product roadmap that stretches out for next three years, added Foy. To underpin that, Microsoft is providing resources going forward, of which the equity stake is one part.
From Microsofts perspective the deal is a way to widen its target customer range. Id like to cite the momentum of [Office Communications Server], said Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president for the unified communications group at Microsoft, during a conference call on Tuesday from the VoiceCon 2008 show. In the few months since launch weve seen tremendous uptick, with 174 of the Fortune 500 with licenses. We are on track to be one of the top 3 enterprise voice providers in a few years but the contact center is extremely important tactically to customers. And decisions on voice often rely on having a very rich contact center option.
The deal with Aspect is far from exclusive Pall said the goal is to offer multiple best-of-breed options to enterprises, as opposed to model where the contact center is built by the PBX manufacturers, who also make the gateways and the pones and so on. Nortel, he noted, is also planning on building its contact center on top of OCS.
Its an open platform and as such is available to others that want to do this, he added.
For its part, Aspect will begin development of the optimized solutions immediately. This year, Aspect plans to release a new version of its .NET-based Aspect Unified IP product, which delivers interoperability with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. Aspect plans to extend the interoperability of its Unified IP with Office Communications Server to include software-powered voice in subsequent releases. This solution is being designed to enable contact centers to seamlessly escalate customer interactions to different channels phone, instant messaging, e-mail or conferencing while addressing reliability, scalability and reporting needs.
Aspect also will build a professional services and systems integration practice for Microsofts unified communications software, so Aspect will help customers deploy, customize and manage Office Communications Server in its contact centers and throughout its organizations for software-powered voice, instant messaging, presence and conferencing.
