Unified Communications Will Rule The Enterprise

Aspect Software, a leading contact centre solutions provider recently was in the news for receiving the 2007 IP Contact Centre Technology Pioneer Award for Aspect Unified IP.

James D Foy, President & CEO, Aspect Software talks to Biztech 2.0 about the evolution of technology in the contact centre industry and unified communications, and their strategy for combating it.

How does the advent of other modes of communication like e-mail, IP, IVR, affect the traditional telephony channels and where do you see it heading?

The contact centre is all about communication and communication is not about the telephone, data or e-mail. It’s about all forms of communication. So you’ll hear more and more about the buzzword in the industry - unified communications. What that will do is it will make it possible for agents and customers to communicate with each other in a much more sophisticated way. So when you call a contact centre, you can see the agent, their lip movement. If you want to send a mail while you’re having a conversation, the agent can see the mail. If you have recorded a message you can play that message. So unified communications is absolutely crucial. And I think, not just for the contact centre but also for the enterprise. If you want to look a little further down the road, the contact centre will extend beyond imagination. In 10 years from now, there will be no contact centre, because the contact centre will be the enterprise. Everything that’s done in the contact centre will be done in the enterprise.

What are the top priorities of Contact centre managers or IT managers in terms of technology adoption?

The most aggressive driving force for IT managers and CIOs is to control cost. They need to generate revenue and they need flexibility and very high availability. Flexibility and performance is crucial. That’s why you have to measure everything. If you don’t measure everything, it’ll affect the performance of your system. Aspect software for example provides an option called the Performance Management, which is a series of tools and analytics that help analyse how transactions in the contact centre are conducted. So you can actually record speech, translate the speech to text, analyse the text and determine patterns in contact centre transactions that’ll allow you to optimise the performance of your contact centre.

You’ve been pushing the case for SIP adoption in a big way. What’s the advantage for you?

SIP is a standard, which is now being widely adopted. Essentially it levels the playing field. When companies are switched on SIP it means it’s easier for us to penetrate their account. We’re very competitive and we love competition because we think we will win most of the time. So the more access we have to prospects, the better off are we. And we think that’s what the effect of SIP will do. However, there’s one more dramatically important reason why SIP is so important. Part of that has to do with mobility and the notion that agents are sitting in their desk in a contact centre or even sitting at home. That will be an old definition. In a few years from now, contact centre agents will walk around, they’ll be in cars or doing other jobs and occasionally, because they can be tracked through mobility, we can contact them when a particular agent is required. So mobility is the future.

With regard to IP PBX, especially open source IP PBX how do you think that’s going to pay out for the contact centre industry?

The important thing about open source is that it takes a while to pick up momentum and to be universally adopted. Open source needs to be blessed by a powerful player in the industry. Until IBM blessed Unix, it was never going to be adopted. We sell an IP PBX solution and in fact we run our headquarters using an IP PBX. The other thing is because it’s open source, there is no licence cost. There is support cost, but you can buy support from vendors such as us. If Aspect implements a solution or a source code that includes IP PBX, then we also provide the support. That’s bad news for companies like Cisco and Avaya because they sell their PBXs for big money.

In a price sensitive country like India where RoI is a constant worry, how does it affect Aspect as a technology vendor?

It’s not just the cost sensitive nature of India, contact centres now are really global. We have lots of people who have agents in India and other places, with customers in the US or Europe. Sometimes the agents are in Europe as well, but there’s a co-operative virtual contact centre. The important thing is we have to price our products to value. That’s the real key thing because we don’t want to be the cheapest option; we want to be the best option.

Do the sensitivities of the Indian contact centre industry differ in any way from that of the others?

It’s hard to call India an emerging market anymore - that was ten years ago. Emerging markets will be competition for India, because they’re a lower cost option. It used to be almost a cost equation ten years ago, now it’s a skills, professionalism and expertise based equation. There are operations in the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand and also it’s happening greatly in China, and they are the lower cost options. But otherwise there’s not a dramatic difference. What constitutes value in different places is variable and we do business in India because it’s profitable, we don’t do business in India for charity.