Johannesburg, 08 Apr 2013
Overview
* Partnership with Lithium Technologies combines powerful social media expertise with contact centre best practices
* Customer-centric organisations can extend capabilities beyond listening by turning social monologues into productive, effective dialogues
* Cloud-based offering is purpose-built for the contact centre with social engagements supported by Aspect's unified platform for interaction management and workforce optimisation
Aspect Software, a leading provider of next-generation customer contact and enterprise workforce optimisation, today announced the launch of Aspect Social, a cloud-based offering that aligns interactions organisations have with customers on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and online communities with their overall customer contact operations.
Companies can move beyond passive social channel monitoring and delivering ad-hoc responses, to empowering contact centre agents to expertly act in a disciplined, timely way on inquiries or comments in the social sphere or even proactively engage customers in anticipation of disruptive events such as power outages or travel delays.
"Most companies today simply monitor social media conversations on marketing campaigns or promotions on the social Web, sometimes responding to them but, more often, ignoring them. However, as customers increasingly turn to social networks for customer service response interaction, organisations need to embrace social media as a vital, two-way channel that can amplify their ability to deliver a differentiated customer experience," says Jim Freeze, chief marketing officer of Aspect. "By aligning social customer care with the metrics and processes proven to work in the contact centre infrastructure, Aspect Social enables organisations to create genuine customer advocacy by turning social monologues into productive dialogues that grow customer loyalty."
This alignment is something organisations are calling for, as 58% of customer service strategy decision-makers see managing social media inquiries as their top challenge* and just 4.6% say their ability to measure the overall impact of social media is excellent**.
Through a partnership with Lithium Technologies, and alignment with contact centre methodology, Aspect is delivering a game-changing social care solution. Aspect's new offering combines the strengths of its market-leading, comprehensive customer contact and workforce optimisation platform with the Lithium Social Web product that Lithium gained through its recent acquisition of Social Dynamx.
"Enduring customer relationships are built across multiple channels, and brands need to implement a sustainable and scalable social strategy," said Mike Betzer, senior vice-president, Lithium Social Web. "The Aspect relationship gives us a contact centre provider as passionate as us about improving the customer experience and increasing customer engagement to drive measurable business results. Aspect shares our vision of seamless social customer experience and is an excellent partner with a proven ability to combine best-in-class technologies to deliver rich customer care solutions."
Aspect Social provides contact centres the ability to automatically identify, prioritise and route targeted customer service-related social media to the right contact centre agent and measure the effectiveness of their response. It provides tools and capabilities specific to the needs of contact centre agents and supervisors, including:
* Role-based User Interface - Includes specific features and access levels for agents, supervisors and managers, providing each work group within the contact centre the tools necessary to create customer service excellence.
* Automated Prioritisation and Matching - Use of patented algorithms that score posts for sentiment, relevancy and actionability. Posts are then matched and auto-assigned to the most appropriate agent based on history and skill.
* Advanced Conversation Management - Capability to follow a conversation thread rather than reacting to every post isolated from its context.
* SLA-Based Metrics - Provides a way to establish and track against social service level agreements (SLAs), such as customer satisfaction, handle times and resolution rates, so managers and supervisors have insight into KPIs.
* Proactive Social Engagement - Capability to proactively inform social consumers of changes, outages or common solutions.
* CRM Integration - Integration with CRM systems, knowledge bases and communities to give a more comprehensive view into the customer and provide agents with tools to provide a faster and smarter response.
"Constant innovation around delivering a superior customer experience is an essential survival skill in today's marketplace," adds Freeze. "In an era when consumers choose when, where and how they communicate, businesses have a unique opportunity to rally around the total customer experience by placing the contact centre at the heart of the customer engagement process. Aspect makes this happen by extending the contact centre's history of disciplined, measured, customer-centric contact management to social media."
* According to a Forrester study, commissioned by Aspect, of enterprise customer service strategy decision-makers
** According to Lithium and MarketingProfs "2012 State of Social Media Marketing Report"
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