Aspect contact centre solutions will help companies take full advantage of Microsoft Lync capabilities

Aspect, a global provider of unified communications and collaboration services and software, has announced it is integrating its market leading Aspect Unified IP contact centre platform with Microsoft Lync Server 2010 capabilities.

Aspect Unified IP, with Microsoft Lync, will offer key unified communications (UC) capabilities, including enhanced expert search functionality and increased collaboration for agents within the contact centre and knowledge workers across the enterprise.

“For companies that have implemented Microsoft unified communications technologies, deploying Aspect solutions within the contact centre will offer almost the equivalent of out-of-the-box UC capabilities for customer contact,” said Gary Barnett, chief technology officer and executive vice-president at Aspect. “The integration will also help support IT strategies to allow organisations to standardise on Microsoft core technologies, streamlining IT management and allowing for straightforward, uncomplicated support of the customer contact solutions within those enterprises.”

Working with the Microsoft Lync Release Candidate - an early version of the software, Aspect drew on its extensive insight and experience with Microsoft UC not only to integrate Lync with its upcoming release of Aspect Unified IP, but to put the integration through its paces in Aspect's own contact centre. As part of its own beta test, Aspect's contact centre will be using Lync with Aspect Unified IP for its Ask an Expert functionality, which leverages knowledge workers throughout the enterprise to increase first call resolution for customers. Aspect expects the implementation to continue to drive meaningful results across its enterprise and customer interactions.

The enhanced enterprise and contact centre features that will be available through the Lync and Aspect Unified IP integration will create new opportunities for organisations to advance customer contact through better communication and information sharing.

“Microsoft is pleased to be working with Aspect on delivering next-generation solutions for the contact centre that leverage unified communications capabilities to better engage customers and companies and deliver greater communication and collaboration,” said Kirk Gregersen, Senior Director, Lync Product Management, Microsoft Corp.

“The enterprise-grade voice capabilities within Lync validate the tenet that software is poised to replace legacy PBX-based telephony systems. Enterprises that migrate to Lync will get a unified and intuitive set of voice, video, instant message, presence, and conferencing tools and increased savings on costs normally incurred from hardware purchases and maintenance, telephony circuit costs and conferencing services,” added Barnett. “In the two years that the entire Aspect organisation has been PBX-free, we have reduced costs by two million dollars annually. We feel it is only a matter of time before more organisations make this transition to take advantage of the compelling productivity, collaboration, mobility and cost benefits.”

The upcoming release of Aspect Unified IP will use specific functionality within Lync that will provide increased capabilities to contact centre users, including:

* Unified Communications Powered Agent Desktop: Will eliminate the need for two separate desktop applications for contact centre agents that want to take advantage of Lync's IM, presence and federation capabilities.
* UC collaboration for contact centre agents: Collaboration capabilities from Lync can be used to initiate desktop sharing between agents in the contact centre, supervisors and experts.
* Security: Aspect Unified IP will work with Lync to provide advanced security of customer information, including encryption, access controls and authentication through Active Directory.
* Distributed Architecture: Aspect Unified IP, in conjunction with Lync, will support distributed architecture models to enable data centre consolidation, virtualisation, as well as distributed and work at home agents and information workers.