Johannesburg, 05 Apr 2017
Aspect Software is celebrating the European launch of its 100% cloud-based Customer Engagement Centre (CEC) platform, Aspect Via, this month. Available to all verticals in the UK and Europe, Aspect Via's launch marks the company's aggressive global expansion plans.
Aspect Via is a complete refactoring of Aspect's full range of next generation customer engagement technologies - it is currently the only cloud platform in the world with native omni-channel interaction management, workforce optimisation and self-service capabilities. With Aspect Via, Heads of Customer Service can digitally transform the contact centre, elevating it from contact centre with disparate and disconnected technologies for multiple vendors, to a Customer Engagement Centre with seamless capabilities.
In 2016, Gartner defined a CEC as "a logical set of technologies and business applications that are engineered to provide customer service and support, regardless of the interaction (or engagement) channel. The goal of the CEC is not only to provide service to customers as they move among communications channels - including social media and community forums - while retaining the customers' context, but also to deliver the appropriate business rule to determine the next best action, information or process with which to engage the customers." Gartner also released a Magic Quadrant report, Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Centre 2016, which examined the global market for customer service applications.
The evolution of the contact centre to a CEC is only made possible when service organisations address the increasingly clear demands modern consumers have about how they wish to interact with businesses. "In our digital world, even the more sophisticated contact centres are still grounded in an outdated architecture. This rigid and dated technology has limited the ability of many businesses to respond effectively to customer queries in an acceptable manner and timeframe. By redesigning the customer service department to take advantage of a variety of SAAS applications built on cloud platforms, CECs can provide flexible service across multiple engagement channels, all while retaining the initial context of the customer. With today's customers demanding more responsive, flexible and personal experiences when interacting with businesses, companies need to plan how best they can support these requests with a more contemporary infrastructure," explains Stephen Ball, Senior VP Europe and Africa at Aspect Software.
Aspect Via features shared real-time and historical reporting/analytics and a common browser-based user interface across all capabilities, covering the essential areas of self-service, customer engagement, service intelligence, proactive outreach, agent empowerment, and people and process optimisation. All this is provisioned through an open, cloud architecture for seamless integration with other enterprise data sources and business systems.
James Freeze, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Aspect Software, added: "The premise behind Aspect Via is to challenge ineffectual and outdated enterprise use of lightly integrated point solutions. With native capabilities across every requirement of the forward-looking and customer-focused brand, companies are better equipped to meet the expectations of today's mobile, connected and highly demanding consumers."
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