What’s new in cloud services

JIM Freeze, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Aspect Software Inc.

Aspect Software Inc. (Aspect) is looking at 15-20 percent of recurring revenue from its cloud services. This is the result of its customers either migrating to cloud services or supporting their on premise data centers with cloud. This is according to Jim Freeze, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Aspect.

“We wouldn’t be surprised in 2-4 years if majority of revenue come from cloud-based services,” he says.

“This is part of our strategy, which is (to be able) to offer both methods (on premise and cloud) because customers have different needs and issues that they deal with,” he adds.

Freeze says the industries that are usually keen on traditional or on premise solutions are financial and healthcare. These are the companies sensitive about security, compliance and customer data.

“Those customers tend to lean toward on premise solutions because they (want to) have more control,” he says.

Strongest markets

“There are industries increasingly liking cloud-based solutions,” Freeze says. “They take all the benefits. The providers offering cloud-based solutions are those constantly updating software. We see that based on the business model, customers have different needs. We are increasingly seeing an interest in cloud-based solutions here (in the Philippines) because the BPO space is obviously strong here.”

Aspect considers the Philippines, along with China, India and Thailand, as one of its strongest markets in the Asia Pacific. The company has been operating in the country for 10 years now.

“Aspect’s technology solutions are designed to work on an intuitive level providing companies the flexibility of operations and integrated customer service operations,” Freeze says. “Our products provide solutions that coordinate workforce processes while seamlessly elevating the level of service that is delivered, and at the same time provide great user experience for agents and supervisors while developing a tighter integration between the front and the back office.”

The company recently launched three new products that offer fully integrated customer interaction management, workforce optimization, back-office solutions and cloud solutions.

The three primary suites of software that Aspect markets to enterprises and BPOs include the Contact Center Suite, which is used by companies to manage their contact centers to enable them to communicate with their customers in different channels of communication whether it’s traditional voice, e-mail, SMS or chat. Second is Workforce Optimization (WFO 8), a software that enables companies to ensure that they have the right agents at the right time with the right skills set based on their business model.

“This will help optimize and improve the performance of their agents,” Freeze says.

Savings

Third is Back Office Optimizer, which aims to help companies ensure that whatever promises the customer service optimization makes are translated to efficient task assignments at the back office.

“If you think about a mortgage, a customer service agent could be talking to somebody on the phone, helping him or her fill out a form, and that’s just the first step,” Freeze explains. “There’s a whole process in the back office that needs to happen to ensure that the mortgage form actually gets filled out. Our software helps ensure that those tasks are efficiently assigned and tracked in a way that allows companies to optimize their resources in the back office.”

“Internationally, as per industry analysts, early adopters of back office workforce optimization solutions are realizing significant savings, ranging from 20 percent to 40 percent,” says Richard Loberas, regional sales director of Aspect Asia Pacific. “We are thrilled at the prospect of bringing some of these benefits to our existing and new customers in the Philippines.”

Aspect’s Back Office Optimizer will amplify the improvements in WFO 8 with real-time work allocation and reallocation based on demand, resource availability and skill, and service

RICHARD Loberas, regional sales director, Aspect Software Inc.

level goals along with preconfigured views into operational efficiency and effectiveness.

Aside from the three products, Aspect also announces the launch of Aspect BPO Cloud.

“We are going to take and deploy it outside the United States,” Freeze says. “The region we’re most interested in is the Asia Pacific. It is another cloud-based solution to be deployed in our data centers. We will also be working with partners and will be deploying to their (own) data centers. This is entirely scalable based on the business model. This is also the reason we are seeing more BPOs with cloud-based solution because of the flexibility to scale (up or down).”

Freeze says a big part of Aspect’s differentiation is the breadth of its suite. “Another key differentiator is that we offer the software in traditional method of deploying it in companies’ data centers, software on-premises or second deployment method in the cloud. We offer both deployment methods to customers because we have customers who choose cloud over on premise and vice versa.”