Aspect Telecommunications Inc, the CTI company which recently filed to change its name to Aspect Communications, yesterday announced the availability of its customer relationship management portal; a software product designed to let companies better serve their customers by integrating the call center environment with front and back office applications.
Aspect first announced the portal in June, describing it as a multimedia package for managing customer interactions over voice, web, email and fax. Yesterday, the company fleshed out those details, giving news on partnerships as well as announcing availability of the product itself. The name portal is deceptive because the product isn’t web based, like a traditional MyYahoo or Netcenter portal. Rather, it’s a platform based on Aspect’s CTI product (although it could equally work with Lucent or Nortel systems) plus some new software thrown in that enables companies to pull in data from disparate front and back office systems.
Aspect was a little sketchy about the precise details on the integration software other than to say it provided companies, or third party integrators, with a visual rules-based management environment which enables them to dictate precisely which front and back office systems it wants to integrate with. Traditionally, that type of integration would have taken companies months and involved lots of hand coding to link the systems, said Karen Hardy, senior product marketing manager. But Aspect’s development environment contains an easy-to-use GUI with drag and drop functionality, enabling developers to visualize what they need and generate definitions and rules in half the time, she said.
In the front office space, Aspect said its portal can access data from Vantive Corp, Siebel Systems Inc and Clarify Inc. But in the back office the company wasn’t so forthcoming, other than to say the company was working with SAP AG. However, Hardy assured us that the software could extract data from any back office database, data mart or data management applications. Being armed with all the necessary information about a customer will enable the operator to forward his or her query on to the right agent, Hardy said, without them being passed from person to person, which clearly detracts from the level of customer satisfaction. So far two customers, Adaptec Inc and Anytime Access, have already publicly stated their intention to use the portal software to improve their customer service and other, as yet unnamed, firms are in the wings, Hardy claimed.
Aspect’s announcement is part of the company’s recent push to reposition itself as a software company and move away from its image as a call center/ACD (automatic caller distribution) hardware vendor. We’re not abandoning our voice base, we’re just expanding into other forms of communications, said Hardy. We want to shake that image of just being a hardware company. We’re not, we’re a software company. Hardy says that’s the main reason for the company’s intended name change, from Aspect Telecommunications to Aspect Communications, although it’s still waiting approval from shareholders before it can go ahead.
