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Bryan Sheppeck, Senior VP, Worldwide Sales, Aspect Software, talks to Jasmine Desai about the sea change in the customer service industry and the need for a holistic approach to it. Excerpts:
Can you shed light on Aspect’s acquisition of Voxeo and the product Zipwire? What will it mean for your customers?
Zipwire’s parent company, Voxeo, has ten years of experience in hosting applications for multi-channel self-service. They are well-known for IVR, but they do many other channels as well. They have six data centres around the world. Based on the partnership we launched a new product called Zipwire. It is Aspect created product based on Voxeo knowledge and experience. It scales down a bit more cost effectively than our traditional portfolio. The unified IP is the foundation of most of our interaction management. It is however, not cost-effective for smaller contact centres, wherein Zipwire will be more cost-effective. It is hosted and ITS operational benefits are state-of-the-art and it is very easy to provision.
Large enterprises that have seasonal demands can definitely take advantage of it. For example, an accounting firm that has peak demand during tax season. Because of Voxeo acquisition, there is lot of room for expansion of self-service strategies by our clients. The more of this happen, the more the agent is free to take up sophisticated interactions perhaps to do cross-selling, problem solving etc.
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What will the next-gen customer service experience include?
Customers are looking to being more creative about self-service strategy. It is about giving customers lot of choices of how they interact. It continues with all details of awareness of the interaction of how they interact, but also adding lot of creativity to those interactions. A younger consumer has different expectation than older consumer about channel choice. When the consumer takes charge of the interaction it is a relationship revolution. For example, an airline in Europe before check-in gives the option to travellers to share their LinkedIn or FB profile. Once this information is given, the travellers are allowed to see profiles of even other people who have selected to share and based on that can sit next to someone of choice. Basically it is self-selecting the neighbour on airplane.
Another airline in the Mideast which is owned by the government, also owns the duty-free. They have integrated the frequent flyer information. Thus, if they know the shopping pattern and what the customer bought on previous flying trips at the duty-free, they ask if the customer would like to have a bottle of perfume ready when they board etc. It is all about getting creative with the customer experience and not just great customer service.
Be it BFSI, healthcare or retail, their core business is not operating a contact centre. If they can outsource it cost-effectively with high level of operational skill and not have to sacrifice in terms of control and influence of how application works, there are many who would like to opt for it, especially smaller contact centres. The promise of cloud can be over-stated, but there is real value in these models. When businesses move past through some of the challenges of moving in the cloud, the actual benefit of cost-savings, technology becoming available much quicker cannot be negated. They will also be willing to move other applications onto the cloud.
Aspect is known to charge premium prices on its services and that considerably increases the TCO. Your comments?
In the last couple of years, we have spent lot of energy to reduce TCO of our products. There are lot of components there. The way you charge for training, maintenance, amount of servers that the software requires and scale to a certain level etc. We work on all those pieces, and have made dramatic improvement. The contact centre is a very demanding space. It is life and blood of customer’s organisations. They have very high expectation of vendors’ responsiveness strategically available 24/7. As a result, there is charge associated with that. When we benchmark ourselves against our competitors for maintenance and cost we are very competitive. We always work around SLAs, especially in certain cases we suggest areas in which they can be self-sufficient and thus reduce the cost.
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