Aspect Brings Social Media into the Contact Center

Aspect, a leading provider of customer contact and Microsoft platform solutions, today announced the availability of Aspect® Social Media Channel Integration to help businesses turn social media engagements into productive customer dialogues that create a positive experience and deliver significant business value. With the Aspect solution, organizations can better manage their interactions with today’s hyper-connected consumers who are increasingly relying on social media not only to communicate with peers but to seek answers about products and services.

While other customer contact solutions might focus only on identification and routing of social media interactions, Aspect’s approach addresses the complete business issue of routing the right issue at the right time to the right resource, managing the resources needed for an effective social media response, and measuring the efficacy of the social media strategy.

Aspect customers can apply Aspect’s sophisticated workflow rules, call center performance analytics, and workforce optimization capabilities to social media-based communications. This allows social media communications to be easily integrated into the overall customer contact strategy as a distinct channel, leveraging existing resources and investments. It ensures that this new channel can be compared to and put in the context of the total engagement strategy, rather than remaining an isolated medium.

The Aspect solution provides a powerful engagement framework backed by Aspect Unified IP, the company’s platform for delivering next-generation customer contact.

The solution manages social media interactions that are identified through virtually any social media monitoring tool customers have in place. Relevant and actionable interactions are identified based on customer-defined criteria, which includes relevant search terms and weighting factors, followers, or perceived sentiment. Actionable interactions are routed to the appropriate agent or knowledge worker, according to specified routing rules. Aspect Social Media Channel Integration customers can productively respond, plan for, and measure social media interactions through Aspect’s core interaction management and workforce optimization capabilities.

Aspect’s vendor-agnostic approach supports its open standards methodology, giving customers complete freedom as to which social media monitoring tools they choose. This approach also enables Aspect to easily integrate with new social media channels as they emerge.

“In the past year, there has been an explosion of discussion about integrating social media into the contact center” said Sheila McGee-Smith, president & principal analyst, McGee-Smith Analytics. “While the number of solutions in production is still low, companies are actively seeking to understand their options for adding social media as an additional media type in the contact center with pilots and trials. Aspect’s broad contact center solution portfolio allows them to leverage not only contact center routing, queuing and reporting but also workforce optimization and analytics to help companies maximize their social media investments.”

“The popularity and power of social communication channels have made them an integral component of the total customer experience and a critical channel for organizations to manage,” said Serge Hyppolite, vice president of product management, Aspect. “Our customers are increasingly incorporating social media into their customer contact strategies to help manage opinion and loyalty associated with their products and services. With Aspect Unified IP and Social Media Channel Integration, organizations are uniquely positioned to extract considerable business value from this communications channel through their existing operations, leveraging the disciplined, impactful, customer-centric approach implemented within their contact centers. Aspect’s social engagement capabilities will help our customers turn social interactions with consumers into meaningful, mutually beneficial conversations.”

Aspect builds customer relationships through a combination of customer contact software and Microsoft platform services/solutions.