Full contact
Microsoft has announced a five year strategic alliance with call centre software outfit Aspect, with the aim of bringing unified communications to what it insists on calling ‘contact centres’.
What are unified communications? I hear you ask. Amazingly the name seems to be fairly self-explanatory. It is the utopian scenario in which land-lines, mobiles, VoIP, email, SMS, carrier pigeons, smoke signals and any other type of communication you can think of are all interconnected in a highly clever way.
The point of all this, other than to show off, is to make communication a lot more efficient and allow the right people to be communicating with each other as much as possible.
A key objective of all this cleverness appears to be ‘first call resolution’. As you can probably guess, this involves trying to deal with an incoming query there and then, rather than having to take their details, pass them around or just say ‘computer says nooo.’
Jim Foy, president and CEO of Aspect, said: ‘This is a means of connecting individual agents with experts within the organisation in order to achieve that all-important first call resolution.’
‘A key pillar of Microsoft’s unified communications vision is improving access to the people and information you need to do your job better and more quickly, and, with Aspect, we aim to make this vision a reality for contact centers,’ said Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft.
It appears that Aspect will design its Aspect Unified IP contact center solution to interoperate with Microsoft’s current offerings in this area, including Office Communications Server 2007.
It also looks like Microsoft is chucking Aspect a few
greenbacks for its trouble. To quote the press release: ‘Microsoft is making an
equity investment in Aspect to accelerate the development and adoption of the
new solutions and services.’ Neither Singh nor Foy would be drawn on the amount of the investment.
