In a series of announcements yesterday, call center management software vendor Aspect Communications Inc introduced a customer relationship management portal and announced plans with Microsoft Corp to jointly invest $1m to set up two R&D centers at Microsoft’s premises in Redmond, Washington and Aspect’s headquarters in San Jose, California.
Aspect said its portal software is a multimedia package for managing customer interactions over voice, web, email and fax. The portal works by integrating distributed, disconnected data and sharing the customer data across all contacts, so that information collected through each customer interaction is immediately available to the agent answering the inquiry, regardless of the access method. As well as connecting to back office databases, data marts and workforce management applications, the portal will also integrate data from the leading front office vendors’ software, namely Vantive Corp, Siebel Systems Inc and Clarify Inc. The portal runs on Microsoft’s Windows NT server and creates virtual, web-based contact centers to route customer contacts to the best resource for service and direct marketing.
Aspect said the new test centers will be used to develop enhanced call center support for CRM applications in large, mission critical and distributed environments. Specifically, Aspect will work to leverage the call center features of Windows 2000 and Windows Telephony Applications Programming Interface (TAPI). Aspect says the telecommunications industry is shifting from proprietary hardware and software to open systems but organizations deploying advanced call center applications are still challenged by the complexity of integration with existing IT and telecoms environments. Aspect chose to work with Microsoft because it said the company’s Windows NT/TAPI provides a standard platform to help companies solve this integration problem.
