Aspect (News - Alert) Software on Wednesday announced its acquisition of BlueNote Networks, a company that specializes in Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based solutions that make possible communications enabled business processes (CEBPs) for enterprise service oriented architecture (SOA) environments.

 

While financial details of the deal were not disclosed, Aspect officials did elaborate on ways that the acquisition complements its strategy of bringing unified communications (UC) to the contact center setting.

 

“Aspect will leverage BlueNote’s products and technologies in fulfilling its vision of Unified Communications (News - Alert) in the Contact Center, said Aleassa Schambers, corporate marketing manager at Aspect. “BlueNote’s Web services capabilities and expertise will be leveraged in order to more tightly integrate the Aspect Software products with business applications and processes.”

 

Schambers added that BlueNote’s communications middleware and client technologies will be used to speed up market delivery for key elements of Aspect Unified IP, Aspect’s flagship product — a SIP-based Voice over IP (VoIP) solution that pulls together automatic call distribution (ACD), voice portal, predictive dialing, workflow management, Internet contacts, quality management, and multichannel recording applications.

 

The acquisition of BlueNote has been in the process for several months, and developed organically from previous projects the two companies worked on in the past, Schambers told TMCnet.

 

“Aspect and BlueNote had previously worked together on a number of occasions based on the request of a common customer, Fidelity, demonstrating our ability to integrate the contact center with the BlueNote strategy for enabling business processes to incorporate communications through Web services,” she said. “As Aspect began our work to bring Unified Communications into the Contact Center, working closely with BlueNote became an obvious benefit.”

 

Because the two companies already had a close working relationship, integration of the two teams will be much more seamless than is typically the case with acquisitions.

 

“BlueNote personnel are already up to speed on Aspect Software products and roadmap and the team has ‘hit the ground running’ upon completion of the business arrangements,” Schambers said. “At this time, all of the BlueNote personnel are fully engaged with active development and testing efforts for the Aspect Unified IP product.”

 

Most of BlueNote’s engineering and quality assurance assets — including personnel — are being integrated into Aspect’s Unified IP department. This includes Mike Regan, cofounder and vice president of engineering at BlueNote, who is now heading up the Aspect Unified IP development team. Regan and other BlueNote personnel bring to Aspect their expertise in CEBPs and SIP.

 

“This acquisition will allow Aspect to provide standards-based communications services across a variety of media by offering structured tools on which to develop our unified communications for the contact center solutions,” Schambers said.

 

Schambers described Aspect’s UC portfolio as featuring all-in-one, IT-ready solutions designed to bring increased flexibility to organizations and to help them successfully execute UC goals. This functionality is further enhanced with Unified Command and Control, a scalable product that consolidates a variety of administrative, reporting and routing tasks.

 

Aspect’s portfolio also includes a range of voice portal applications that can be deployed as standalone software or integrated with Unified IP, and the PerformanceEdge (News - Alert) suite for unified workforce management.

 

Schambers told TMCnet that Aspect’s performance optimization solutions are a key differentiator for the company because they allow organizations to “measure and monitor customer interactions that may be taking place outside the traditional boundaries of the contact center, as well as to schedule knowledge workers that may be handling some of those customer interactions.”

 

Given Aspect’s focus on UC, the synergies between it and BlueNote go beyond simply furthering development of the Unified IP flagship product line. Aspect is currently considering how and where to incorporate BlueNote technology into its various products, with a particular focus on leveraging SIP communications to expand offerings for remote agent support.

 

“We are also investigating leveraging the excellent web service enablement produced by BlueNote to allow for tighter integration between CRM systems and the contact center,” Schamber said. “There will be subsequent roadmap announcements once the details have been finalized.”

 

Schambers said a key factor in common to both companies is the use of standards-based technologies.

 

“Standards-compliant solutions, such as those leveraging session initiation protocol (SIP), will ensure that a number of unified communications solutions will easily interoperate in the contact center and across the enterprise,” she said. “And because of this synergy, it allow the capabilities garnered through the BlueNote acquisition to be easily incorporated into the Aspect Software offerings.”

 

Schambers stressed that enterprises initiating UC projects should demand standards-based applications from vendors to ensure that the solutions chosen are IT-ready and can fit into any existing architecture.

 

“With unified communications, the onus is on technology vendors to develop technology that is standards-compliant, services-based, reliable, secure, and fits into a well-understood management environment,” she explained. “This will go a long way in ensuring that a UC strategy is successful.”

 

Aspect’s UC strategy is based on market research and projections, which indicate that there is great potential for UC in the contact center, beyond the current focus on improving employee productivity.

 

“UC, done right, has the potential to make an enormous impact on much more than internal productivity – it can transform the way you interact with your customers and really lift your bottom line,” Schambers told TMCnet.

 

To back up this claim, she cited details from a Leo J. Shapiro & Associates study, which indicated that 10.3 percent of interactions handled by contact centers on a daily basis require assistance from experts throughout the enterprise. On average these types of  inquiries require two interactions to resolve a customer’s issue, and last two and a half minutes longer than a call handled solely in the confines of the contact center.

 

The Shapiro & Associates findings indicate that, in a 200-seat call center, every agent reaches out to an enterprise expert once an hour, totaling 200 outreaches every hour. That’s a significant amount of inefficiency.

 

“With each issue taking two interactions and two-and-a-half more minutes to resolve, you are looking at a lot of room for improvement in terms of talk time, agent productivity and first call resolution,” Schambers said.

 

Proactive contact center organizations are turning to UC as a way to overcome these limitations. Managers at such centers know that a satisfied customer is four times more likely to do future business with a company. For most companies, the chance to makes things right with a customer, or to lose that customer, starts and ends in the contact center. Every interaction that ends in satisfaction validates the initial purchase and can provide opportunities for new sales.

 

“Unified communications for the contact center is going to play an extremely significant role in the effectiveness of those customer-company communications,” Schambers predicted. “Getting the organization to focus on more than just using Unified Communications to improve employee productivity is key.”

 

Aspect’s goal, then, is to educate businesses, contact centers and IT departments regarding the role that the contact center and the customer plays in every organization’s UC strategy, and how this can benefit the customer — and ultimately the bottom line.

 

Perhaps the biggest challenge for enterprises seeking to implement UC is the speed with which technology is changing. Most companies can adjust to change if it is limited in scope, Schambers said, and if it happens over a manageable period of time. With UC, that’s not the case — and this presents a variety of challenges.

 

“Communication technology is changing in many areas all at once,” she told TMCnet.  “Devices are changing. Transport methods are multiplying. Consumer expectations are heightening. Increasing the speed of interactions to satisfactory resolution without losing the consumer in the process is the key, and forcing the consumer to adopt a specific technology choice is most likely a losing proposition.”

 

Schambers predicted that, five years from now, organizations that start now in adopting new technologies will become leaders in their industries — even if keeping pace with the evolution of the technology might be challenging.

 

“UC is a viable way for every customer-facing process to be drastically improved. Instead of frantically running down a call list to reach someone with the technical expertise to answer a specific customer question, UC empowers agents to instantly check the availability of experts and quickly get their input with a few keystrokes and the click of a mouse,” Schambers explained.

 

BlueNote’s technology and market expertise will allow Aspect to extend voice, video and other real-time interactive communications services to contact center agents and knowledge workers at enterprises.

 

“Right now to do any level of integration between the contact center and enterprise applications requires a great deal of professional services,” Schambers said. “The BlueNote capabilities/tools will allow us to complete these integrations quicker and more cost effectively.”

 

She added that Aspect’s goal is to accelerate the trend toward blurring of traditional demarcation lines between the contact center, IT and carrier networks.

 

“Aspect Software will lead the industry in bringing UC to the contact center, creating business value with an ability to provide a higher level of customer service and satisfaction,” Schambers concluded.