According to industry reports, there are currently about 100,000 “remote” or “home-based” agents working in the contact center industry in the U.S. today – and as companies come to embrace the benefits of remote agents, the number is expected to grow.
Facilitating this growth is the SaaS (
News -
Alert) or hosted software model, which enables a “virtualized” contact center environment where all end-points on the network are the same - thus allowing an agent to work wherever there is a computer, a broadband connection and a headset. Through the power of IP
, the walls of the contact center have disappeared, and the seats of the new “virtual” contact center can be anywhere you want them to be.
In order to route calls intelligently across a “virtual” network, most on-demand contact center software makers are harnessing the power of SIP-based VoIP. This allows them to route calls to any end-point, and thus to any remote agent, no matter where he or she is located. Recently, Aspect Software (
News -
Alert) announced the general availability of Aspect Spectrum ACD
10.1, call distribution software that provides feature-rich routing, administration and real-time and historical reporting for both traditional voice and SIP-based VoIP. Part of the company's Signature product line, this new ACD is ideal for contact centers seeking to more easily support and administer low-cost remote agents.
With this powerful new ACD, contact centers will not only gain greater flexibility in terms of call routing, they will also be able to reduce costs by eliminating traditional carrier charges and connecting calls via VoIP. They can also use the product as a toll bypass application, alleviating costly connections between centers or by enabling IP trunks, allowing calls to be routed over an existing LAN/WAN
to other SIP-based interfaces. Furthermore, ACD 10.1 enables contact centers to quickly scale and bring new agents onto the network, without any special equipment requirements, and thus offers disaster recovery functionality.
ACD 10.1 sports new monitoring, security and desktop enhancements. Its new monitoring capabilities include more real-time data display options and expanded threshold setting and viewing capabilities on the dashboard. Platform enhancements include automated testing and diagnostic additions, expanded log files for more detailed diagnostic information, and improved firewall friendliness through network address translation (NAT) router compatibility. For improved security, Aspect Spectrum ACD 10.1 now uses lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP
)/Active Directory to enable contact centers to implement their standard company resource access methodology, along with IT/IS authentication policies to enable managers/supervisors to access client desktop applications. In addition, agent desktop clients, like Web Powered Agent, now provide expanded customer data and application password encryption along with improved authentication procedures. Other Web Powered Agent enhancements include expanded agent scheduling tools, dial lists, statistic displays, redundancy and load balancing.
“The Aspect Spectrum ACD 10.1 release provides numerous operational enhancements, as well as added functionality to allow for a smooth transition to VoIP,” said Gary Barnett, chief technology officer and executive vice president at Aspect Software, in a press release. “We are highly mindful of the need to provide our customer’s paths to new capabilities, like SIP-based VoIP, that leverage their existing investment, involves minimal disruption to their operations and most importantly provides them greater flexibility, control and choice. This latest release of Aspect Spectrum ACD 10.1 accomplishes this goal, which enables contact centers to be even more competitive and provide a higher level of customer service.”
Teleperformance México, a leading customer relationship management and teleservice provider to the Mexican and Hispanic American markets, is one of the companies already benefiting from Aspect Spectrum ACD 10.1. Eduardo Padron, chief information officer at the company, said once the product is fully deployed across the network, “we expect to benefit from reduced infrastructure costs and improved disaster recovery capabilities while maintaining the high levels of service and reliability our customers expect from us.” He added that Teleperformance México is “very pleased with the ease of implementation and the high level of performance.”
In order to help spur adoption of its contact center solutions, Aspect Software is offering its IP Starter and IP PLUS Starter bundles on a trial basis so that customers can experience first-hand the advantages of IP connectivity. The IP Starter bundle provides a 24 port license that can be used to connect agents through VoIP using SIP
2.0 enabled soft or hard phones. The IP PLUS Starter bundle provides a 24 port license, plus 24 Web Powered Agent licenses and 24 Polycom (
News -
Alert) desktop phones, allowing customer to test a thin client desktop and soft phone in addition to IP connectivity.
For more information, visit
www.aspect.com.
----------
Patrick Barnard is Associate Editor for Customer Interaction Solutions magazine and Assignment Editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.
