This week I attended the Aspect Customer Experience Conference in Miami. It’s been a few years since I attended an Aspect customer event and was curious to see how the company has transformed in that time. Since my last participation in the event, most the leadership has changed, the company has made a number of acquisitions (most notably, Voxeo) and much has changed in the world of customer engagement expectations and delivery methods.

I left the event very impressed.

During the keynotes, the Aspect leadership team was clear about priorities; happy, but not satisfied with bookings and “new logos” achievements, and felt similarly about their support for their customer base. They acknowledged that they’ve come far, but there’s much to do. It was refreshing and confidence-inspiring.

The leadership team clearly understood key market trends: cloud as a business value, the proliferation of devices, meeting consumer expectations, and the need for creative destruction. And they did a nice job of connecting these trends to their product and services offerings.

The Aspect Reference Architecture quite elegantly captured their product and services strategy. It highlighted the products that are homegrown and recently reinvested in, and also highlighted the incremental investments they’ve made to round out their offerings. They presented a compelling end-to-end view including omnichannel engagement, workforce management and back-office management, underlined by security and compliance, reporting and analytics, and enterprise integration – all with the ability to be delivered on-premises or in the cloud.

Speaking of the cloud, Aspect is making a smart bet on the cloud. They recently brought in new leadership, launched a cloud-based contact center offer called Zipwire and acknowledge that there are going to be a variety of deployment models incorporating premise, cloud and hybrid models. I think this approach is a very compelling and realistic as companies move the cloud.

I recommend you keep an eye on Aspect. I felt really positive about how far they’ve come in recent years, and believe they are poised for very good things. They have a solid strategy, and now it’s all about execution.

Key Takeaways

• Aspect articulated a solid strategy, supported by organizational requirements and product service offerings
• Aspect has developed a compelling reference architecture to bring together new products and service offerings for both cloud and on-premise
• Investing heavily in cloud-based offerings
• Aspect recognizes key industry trends – such as “omni-channel” engagement – and plans capitalize on them
• Services approach is solid, extending into digital experiences
• Augmenting offerings with solid workforce optimization (WFO) and back-office products and services
• Great strategy, solutions, people and plan — now need to execute

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Articles

Tags: Voxeo, Aspect, Cloud-based telephony