Roughly a year and a half after the acquisition of Voxeo, the introduction of the Aspect Mobility Suite shows that the company’s investment is going to good use, made manifest by the launch of the Aspect Mobility Suite. The new offering is a cloud-based set of products and capabilities that take a mobile-first, developer-friendly approach to multichannel customer care and intelligent assistance. Applications are offered through the newly launched Aspect® Innovation ExchangeTM, a marketplace where pre-packaged software and APIs are made available to enterprise IT departments and developers.

The first eight offerings are packaged versions of business processes that integrate with elements of Aspects existing contact center, IVR and self service resources and have been developed and deployed by Aspect’s Professional services group or selected partners. They are as follows (including Aspect’s description of each application):

• Aspect Proactive Mobile™ –  Turns outbound outreach into an interactive dialog allowing companies to send notifications in a rich mobile interface and expand one-way text notifications. It gives the customer on-the-spot response options and access to data through a “disposable” mobile Web app.
• Aspect Visual IVR™ – A visual menu of interactive voice response (IVR) options for smartphone users, controlled through touch by going through a pre-qualifying menu with images instead of listening to the information, improving first-call resolution and reducing call times.
• Aspect Augmented Chat™ – Embeds a chat, audio/video, and co-browse widget into an existing Website or mobile app so that a customer can communicate with an agent without leaving the application.
• Aspect Callback Mobile™ – Embeds a qualification dialog into an existing mobile customer care app. After answering the questions, the customer gets a callback and the agent handling the calls gets a screen-pop with relevant details.
• Aspect InQueue Self-Service™ –  Offers IVR callers a callback option plus a link to a disposable mobile Web app via SMS to try self-service while waiting. If they are able to resolve their issue using the mobile app, the callback is cancelled. Otherwise, their position in the queue will be prioritized to reward them for having tried self-service.
• Aspect Text2IVR™ –  Gives IVR callers the option to send alphanumeric text information (name, address, license plates, tracking IDs, etc.), a challenge for automatic speech recognition, via SMS.
• Aspect Text Self-Service™ –  Gives customers a multi-lingual, natural language, self-service interface using 2-way SMS text applications, also referred to as Interactive Text Response.
• Aspect Social Self-Service™ – Gives customers a multi-lingual, natural language, self-service interface on the Twitter channel.

These eight offerings, jointly and severally, address known deficiencies in multichannel self-service, assisted service and intelligent assistance. They take advantage of embedded capabilities of smartphones, extend the life of existing IVR systems and applications, and leverage investment in database management, customer relationship management (CRM) systems and workforce optimization (WFO) systems that reside at the “back-end” of today’s contact centers.

The Aspect Mobility Suite also introduces a couple of new concepts that will prove vital to supporting multi-channel, intelligent assistance. One is the notion of a “disposable mobile Web app.” I would prefer the word “ephemeral” to “disposable”, because it refers to a Web application that is invoked to serve a specific purpose and then vanishes once its purpose is served. For instance, in the case of Aspect Proactive Mobile™, which is an interactive variation of outbound notification services. The outbound alert is accompanied by a special-purpose mobile app that gives provides the recipient the ability to access relevant data and respond without making a separate phone call.

Once a recipient has completed the designated task through the app, its job is done and it disappears. The “disposable app” protocol is ingrained in Aspect InQueue Self-Service as well.

Interactive Text Response is another feature/function that figures prominently in the new mix. Finally, the generation of smartphone users that have demonstrated a pronounced preference for letting their fingers do the talking can now text with the customer care resources at the companies with whom they choose to do business. The Mobility Suite offers text options for Aspect Text2IVR™ and Aspect Text Self-Service™. In the first instance, people who reach an IVR system can use text messages for form-filling activites, like providing names, addresses, tracking ID numbers, and the like. In the second instance, a customer can text back-and-forth with an automated system using natural language input to accomplish self-service tasks. Aspect Social Self-Service™ is a variation on the interactive text response routine, although it relies on the venerable 140-character Twitter protocol as the communications platform.

The genius of Aspect’s Mobility Suite is the ability to incorporate smartphones in enterprise efforts to overcome inherent disconnects in their conversations with customers and prospects. Both central IT departments and the “shadow IT” groups that assist individual departments (e.g. marketing, customer care, customer experience…) will find themselves able to manage multi-channel conversations through a shared “business user interface.” Through it, they can build apps (both disposable and persistent) that build off of existing mobile apps, IVR systems, call routing tables, CRM and the like to make the mobile customer experience more seamless and friction-free.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Articles

Tags: Contact Center, Natural Language, omnichannel, Mobile CX, Intelligent Assistance, Aspect Software