Ringing in the new year last week was news that private equity firm Vector Capital is acquiring Aspect Software. Arizona-based Aspect provides cloud customer self-service platforms, contact center interaction management, and workforce optimization capabilities to more than 1.6 million agents around the world.

Under the terms of the agreement, Vector Capital will invest more than $100 million of equity capital in Aspect’s business to support existing lending and provide a new credit option. The acquisition underscores how transformative technologies like conversational commerce are changing the fundamentals of contact center operations.

Aspect has a proven legacy in customer engagement solutions including a bot platform that works in conjunction with a natural language understanding (NLU) platform for customer interactions and a goal to help agents do their jobs better. Customers include Radisson Blu Edwardian, City of Mesa, Overstock and Lidl UK.

Of note, Aspect worked with UK grocery chain Lidl to launch a fully-automated Facebook Messenger chatbot to help customers select wines. Featured at last year’s Conversational Commerce Conference London event, Lidl UK worked with Aspect to deliver a project from start-to-finish in just 12 weeks and outlined what it takes to reach key customers using NLU technology.

In the wake of new bot and self-service technologies being implemented into contact centers, Aspect has committed to understanding and evaluating the agent experience. Just last month the company published a survey that examines what factors motivate, encourage and satisfy agents in providing customer service experiences. The survey is chock full of interesting stats on customer service agent perspectives, including how a lack of customer history and personal information undermines their ability to provide personalized customer experiences.

With the acquisition, Vector Capital is investing in how next-generation contact centers improve customer engagement with conversational, self-service tools as well as emphasizing how agents help organizations with a focus on higher-value, customer-centric activities.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles