Last week, I attended Aspect’s analyst summit, where I met the company’s executive leadership to discuss company updates. In January 2019, Vector Capital acquired Aspect, and this event allowed for deep dives into many areas, including pre- and post-acquisition business results, company strategy, product roadmap, and market positioning. This article provides a brief overview of my takeaways from the event.

Post-Acquisition Priorities

First, it’s worth noting that the last Analyst summit Aspect held was in February 2017. While I communicated with many company executives between then and now, last week’s summit allowed a detailed overview of many important changes within that period.

The summit kicked off with Michael Harris, CMO of the company, noting that Aspect’s product portfolio was made up of islands, including contact center software, workforce optimization (WFO), self-service, and Via (the company’s cloud contact center product). Harris noted that while each of these products provided rich functionality, the company has been working on more tightly integrating these products to address the complex requirements of large contact centers.

Harris also noted that one of the first steps the new management team took after the close of acquisition was to determine the core users of the company and retool the company strategy to address the needs of this clientele. For Aspect, this core user group is large contact centers that have more than 500 seats. Upon my question on if this means Aspect is only looking to serve large contact centers now, Harris clarified that the company will continue to serve firms of all sizes, but that, in general, contact centers with more complex needs are more likely to be a part of their clientele.

Cloud Messaging

After the close of the acquisition, one of the first steps the new management took was to change the company’s cloud messaging. Harris noted that, prior to the acquisition, the company focused on helping current and new users of its products migrate to cloud. He added that conversations with current and prospective customers have shown that not every business wants to move to the cloud, or that firms want to do so within their own timeline.

As such, the cloud messaging was updated to provide customers with deployment choice — allowing customers to use products deployed on-premises or through various forms of cloud technology, including public cloud, hybrid cloud, and private cloud. Ironically, discussions later in the event showed that when the company provided customers more flexibility for deployment choice, overall cloud adoption has increased.

One of many factors for this increase in cloud adoption was the company’s move to adopt a cloud-neutral approach. Aspect used to utilize Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its cloud infrastructure for the Via product. Firms such as retailers, shipping services providers, financial firms, and healthcare organizations (all afraid of Amazon currently operating in their industry or potentially entering their industries) are typically averse to using Amazon-related technologies. To allow these businesses the option to use Amazon-independent cloud technology, Aspect can now also deploy Via through other cloud service providers — Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Patrick Dennis, CEO of the company, noted that providing customers with deployment choice along with a cloud-neutral approach are among the key elements of the company’s platform strategy. Dennis also shared deep insights into the pre- and post-acquisition financials. On a high-level, he shared that the company has decreased its net debt year-over-year, reduced operating costs by streamlining business activities, and achieved revenue growth year-to-date since the close of acquisition.

Both Dennis and Harris noted that allowing customers the ability to choose how to deploy their contact center solution along with cloud neutrality, a streamlined approach to product management activities has been instrumental in adding more customer seats. I found it interesting that even when the company provided customers and prospects with greater flexibility to choose on-premises versus cloud technology, the overall adoption of cloud across its clientele has increased year-over-year.

This means that while some businesses still prefer deploying their contact center on-premises for myriad reasons (e.g. data security), companies increasingly understand the benefits cloud technology provides with the ability to easily adjust to changing customer traffic, predict operational expenses, and migrate to cloud technology.

Product Updates

David Funck, CTO, Peter Lavache, VP of Product & Program Management, and Michael Kropidlowski also shared updates on the company’s overall product portfolio and architecture. Among the many updates was the company’s activities to help firms more easily access data stored across various technology systems.

Lack of easy and timely access to customer data is a significant hurdle negatively impacting agent productivity and performance, according to Aberdeen’s research. In fact, on average, 14% of agents’ time is spent looking for data across various systems. Best-in-Class contact centers make this process easier by establishing a single view of customer data across all systems and make this view easily accessible to the agent through a unified agent desktop. As such, this focus on helping firms easily access data across all systems is vital to boost agent productivity and performance.

As expected, the event also featured discussion on artificial intelligence (AI), automation and other trending topics. It was interesting to observe that AI wasn’t covered as prominently in product conversations. The company executives noted that many AI capabilities in the market are not very sophisticated. Specifically, many are designed to execute certain workflows (e.g. customer routing) or follow rather simple algorithms versus the true definition of AI, which provides human-like analysis and decision-making capabilities. While it’s true that we’re far away from sophisticated AI capabilities that can mimic human empathy, logic, or decision-making processes, there are still many practical use cases of AI capabilities.

These include continuously optimizing routing based on insights gleaned through machine learning that observes how various factors such as agent skills, customer issues, and other aspects correlate with issue resolution, then route customers based on those insights. Another use case for AI is agent augmentation where use of speech analytics and desktop analytics can reveal the context of a customer interaction, which then allows the AI algorithm to prompt an agent with a recommended knowledge base article or next best action guidance through the agent desktop. Yet another practical use of AI capabilities today is in the area of self-service, with the use of chat bots and intelligent virtual agents (IVAs). These are tools that customers can interact to ask questions and receive answers.

Overview

Many of the above capabilities are already within the company’s product capabilities. As the company continues executing its new strategy, it’ll be interesting to see if it will also incorporate these trending capabilities within its market messaging activities. Are you an Aspect user? What do you think about the above updates? Please share your experiences using the company platform and your expectations to help you accomplish your CX objectives.

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