Aspect Software has announced significant customer and agent experience enhancements to Zipwire, the company’s 100% cloud contact centre solution.
The enhancements improve customers’ ability to engage on a variety of communication channels and the new Agent Desktop features greatly improve agent interactions by helping to create better efficiency, productivity and performance.
“To the consumer, a customer journey is not a string of events in isolation, it is one continuous conversation. So when their “info” is not carried from interaction to interaction, in the consumer’s eyes, that conversation becomes fractured and frustrating,” says Joe Gagnon, senior vice-president and GM: Cloud Solutions at Aspect. “Our latest enhancements to Zipwire not only address a growing consumer desire for mobile and self-service based experiences, they also address the demand to have interaction continuity between channels. We recognise that creating a great customer experience requires an equally outstanding experience for the agent, too.”
Additional highlights of the release include:
* Mobile and Web APIs – Enables support for two-way audio and video conversation including file transfer for desktop and mobile applications.
* Presence – Zipwire now provides indication of resource availability directly from the Agent Desktop.
* Personal and group-based routing – An incoming interaction can now be distributed to the agent who handled previous interactions with the same customer or related to the same case.
* Voicemail greetings – Agent driven voicemail management, and support for multiple VM greetings.
* A realtime data feed – Contact center key performance indicators (KPIs) can be used to power external system integrations.
Also included in the Zipwire enhancements is ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) support. ARIA provides a means to make web applications more accessible to a diverse range of users, including those who use assistive technologies like speech to text. The ARIA support enables use of the Agent Desktop with a screen reader for inbound call processing, including consult calls, transfers, and internal chat. Screen readers are software programs that allow blind or visually impaired users to read computer text with a speech synthesiser or braille display.
According to Gartner, in a research note published earlier this year, weak mobile customer service is harming customer engagement. Gartner noted that nearly 60% of customer service interactions required the intervention of a human support agent in 2014. But by 2017, this will be cut nearly in half through “more radical self-service, communities, alerts and mobile devices”.
Zipwire is part of Aspect’s global cloud, managed services and telco infrastructure, representing one of the largest cloud businesses in the industry.
