Aspect Software Releases Aspect Spectrum ACD 10.1

Aspect Software, Inc. announced the general availability of Aspect Spectrum ACD 10.1, designed to help companies reduce costs and increase flexibility through feature-rich routing, administration and real-time and historical reporting for both traditional voice and now session initiation protocol (SIP)-based Voice over IP (VoIP).

The new VoIP capability of Aspect Spectrum ACD 10.1 allows contact centers to more easily support and administer low-cost remote agents by enabling them to redirect any call to any location on its network, as well as helps reduce costs by eliminating associated carrier charges. Contact centers can also use the product as a toll bypass application – alleviating costly tie lines between centers or by enabling IP trunks, allowing the call to be routed over an existing LAN/WAN to other SIP-based interfaces.  And because a contact center can easily extend its network with VoIP and quickly bring new agents online without any special equipment requirements, Aspect Spectrum ACD 10.1 enables improved disaster recovery functionality.

“The Aspect Spectrum ACD 10.1 release provides numerous operational enhancements, as well as added functionality to allow for a smooth transition to VoIP. We are highly mindful of the need to provide our customer’s paths to new capabilities, like SIP-based VoIP, that leverage their existing investment, involves minimal disruption to their operations and most importantly provides them greater flexibility, control and choice,” said Gary Barnett, chief technology officer and executive vice president at Aspect Software.

Teleperformance México, a leading customer relationship management and teleservice provider to the Mexican and Hispanic American markets, is relying on Aspect Spectrum ACD to enhance its service and productivity.

“As a company that provides both inbound and outbound customer service and sales support, Teleperformance México needs a highly reliable and extremely feature-rich contact center solution,” said Eduardo Padron, chief information officer at Teleperformance México.  “Because we are always looking for ways to enhance the service and productivity of our contact center, we were excited about the new version of Aspect Spectrum ACD.  We have completed our evaluation of the product and its new VoIP capability and are very pleased with the ease of implementation and the high level of performance.  When fully deployed throughout our contact centers, we expect to benefit from reduced infrastructure costs and improved disaster recovery capabilities while maintaining the high levels of service and reliability our customers expect from us.”

Aspect Spectrum ACD 10.1 also includes enhancements to monitoring, security and the Web Powered Agent desktop.  Monitoring application improvements include more real-time data display options and added threshold setting and viewing capabilities.  Platform enhancements consist of automated testing and diagnostic additions, expanded log files for more detailed diagnostic information, and improved firewall friendliness through network address translation (NAT) router compatibility.

For improved security, Aspect Spectrum ACD 10.1 now leverages lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP)/Active Directory to enable contact centers to implement their standard company resource access methodology, along with IT/IS authentication policies to enable the appropriate contact center administrators to access client desktop applications.  In addition, agent desktop clients, like Web Powered Agent now provide expanded customer data and application password encryption along with improved authentication procedures. Other Web Powered Agent enhancements include expanded agent scheduling tools, dial lists, statistic displays, redundancy and load balancing.

Aspect Software has initiated a promotion to offer customers IP Starter and IP PLUS Starter bundles to cost effectively introduce IP connectivity into their contact center.  The IP Starter bundle provides a 24 port license that can be used to connect agents through VoIP using SIP 2.0 enabled soft or hard phones.  The IP PLUS Starter bundle provides a 24 port license, plus 24 Web Powered Agent licenses and 24 Polycom desktop phones, allowing customer to test a thin client desktop and soft phone in addition to IP connectivity.