Today’s customers are looking for not only the best service, but also the best service across all channels of communication. We live in an increasingly connected world, and with that level of instant gratification and access, most people expect customer service to operate the same way. Customer service solutions are used in industries across the map these days, such as aviation, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, telecommunications, retail and more. All customers, no matter the business, are demanding the same level of service.

Aspect (News - Alert) Software, a leader in customer engagement solutions, helps enterprise contact centers achieve a high-quality customer experience by delivering service across every channel, all through a single, elegant software platform. Aspect’s unified interaction management, workforce optimization and back-office solutions are designed to orchestrate people, process and touch points so that everyone can communicate with ease. A huge part of that communication network is mobile—tablets, smartphones, anything with a wireless connection. Businesses and consumers alike are going mobile, and it’s time customer service did too.

TMC (News - Alert) recently had the chance to catch up with Michael Kropidlowski, director of product marketing for Aspect Software, to discuss the influence of mobility on customer service today.

TMC: How has mobility changed the way you and your team work?

Michael Kropidlowski: Aspect embraces mobility with the customer experience solutions we build and for how our own company collaborates. The biggest impact on our mobility has been our Microsoft Lync technology. Working from home, the office or while traveling is a seamless experience. The same phone, chat, conference, file sharing, screen sharing capabilities that we have on our desktops are on our mobile devices. As a company, Aspect has experienced firsthand the increased productivity that comes from mobility. Every Aspect employee has access to all Aspect team members and has an understanding of their availability with Lync presence. Since it is VoIP, Aspect has also benefitted from saving costs as all Aspect employees are able to locally call even when traveling across U.S. or internationally.       

TMC: How has mobility impacted the way you interact with your customers?

Kropidlowski: The first thing we did to ensure our own customers could interact with Aspect in a mobile environment was to ensure that our Web experience on all customer facing sites (Aspect.com, Aspect Customer Care Center, and Aspect Community) are optimized for mobile. The sites render by device, PC, smartphone, or tablet.

For Aspect’s Customer Experience (ACE) events we build mobile apps on our own CXP platform. These apps ensure a smooth experience for our customers by enabling attendees to find conference rooms, speaker bios, schedules etc.

Aspect understands that our customers are mobile and social.  We communicate on social channels where our customers are including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, Google+, YouTube (News - Alert), and Instagram. These mobile communication platforms break down communication barriers by allowing easy sharing of videos, photos and links.       

TMC: What functions/applications has your business moved to the cloud that you were once running on-premises?   How has migrating to cloud benefitted you?

Kropidlowski: At Aspect we practice what we preach on cloud.  Aspect is garnering huge benefits across our business from cloud adoption. We currently leverage 18 cloud vendors and are considering more. A move to the cloud lowers IT costs, provides easier access to upgrades, and the ability for users to login to their account from any location or device. Our current vendors are listed below:

• HR – iCIMS, Success Factored
• Finance – Concur (travel and expenses), ADP (Payroll), NetSuite (Accounting)
• Marketing  - SilverPop, EverWeb
• Sales – SFDC, iApprove, Service Source (News - Alert), Channelitivity
• IT – WatchDax, EpiServer
• Customer Service – SalesForce ServiceCloud, jive, Axios
• Corporate  - BaseCamp
• DocuSign

Not only do we use cloud solutions but we also provide them to our customers. With our cloud solutions our customers enjoy a scalable solution that's flexible enough to quickly adapt as business needs change.

Kropidlowski will be taking his more than 20 years worth of customer service and contact center industy insights to ITEXPO (News - Alert), being help August 11-14 in Las Vegas, where he will be speaking in two sessions—“Using Technology Investment to Put the Customer First” and “Multimodal Customer Engagement: Because All Your Customers Aren't the Same.”