After attending the Aspect ACE event and speaking to hundreds of the attendees, I thought I would share my perspective on the event. In full disclosure, MicroAutomation has a product – OmniEngage – that Aspect cloud and premise customers using Aspect CXP leverage to power customer engagement across any channel. That said, we maintain a vendor agnostic approach to best serve our customers and work with a wide range of vendors in the contact center industry. I had a great time at the event and enjoyed speaking to a lot of professionals that are on the front lines of customer service everyday.
A primary theme from Aspect centered on the impact of digital transformation on self-service, agents, customer experience, and the opportunity to leverage digital to disrupt your industry. When hearing about this subject in detail by the Aspect CEO, Stew Bloom, and GE Digital Chief Product Officer, Brad Surak, it reminded me of a Forbes article I head read – Top 10 Trends For Digital Transformation In 2017 – notably the following 3 items:
For the past half decade, I have been working with our customers on digital business transformation and especially on removing friction through reduced customer effort. To create a great customer experience, I focus on 3 key areas:
If you do one thing different on all future projects – discuss with your team and challenge them to always find ways to value a customer’s time.
The various teams at Aspect did a great job in describing the use of their products to take advantage of the digital transformation. I took away from the event that a lot of focus on item #2 “Innovation must happen rapidly” now exists across the all product lines, especially within Aspect Via. The time and cost of implementing a new solution, or upgrading an existing one, continues to decline while the range of functionality continues to expand. This concept was further supported by the large number of Aspect customer use cases presented at the event.
During the event, I had the opportunity to introduce our OmniEngage product to hundreds of attendees. From a self-service perspective, I was asking the attendees if they had projects lined up or already in production with customer service items that would fit into the broad definition of digital transformation:
Conclusion
Trend Hunter CEO, Jeremy Gutsche, provided an excellent keynote on innovation. I had the in the past read Jeremy’s book and seen him on YouTube. Whether we take the nod from Jeremy on better and faster or from Stew/Brad on digital transformation, companies need to look both at self-service and agent channels for innovation. Whether you start with next generation IVR, ITR, Omnichannel or chatbot – time to innovate