At a time when enterprise and the SMB community is continuously looking at ways to enhance their communications fabric with their customers, Aspect helps enterprise contact centers deliver unique customer experiences across every conversation and every channel – with the help of a single software platform. Sriram Viswanathan, Director-Channels & Alliances for India & Middle East, Aspect, speaks with ChannelDrive.in on the core focus for Aspect and how does the company look at Cloud and Virtualisation trends today.
What are the big priorities for the company today? How important are the Indian operations for the company?
Today the domain of customer engagement is fast evolving. Every day there are new platforms of customer-brand interaction getting introduced. Aspect has been an innovator in interaction management space and ensuring that enterprises stay in middle of conversations. We have also expanded our solution portfolio which now includes not just customer interaction, but also interactions and processes within an organization.
Today, our portfolio includes Unified Interaction solutions with workforce management & optimization and Back Office solutions. We are constantly innovating these solutions and that’s the priority at Aspect, i.e, providing customers with a great customer interaction experience. In India, we are equally committed as any other market, and this reflects in the fact that our Indian operations have been consistently seeing more investments.
How does the company look at growth in India and Middle East? Where is this growth likely to come from?
Both India and the Middle East are fast-growing regions with regards to the contact center business. These are the fastest adopters of social media platforms. This speaks volume about the shift these regions are witnessing and are about to witness. Thus there is no doubt that these regions are expected to deliver the next big growth platforms at Aspect. From a vertical standpoint, I see a lot of traction in the e-commerce, healthcare, hospitality, besides outsourcing. Government too is adding a lot of emphasis on citizen inclusion and engagement and that too will be a vertical to focus upon. Both these markets provide us with ample opportunity to grow and strengthen our business.
Cloud computing and virtualization are gaining importance with the enterprise as well as SMBs today. How does the company look at embracing these two technologies?
A lot is already being said about cloud computing and virtualization, and both these technologies are seeing a very high adoption rate amongst our customers in India and Middle East. Aspect is the first organization to offer Contact Center on Cloud solutions. Our other endeavours too reflect our strategy.
For example Aspect key investments in Voxeo. Voxeo is a specialists in cloud, hybrid and premise-based deployments while adding a market-leading IVR and multi-channel self-service capability to Aspects solution portfolio. Another significant investment has been with Zipwire, which has made comprehensive cloud offering of the Aspect – Voxeo capabilities possible. Alliance has been made with LiveVox which has enabled us to offer the most comprehensive SaaS, PaaS, and private cloud portfolio to BPO industry.
In line with market demands, we have ensured that all our products today embrace both these technologies. Our customer contact center products are Cloud enabled and we have different set of products for enterprises and SMBs which allow them to be on the Cloud which is cost effective and efficient.
What is your channel strategy for India and how many channel partners work with Aspect today? Is there any expansion being planned in this area?
With our continued focus on the Indian market, we are seeing that our partners are contributing to our new logo strategy and creating wider engagements in existing accounts. Over the last decade, Aspect has created a strong, multi-layer partner network to cater to different type and size of market requirements. Our mix of tier 1 and tier 2 partners today help us serve clients in a wide geography and from largest of enterprises to midsize as well.
While most of our partners are India’s leading System Integrators who are capable to take care of customer requirements beyond just Aspect solutions, we have specialist partners as well for our Back Office and Workforce solutions.On a relationship front, Aspect has a long lasting relationship with each of our partners. Trust and enablement are two key pillars of our relationship which help this association strengthened.
What kind of challenges do you face in India? And how do you plan to overcome these challenges?
We are currently in a market environment that is stiff with competition. Partners make it possible for us to reach all the geographies that we cover as part of Aspect as well as in countries / cities where we do not have any direct offices. Our partners are Mid to Large SIs who already have technology intelligence and have a presence in enterprises across industry. We work with our partners to empower them and hence overcome competition.
One of the key challenges is in the amount of trained people on the ground that can talk the language of the customer and then dovetail into an Aspect product solution. At Aspect, we have structured training programs on implementation of our products and we publish a calendar in advance for our partners to schedule in advance. Partners are given access to our demo labs that they can use to simulate customer scenarios. They can also purchase demo equipment for use in their own labs.
