A NetworkWorld article summarizing the acquisition says “Aspect will apply SharePoint directly to contact centers, for example, enabling such services as expert search in which agents can find subject matter experts company-wide to answer callers’ questions.”

It should be interesting to see how Aspect takes the skills and intellectual property of Quilogy and expands its portfolio of unified communications and contact center offerings.

When this situation occurs, the Level 1 support technician that has reached the end of their troubleshooting flowchart without arriving at a viable resolution for you must find a more experienced and/or knowledgeable technician to escalate the problem to. Preferably, a technician with specific expertise with your exact issue.

With traditional call center systems and processes, identifying and locating the right person to address the issue most efficiently, and thereby deliver the best possible customer service, is daunting at best. With unified communications, and presence, though, the contact center can be transformed into a paragon of efficiency and superior customer service.

In How Unified Communications Can Improve the Contact Center, the author states “Now, with UC, they can search a complete list of subject matter experts (together with their presence availability), and contact them via IM or telephone, in order to get the information they need, when they need it. Finding the right resource in this way may not only solve the problem on a single call but also lead to higher customer satisfaction, increased sales, and more successful cross and up-selling of products. No wonder many companies are already reporting over 100% ROIs on their UC investments!”

If you have a contact center or customer support department, you should definitely be looking at the ways that unified communications can streamline your processes and enable you to improve customer satisfaction while cutting costs.

Jamie Ryan, Senior Vice President of IT and Chief Information Officer of Aspect, wrote this eWeek.com article about building a successful unified communications strategy which similarly stresses that “evaluating the technology necessary for a rollout and developing a timeline is key to the success of any UC strategy.”

Ryan goes on to discuss the need to assess the underlying network infrastructure to make sure it is capable of providing the bandwidth and quality necessary for unified communications and upgrading the network if need be.

The article provides an interesting and informative look at the approach that Aspect took to planning and deploying unified communications internally. The process followed by Aspect can help you to understand the sorts of questions that should be considered and pitfalls to avoid as you explore implementing unified communications for your organization.

Aspect recently announced that this December they will roll out Unified IP v6.6. According to the article “Aspect Unified IP 6.6 is designed to offer an ask-an-expert capability using the instant messaging and presence technology available in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. This newest feature enables Aspect Unified IP to seamlessly integrate to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 to specifically request real-time presence information.”