Mr. Rajeev Soni, General Manager, South Asia & Middle East, Aspect	A+  A-

Rajeev Soni, General Manager South Asia and Middle East at Aspect Software is a renowned expert in productivity enhancement techniques. Under his stewardship, the company not only scaled newer heights in clocking higher sales but has enabled all our clients to quickly realize higher return on investments from this technology.

With competition hotting up in the marketplace, winning or losing is determined by better service, and contact center technology of Aspect clearly helps companies to obtain that edge over others. With more than 12 years of solid experience behind him, Rajeev is a leading votary of contact center technology and passionate about the positive spin-offs the clients can get from this new technology.

An avid golfer and a cricketer, Rajeev, during his spare time, devotes time to pursue these hobbies. He also loves travelling with his family whenever time permits.

Q:Can you share an overview of Unified Communications market in India?

Unified communications (UC) allows companies to build a structure for streamlining communications and connecting people through the adoption of presence and availability awareness tools. These tools meld each individual’s capability for communication with the availability to communicate and the specific knowledge that person holds.

Technologies such as UC become relevant especially during times like economic slowdown when companies are driving cost control. Unified communications technologies fall squarely in this category, with several companies beginning to adopt wide-scale UC strategies. According  to Datamonitor, the UC market is set for continued growth over the next five years at an overall compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4 percent. A key trend is the adoption of UC among enterprises with large end-user interaction, such as FMCG companies and telcos etc, since UC enables better customer connect, and enables the enterprise to deliver higher customer satisfaction and therefore drive loyalty.

Two key variables are implicit in building a creative UC strategy for such companies. One is the end customer, along with an understanding of the tools that the customer uses to connect to the company. The second is the contact center, where agents can use the UC infrastructure to boost and extend the effectiveness of the customer experience. This offers the opportunity for people with relevant expertise, outside the contact center, to become part of the knowledge pool that can be tapped by the agent during the customer interaction. Here, performance optimization technologies, long a staple in the contact center, present a unique opportunity to extend the UC best practices enterprise-wide.

Q:What is the focus for Aspect in India? Can you please explain the nature of work?

We set up our business in India in 2001. In the last few years we have gradually scaled to more than 250 employees today. Today, in India, we have successful presence across Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore in addition to the R&D center. With more than 400 customers and 500+ installations of our unified platform in India, we have a proven track record of unifying siloed communications technologies and enhancing customer-company communications. Moreover we also enjoy a strong presence across verticals. Globally, we help two-thirds of the FORTUNE Global 100 companies and small and medium enterprises power their business processes with Aspect unified communications solutions. Also, we recently announced a global strategic alliance with Microsoft that clearly represents our joint commitment to UC and to connecting the enterprise and the contact center

On the technology front, we have introduced five new software products to bring UC to the contact center. The solutions include Blended Interaction™, Seamless Customer Service™, Productive Workforce™, Streamlined Collections™, and Optimized Collections™. These applications provide a wide array of services necessary for efficient operations of call centers and BPOs.  The applications enable organizations to turn the potential of unified communications into real business results, through enhanced knowledge worker and agent productivity and by helping optimize business processes throughout the enterprise and contact centre for improved agility and responsiveness.

In fact, our customers include leading companies across the world: American Airlines, American Express, British Airways, British Gas, China Eastern Airlines, CitiGroup, Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), Daimler Chrysler, Discover Financial Services, FedEx, General Electric, Hilton Reservations Worldwide, JC Penney, Lands' End, Lloyds TSB, MCI, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Verizon, U.S. Airways, VW Credit, Wachovia Corporation and Wipro.

Q:How important is the right customer strategy for enterprises especially today when the customers are highly empowered? 

Yes, consumers today have more power than ever before. A dramatic increase in publicly available information and communication channels has gradually shifted the power from businesses to customers and has inverted the dynamic between the two. This wave of the power shift was triggered with the onset of Web 2.0 – the transformation of the Internet from an information source to a collaborative public forum. This shift is fundamentally changing the way consumers choose with which companies they do business. The unprecedented ability for consumers to reach out to other consumers, combined with the staying power of their self-published messages, gives them a forum in which they can share thoughts and ideas about the companies they love, and those they love to hate. Clearly, it is here to stay and companies must either embrace it or endure the consequences.

As the front-line touch point for customer-company interactions, the contact center can enable a company to become known for exceeding consumers’ expectations, while generating customer and brand loyalty, and increasing financial performance. Businesses that accept this new age of consumer empowerment must revisit existing customer strategies to ensure business processes are aligned to deliver optimum results. This includes assessing segmentation strategies, service delivery, interaction channels and technology while continually refining those based on customer and market feedback. Companies that choose to reconnect with the consumer by listening to and responding to their powerful voice will be poised for success in this new age

Q:Can you share some details on Aspect applications?

In 2009, Aspect introduced an innovative set of unified communications solutions to the market, delivering both software and services to help companies streamline communications and optimize business processes. As a worldwide leader in the IT domain, Aspect drew decades of insights gained working with the world’s leading companies on mission-critical customer contact to introduce some of its new global applications, six in all, for India. Our innovation is not just in understanding customer needs and choosing the right solutions that will deliver maximum benefit in an Indian scenario, but also delivering them to customer in a manner that is tailored to suit their current technology and usage environments. [See list A].

 Aspect’s currently offers five new UC applications that include:  

• Seamless Customer Service™delivers the tools needed for comprehensive call response, including coordinated self-service/live service and integrated assistance to improve first call resolution and enhance the overall customer experience.
• Blended Interaction™ provides inbound, outbound, self service and workforce optimization capabilities. By eliminating complex integration and providing common management, reporting and administration, Blended Interaction gives contact centers greater visibility, control and staffing efficiency in your multichannel contact center.
• Streamlined Collections™automates early stage collections and enables expert agent engagement for a more effective delinquent account targeting strategy so contact centers can get more promises to pay faster and improve collections results.
• Productive Workforce™delivers the tools and processes to help you optimize resource utilization and adopt a continuous improvement culture. By motivating agents throughout their workforce lifecycle, contact centers can service more customers with fewer agents, reduce customer interaction costs, and improve customer service, sales and collections results.
• Optimized Collections™ utilizes performance, workforce and campaign management to enhance contact and calling strategies by applying the right resources at the right times to increase right party contacts, lower staffing costs, improve collector effectiveness and collections results.

Q:Can you share same details about your alliance with Microsoft? How are you supporting customers adopt this new technology?

At Aspect, we had recognized the significance of unified communications as a platform for transforming customer-company interactions. Microsoft saw the implications of UC in the contact centre to deliver a competitive advantage for organizations looking to streamline their customer-facing business processes and partnered with Aspect, the world’s largest company solely focused on the contact centre.
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As a deliverable from this alliance, we introduced Seamless Customer Service with the new Ask an Expert ™feature that utilizes the instant messaging and presence technology available in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. This solution enables contact centers to seamlessly escalate customer interactions to different channels – phone, IM, e-mail or conferencing – while addressing reliability, scalability and reporting needs.

With this feature, agents can identify available experts in the enterprise based on specific skill sets to address customer inquiries, therefore streamlining business processes and improving first-call resolution. 

Also, to demonstrate the value of unified communications across a global organization, we have completed the deployment of Office Communications Server 2007 across our global offices and 1,700 employees, including the sites in India. We are already seeing aggressive ROI numbers, including reduced conference calling costs of $75,000 per month and additional cost savings resulting from the use of session initiation protocol (SIP) Trunking.

With regard to support for customers on this new technological advancements, we have built a professional services and systems integration practice - unified communications services.  This service will help customers with planning through implementation and support of Microsoft unified communications products, including Office Communications Server in their contact centers and throughout their enterprises for software-powered voice, instant messaging, presence and conferencing.

Q:What are the key challenges faced by the players in India?

The challenges faced by UC players are not unlike those faced by overall technology solutions providers. Technology deployments are not about sending out a request for proposal and selecting the least cost supplier. They are about intelligently using existing resources, and adding new ones, to deliver a powerful ROI. In a sense, and especially with UC deployments, the sum of the whole benefit is far higher than the sum of the parts (piecemeal benefits). While UC adoption is on an upswing, there is not enough awareness yet regarding the potential impact it can have on a business bottomline. Two key challenges here revolve around reluctance to try new technologies because first the enterprises have legacy infrastructure and are afraid to take the next step to invest in new age technology. SMBs believe that UC is ‘not for them’. Both the above are mindsets that must change if Corporate India must move the needle both in its use of technology to drive business growth, and also to come on par with the rest of the world

Lastly, many believe that India is a price sensitive market, more so than the western world. But I believe India is a value-driven market, and nothing is too expensive for the India customer mindset if the returns are tangible and rapid. And UC delivers exactly that. Tangible cost savings, better productivity, good ROI – and all within a short time span. Today, with the worst of the economic slump hopefully over, having exposed even the smallest inefficiency in the system, businesses in India are poised just right to make this leap into a communications enabled business process.

Updated on: 15 Feb, 2010