Aspect Software headquartered in Massachusetts offers Aspect Unified UP, a call center solution for enterprise contact centers. It supports an omnichannel customer experience across voice, email, chat, SMS, IM, and social channels.
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Genesys PureConnect (discontinued)
Score 6.1 out of 10
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Genesys PureConnect was an omnichannel contact center platform that offered cloud-based or on-premise deployments. It featured a SIP-based architecture with VoIP capabilities, allowing companies to connect legacy voice systems and use existing phones. A legacy product, new users are encouraged to investigate Genesys Cloud.
Aspect Unified IP is perfect to handle multiple outbound dialing campaigns, with tools that allow you to configure how customers must be reached, call them at different phone numbers by the time of the day, set priorities when dialing, or gather information about all running campaigns in dashboards in real-time.
CIC is best suited for business models that rely on heavily leverage Data Integration especially one like ours that require real-time and high-speed data access for billing and customer integration. CIC is not well suited for small organizations < 50 where they are only answering phones in the course of doing business VS. the business is the phone.
Integrates inbound and outbound call routing in one platform, allowing agents to work in a seamless blend mode between all call types (inbound, predictive, manual).
Allows you to associate an account number with every agent phone call, the call type, and the reccording ID giving you the critical datapoints necessary to research, put together a customers experience from a telephony perspective, etc.
Create agent templates to streamline agent setup reducing the potential for admins to configure an agent incorrectly, placing them in services they aren't skilled for and vice versa.
Aspect Unified IP is very competent to handle most customers' needs in the contact center and it delivers what is promised. The only negative aspect is the costs of services, maintenance and professional services, too expensive.
We are so embedded on Pure Connect that we like to progress with it. For instance, we are looking into ways to provide different solutions to our customers, help our business to succeed, and work in a better CX.
One of the biggest advantages is that all is in one platform.
The interface is only semi user-friendly on almost every front. Agent experience is lacking and we have found many limitations within the system. Workforce forecasting is not as robust as expected. Quality continues to be a struggle. Interaction searches are not robust.
The application itself uses a hub and spoke model that can help isolate errors in one section of the application from the rest, creating a much more stable overall program. Of all of the outages that we've had with our contact center platform, I can count on one hand how often it was truly a Genesys issue rather than a network issue, server issue or issue with a platform relied upon for an integration (web services, db calls).
Some of the client applications take a bit of time on initial load, but with the move towards web based applications that issue is alleviated. You can tell that effort really isn't putting into the desktop apps any longer and that the client development effort is being put into bringing Interaction Connect closer to feature parity with the desktop (and bringing wholly new features to Connect). As far as IVR operations, web service calls, database operations: they all operate reasonably.
Some cases are resolved quickly others are taking longer and the reseller sometimes has to chase support several times and explain the issue seen several times. While being a direct customer before, I recognise this and it seems that when a case moves to another engineer they don’t read the previous case notes or don’t understand what has been done. This, from a customers perspective, slows down resolution times.
I liked the setup of the whole class. The instructor knew the topic well enough to answer questions from entry level to a more advanced one.
Instructor encouraged participation of the whole class and was able to engage every one. Also provided "real live" examples so everyone can relate to it.
The online training itself is good. You are provided resources and can self study to a certain point, but the pacing always felt off. Either snails pace or like trying to drink from a fire hose. I think this easily could have had to do with course material and my personal preparations, though. I would say my main gripe is that since the acquisition the team responsible for actually booking training is very unresponsive and often not knowledgeable about the courses they offer. Booking my last training was a real chore.
Don't try to go the perfect solution as a first target. Work on answer the more needs with a simple solution. Then analyse and try again to answer the most needs with adding a bit if complexity only if require. No needs to customise straight from the beginning or deployment takes too long.
We had evaluated Avaya. It was pretty good as well. However, we wanted a more software driven solution. Aspect also was able to give better results in our Proof of Concept.
Call Manager, you had to buy all the components that are out of the box for PureConnect. The licensing model is more expensive on the Cisco side vs the Genesys PureConnect side. Lastly was on the Cisco side since you have to connect/integrate all the components on the cisco side you have to have so many vendors to install those parts. This drives the cost up even more so it was not worth going that route for our organization.
Genesys PureConnect's core and adjunct model allows for fairly easy growth in satellite locations via off site session managers, remote located media servers, remote content servers, etc to allow you to spread the infrastructure out while not pushing as much network traffic to your core data centers.
As stated before, we have been using UIP for over a decade now. Prior to this tool we had agents logging into Avaya for inbound, and using CTI fuctionality to bounce the agent back and forth between inbound and any predictive campaigns. By moving to Aspect it allowed us to streamline that process, reduce agent downtime, lost efficiency, while at the same time consolidationg all of our call center telephony data into one central location allowing us to easily track a customers telephony experience over any period of time.
The only negative impact is due to the upgrade schedule that has made for some interesting challenges forcing us to utilize IT resources that could have been used on more critical corporate projects. These upgrades might not be as big of a deal for any company out there that does not have a lot of integration with Aspect such as custom reporting, data loads, API hooks, etc.
We're improving our CX by optimizing our call centers, using additional attributes and keys to identify the best rep for the job.
We are also streamlining the journey of each individual customer by using PureConnect as the central interface for omnichannel interactions, allowing us to pick up the conversation where we left off.
Using additional attributes that start with the contact center interaction, we're able to track a student journey and proactively step in - increasing our individualized support to focus on the student outcome.
