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Aspect (News - Alert), a unified communications vendor, has announced "measurable results" in its support call center through the use of unified communications capabilities and the Seamless Customer Service UC application for the contact center.

Aspect Technical Services is using Seamless Customer Service for inbound routing, coordinated voice self-service to live service and Ask an Expert functionality. Company officials say they want to provide integrated assistance, to "continue to increase first call resolution and enhance the overall customer experience."

Gary Barnett (News - Alert), chief technology officer and executive vice president, research and development and Aspect Technical Services, Aspect, says unified communications is "bringing concrete benefits to the call center, to the business and the customer, based on our own personal experience in Aspect's customer support center.

"After deploying Seamless Customer Service, our support engineers saw measurable results demonstrating how UC could streamline communications and improve customer service," Barnett noted: "Companies that deploy this technology can expect to use presence, IM routing and reporting capabilities."

Aspect officials said call hold times for their Technical Services have been reduced by 76 percent, to just 44 seconds per call: "Additionally, since the initial introduction of the Ask an Expert capability, the overall first day resolution rate has increased by seven percent and the time to reach a support technician with the correct skill set has improved by eight percent."

Teams using Ask an Expert to reach out to Aspect's experts across the organization have shown overall increases in overall customer satisfaction scores by six percent, measuring 4.79 on a scale of five.

The call center product's features include the capability to use the presence detection, instant messaging and conference calling capabilities of Microsoft (News - Alert) Office Communications Server 2007 R2. This lets support engineers use presence identification and skill criteria to find available experts in other departments to address customer questions.

Last month TMC's (News - Alert) Raju Shanbhag reported that Aspect unveiled new quality management features in its Productive Workforce unified communications application for the contact center.