Chelmsford, Mass. - 12 November 2009 - Aspect, a unified communications (UC) solutions provider, today announced the general availability of new quality management features in its Productive Workforce™ unified communications application for the contact center. PerformanceEdge(R) Quality Management 3.0 offers a number of features for improved business processes across multiple agents, sites and platforms. New capabilities provide cradle-to-grave interaction tracking, enhanced security and compliance, improved alerting, redundancy, system management, and increased features for outsourcers, allowing for full-time call logging and quality recording in mid- to large-sized contact centers. The new features add significant value to Productive Workforce, enabling companies to leverage robust, scalable quality management functionality with leading workforce management and performance management capabilities.

"The newest quality management features of Productive Workforce are helping us improve the quality and consistency of our customer interactions," said Demetric Anamateros, vice president of sales and customer service, RCN. "Having the ability to monitor agent audio and screens in real-time as well as record the interaction on-demand helps us gain greater insight and control over the level of service we’re providing, which is critical to our customer care strategies. New system management features such as enhanced encryption and advanced archiving will allow us to ensure recording security while providing ease of administration. Aspect has continued to deliver the capabilities we’ve needed to pinpoint areas for improvement in our contact center operations and ultimately improve customer satisfaction."

The new capabilities of PerformanceEdge Quality Management 3.0 include:

• Security and PCI compliance capabilities- Companies that require increased security and payment card industry (PCI) compliance, such as financial services organizations, can leverage PerformanceEdge Quality Management features like enhanced encryption for secure transmission of recordings over the network and in storage. This includes functionality such as auto-generation of encryption keys and customer-provided key input in addition to audit trail reporting and automatic pause/resume functionality to prevent recording sensitive data (e.g. payment information).
• Scalable architecture for enterprise contact centers- Mid- to large-sized call centers can record and monitor multichannel interactions across several locations for thousands of agents and also leverage an enterprise multisite option for centralized searching and administration.
• True "cradle-to-grave" recording of customer interactions- Speech self service interactions can now be recorded in addition to agent-customer conversations and "tied" together for ease of playback providing additional insight into total contact quality and agent performance.
• Improved agent management capabilities- Supervisors can leverage live monitoring of agent audio and screens for quality and training purposes as well as for real-time assistance during a customer interaction. Supervisors also have the ability to go from live monitoring to ad-hoc recording with a click of the mouse. The solution also offers expanded coaching capabilities and advanced scorecard features for improved performance management and training opportunities.
• Outsourcer recording features- Outsourcer clients can access recordings of interactions by team, port or skill via secure partitioning features. Audio and screens for all outsourced agents, including outside the firewall, can be recorded and monitored.
• Enhanced redundancy and alerting- Additional redundancy capabilities now ensure business continuity, as well as advanced error trapping capabilities for enabling proactive system monitoring and alerting.
• New integrations to third party platforms and back-office recording- Companies can leverage recording of calls, screens, emails and chats outside the call center on a number of third-party platforms.

"Our customers continue to discuss the importance of quality management capabilities that can easily be implemented in today’s enterprise architectures to improve customer interactions and ensure high levels of security. These requirements address the needs of our biggest customers including both outsourcers and large-scale contact centers," said Andy Bezaitis, senior vice president of product management, Aspect. "The quality management capabilities of Productive Workforce will help our customers gain even broader insight into interactions in the call center and a deeper understanding of enterprise communication processes. The knowledge gleaned from these recordings will be critical for organizations to improve multichannel communications in the enterprise and leverage UC to gain a competitive advantage."

About Aspect Software:
Aspect Software is solely focused on providing products and services for customer care, sales, telemarketing and collections for in-house and outsourcer contact centers. Each day, companies around the globe conduct more than 125 million customer interactions using Aspect’s flexible, reliable solutions for automatic call distribution (ACD), predictive dialing, workforce management, analytics, IVR and multi-channel contact.