Aspect Software Launches Contact Center: Unplugged Blog

Aspect Software, Inc., the world?s largest company solely focused on the contact center, announced today it has launched Contact Center: Unplugged, a blog from the company?s technology leaders, Gary Barnett, Roger Sumner and Jim Mitchell. The new blog will offer postings from the three industry luminaries that will explore a range of topics impacting the contact center ? from new and future technology, agent interactions and business processes, to their own experiences as consumers.

Gary Barnett, the founding engineer of Aspect Communications more than 25 years ago developed that company’s first automatic call distributor (ACD). He was also the founding engineer at Octel Communications and founder of Prospect Software, which pioneered computer-telephony integration in the early 1990s. Roger Sumner has more than 25 years in the contact center industry and was the co-inventor of the Aspect Spectrum® ACD. And, Jim Mitchell, one of the founders of Davox more than 25 years ago, introduced the Aspect Unison® Predictive Dialer which helped to revolutionize the outbound dialing process.

?Our focus is to enhance communications with our customers and prospects, as well as to build an engaged community for the contact center industry using a variety of tools, including the blog and RSS feeds,? said Jim Foy, president and CEO of Aspect Software. ?With such well-respected members of the contact center industry as our technology leaders, it makes sense to showcase their views on where the industry is headed and their insight into how companies can continuously improve their company-customer interactions.?

Available at http://www.aspect.com/go/blog , the Contact Center: Unplugged blog includes an option for readers to provide feedback on the comments made in the blog. Since launching the blog on 22 September 2006, content has included Jim Mitchell?s view on proactive customer service using predictive dialer technology and Roger Sumner?s insight on planning a successful disaster recovery plan.

?The three of us spend a huge amount of time with customers, learning about their particular business challenges and seeing some very interesting and well-executed business practices. This has given us a lot of insight into contact center operations and how technology is being applied — and we are pleased to have the opportunity to share our broad view of the industry with you,? said Gary Barnett, chief technology officer at Aspect Software. ?Not to mention, as consumers ourselves, we also have the perspective of what it?s like to interact with companies ? the good and the bad. Contact Center: Unplugged is the ideal forum for us to get our thoughts out to a much broader audience, while also giving readers the chance to provide their unique views.?

In addition, Aspect Software now offers Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds for subscribers to have Aspect information pushed to them. RSS, also known as Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary, allows Internet users to receive news articles, blog updates, newsletters and other original content. Subscribers are able to have specific ?feeds? of items distributed in an XML-based format pushed to readers or aggregators, like Bloglines, My Yahoo!, or Newsgator.

The Aspect RSS feeds offer information in three separate areas:

• Aspect News RSS feed: The latest news and information on Aspect Software.

• Contact Center Insight RSS feed: Customer Service, Collections, Sales and Telemarketing business process information including customer case studies, white papers, opinion papers and newsletters.

• Blog RSS feed: Contact Center: Unplugged blog content.

Subscriptions to the Aspect Software RSS feeds can be created at http://www.aspect.com/go/rss or by clicking on the orange RSS or XML buttons on various pages of the Aspect Software website at http://www.aspect.com .