CHELMSFORD, MA -- (Marketwire) -- 01/07/13 --

• Partnership with Lithium Technologies combines powerful social media expertise with contact center best practices
• Customer-centric organizations can extend capabilities beyond listening by turning social monologues into productive, effective dialogues
• Cloud-based offering is purpose-built for the contact center with social engagements supported by Aspect's unified platform for interaction management and workforce optimization

Aspect Software, a leading provider of next generation customer contact and enterprise workforce optimization, today announced the launch of Aspect Social, a cloud-based offering that aligns interactions organizations have with customers on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and online communities with their overall customer contact operations. Companies can move beyond passive social channel monitoring and delivering ad-hoc responses, to empowering contact center agents to expertly act in a disciplined, timely way on inquiries or comments in the social sphere or even proactively engage customers in anticipation of disruptive events such as power outages or travel delays.

"Most companies today simply monitor social media conversations on marketing campaigns or promotions on the social web, sometimes responding to them but, more often ignoring them. However, as customers increasingly turn to social networks for customer service response interaction, organizations need to embrace social media as a vital, two-way channel that can amplify their ability to deliver a differentiated customer experience," says Jim Freeze, chief marketing officer of Aspect. "By aligning social customer care with the metrics and processes proven to work in the contact center infrastructure, Aspect Social enables organizations to create genuine customer advocacy by turning social monologues into productive dialogues that grow customer loyalty."

This alignment is something organizations are calling for, as 58 percent of customer service strategy decision makers see managing social media inquiries as their top challenge* and just 4.6 percent say their ability to measure the overall impact of social media is excellent**.

Through a partnership with Lithium Technologies, and alignment with contact center methodology, Aspect is delivering a game-changing social care solution. Aspect's new offering combines the strengths of its market-leading, comprehensive customer contact and workforce optimization platform with the Lithium Social Web™ product that Lithium gained through its recent acquisition of Social Dynamx.

"Enduring customer relationships are built across multiple channels and brands need to implement a sustainable and scalable social strategy," said Mike Betzer, senior vice president, Lithium Social Web. "The Aspect relationship gives us a contact center provider as passionate as us about improving the customer experience and increasing customer engagement to drive measurable business results. Aspect shares our vision of seamless social customer experience and is an excellent partner with a proven ability to combine best-in-class technologies to deliver rich customer care solutions."

Aspect Social provides contact centers the ability to automatically identify, prioritize and route targeted customer service-related social media to the right contact center agent and measure the effectiveness of their response. It provides tools and capabilities specific to the needs of contact center agents and supervisors, including:

• Role-based User Interface - Includes specific features and access levels for agents, supervisors and managers, providing each workgroup within the contact center the tools necessary to create customer service excellence.
• Automated Prioritization and Matching - Use of patented algorithms that score posts for sentiment, relevancy and action-ability. Posts are then matched and auto assigned to the most appropriate agent based on history and skill.
• Advanced Conversation Management - Capability to follow a conversation thread rather than reacting to every post isolated from its context.
• SLA-Based Metrics - Provides a way to establish and track against social service level agreements (SLAs) such as customer satisfaction, handle times and resolution rates so managers and supervisors have insight into KPIs.
• Proactive Social Engagement - Capability to proactively inform social consumers of changes, outages or common solutions.
• CRM Integration - Integration with CRM systems, knowledge bases and communities to give a more comprehensive view into the customer and provide agents with tools to provide a faster and smarter response.

"Constant innovation around delivering a superior customer experience is an essential survival skill in today's marketplace," adds Freeze. "In an era when consumers choose when, where and how they communicate, businesses have a unique opportunity to rally around the total customer experience by placing the contact center at the heart of the customer engagement process. Aspect makes this happen by extending the contact center's history of disciplined, measured, customer-centric contact management to social media."

More information about Aspect Social is available here.

*According to a Forrester study, commissioned by Aspect, of enterprise customer service strategy decision makers
**According to Lithium and MarketingProfs "2012 State of Social Media Marketing Report"

About Lithium Technologies
Lithium helps companies unlock the passion of their customers. Lithium software powers amazing Social Customer Experiences for more than 400 iconic brands including AT&T, BT, Best Buy, Indosat, Sephora, Skype and Telstra. Lithium helps companies grow brand advocacy, drive sales, reduce costs and accelerate innovation to create a brand nation that redefines the customer experience. For more information, visit http://www.lithium.com, or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and our own brand nation -- the Lithosphere. Lithium is privately held with corporate headquarters in Emeryville, Calif. and offices in Europe, Asia and Australia.

About Aspect
Aspect builds customer-company relationships through a combination of customer contact software and workforce optimization for the enterprise. For more information, visit www.aspect.com.

Follow Aspect on Twitter at @AspectUC. Read our blogs at http://blogs.aspect.com.

Aspect and Aspect Software are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Aspect Software, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. The names of other companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.