Aspect Software Earns Top Honors for Customer Value Enhancement

Aspect Software, Inc., the world?s largest company solely focused on the contact center, announced today that Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company, has presented it with the 2006 North American Contact Center Suites Customer Value Enhancement Award. This annual recognition was given to Aspect Software for its ability to reduce complexity for customers while providing them with greater accountability through the extensive features and capabilities of its Unified IP Contact Center product line offerings.

With this award, Frost and Sullivan is acknowledging the company?s ability to provide a complete contact center solution that allows companies to easily manage their customer service, collections and sales and telemarketing processes to meet key business objectives.

Frost was particularly impressed with the Aspect Software unified offerings for the extraordinarily wide range of applications found in its single product – automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), predictive dialing, Web chat, email management and performance optimization. Customers have the advantage of leveraging a single infrastructure by selectively licensing only the functionality that they actually want or need. What most impressed Frost was the value these unified solutions offer to customers ? because the applications are already built into one solution, it significantly reduces integration costs and ultimately reduces complexity for contact centers.

And customers that are using the Aspect Software Unified IP products, like CSC, Air Deccan and Hamilton Contact Center Services, are reaping the benefits. For example, after implementation of Aspect EnsemblePro, CSC saw agent productivity improve by 32 percent, increased inbound IVR call handling by 20 percent and decreased agent training time from one month to one week.

Aspect Software also garnered praise from Frost for plans to merge products from its Unified IP Contact Center Product Line? Aspect® EnsemblePro™ and Aspect® Uniphi Suite™? into the future release of Aspect® Unified IP™.

?Due to its broad product range and strategic approach to providing a unified solution, Aspect Software has clearly demonstrated its leadership role in the contact center and its focus on enhancing value for its customers. The company recognizes that standard point solutions do not work well for all companies because of integration complexities, long-term maintenance costs and inconsistent management tools for multisite and multichannel contact centers,? said Alpa Shah, vice president and research director, Frost & Sullivan. ?The simplification of an inherently complex system will save customers time, money and heartache and its importance should not be underestimated. Products like Aspect EnsemblePro and the future release of Aspect Unified IP can provide this simplified solution and transform how companies interact with their customers. Aspect Software understands its market and its customers and that?s very clear to us.?

Frost & Sullivan presents this award each year to the company that has best demonstrated the ability to expand its customer base, while maintaining its existing install base by providing more innovative value creation and enhancement strategies than competing vendors. The North American Contact Center Suites Customer Value Enhancement Award recognizes the success of Aspect Software to provide technology leadership, as well as flexible pricing and product licensing ? all of which leads to more meaningful solutions for contact centers.

?This is a very important award for Aspect Software because it acknowledges our ability to provide enormous value to new and existing customers through our innovative product and service offerings,? said Jim Foy, president and CEO of Aspect Software. ?Contact centers want to reduce complexity and enhance the overall customer experience they deliver. They are turning to Aspect Software to help them achieve these goals because we provide the full range of products, including a unified solution, giving them one vendor to manage all of their contact center needs.

?Our customers also recognize that we understand what consumers want because of our more than 30 years of experience and through our ongoing research such as the Aspect Contact Center Satisfaction Index. We believe this adds up to tremendous value for our customers, and Frost obviously agrees.?

Other factors that Frost & Sullivan takes into account when identifying the annual recipient of this award are:

• Ability to grow in a mature market

• Implementation of a new or unique product bundling strategy

• Launch of a new service protocol to improve overall customer ownership experience

• Launch of a new program to help improve the utilization rates for products or services procured by clients.

Frost & Sullivan has also recognized Aspect Software with other distinguished awards this year, including:

• Jim Foy was named CEO of the Year for the Contact Center Industry

• Growth Strategy Leadership Award for the world outbound dialing market

• Growth Strategy Leadership Award for demonstrated leadership within the global workforce management market

• Growth Strategy Leadership Award for its outstanding achievement in the Asia Pacific contact center applications market