Southwest Airlines heads to cloud with Aspect

PHOENIX, USA: Aspect Software, a leading provider of fully-integrated customer interaction management, workforce optimization, and back-office solutions, announced that Southwest Airlines will implement its full suite of customer contact and workforce optimization solutions through Aspect as it continues to strive to provide a superior customer service experience.

"This implementation is a huge, but necessary undertaking as part of our ultimate goal of offering a best-in-class customer experience both from an airline operations and contact center perspective," says Teresa Laraba, senior VP for Customers at Southwest Airlines. "We are excited to expand our long standing partnership with Aspect. Calls to 1-800-I-Fly-SWA have come through an Aspect system for more than 10 years, so we knew that Aspect would be able to meet our challenge for a consistent, single-vendor offering."

As Southwest's legacy ACD provider since 2001, Southwest chose Aspect over other vendors to overhaul its contact center operations, implementing the following products:

* Unified IP 7.2 powers Aspect's unified communications applications for customer contact and allows companies to address consumers increasing desire to interact on their own terms on a multitude of communication platforms.

* Workforce Management 7.5 helps companies improve the customer experience by creating a better and more streamlined work environment for contact center agents and better control over interaction outcomes for supervisors.

* Quality Management provides mission-critical, full-time voice and screen recording, and quality management as well as the tools required to measure consumer sentiment.

Performance Management delivers targeted KPI dashboards that align front-line personnel with both operational and strategic goals, while automatically coaching employees who are underperforming.

Speech Analytics allows contact centers to quickly extract deep and meaningful business intelligence directly from recorded voice interactions for a well-rounded understanding of customer intent and experience.

* Interactive Tiles empowers contact center agents by giving them greater visibility to individual metrics, intraday task changes and schedule management.

"To partner with Southwest Airlines, an organization that has long been recognized as an excellent provider of service to its customers and help them continue their vision of providing a superior customer experience is a real honor," says Aspect CEO Stew Bloom. "The breadth and versatility of this deployment is a testament to the dedication Aspect has to delivering exceptional interaction solutions that align with the customer experience goals of our customers. We are confident that the new infrastructure and applications will result in measurable and impactful results for Southwest's business and for its customers in the near future."

The Aspect implementation process is already underway, with the first system set to go-live in the first quarter of 2014.