Southwest Airlines to Implement Aspect Software's Customer Contact and Workforce Optimization Solutions

By Calvin Azuri
TMCnet Contributor

Aspect (News - Alert) Software recently announced that its suite of customer contact and workforce optimization solutions will be deployed by Southwest Airlines in an effort to provide its customers with a superior experience. Aspect Software is a provider of integrated customer interaction management, workforce optimization, and back-office solutions.

In a statement, Teresa Laraba, Senior Vice President for Customers at Southwest Airlines said “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. 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.”

Southwest Airlines will be deploying the following solutions: Unified IP 7.2, which drives unified communications applications from Aspect and allows businesses to meet customer expectation of improved interactions over a number of communication platforms; Workforce Management 7.5, which has been designed to improve customer experience by optimizing the work environment for contact center agents while providing supervisors with greater control over interaction outcomes; Quality Management, which will support voice and screen recording and provide the necessary tools for measuring consumer sentiment; Performance Management, which includes KPI dashboards designed to help front-line personnel meet operational and strategic goals, as well as provide underperforming employees with necessary coaching; Speech Analytics, which is aimed to allow extraction of business intelligence from recorded voice interactions; and Interactive Tiles, which will provide contact center agents with visibility into individual metrics, task changes, and schedules.

Aspect CEO Stew Bloom said, “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. 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.”

Southwest Airlines has already begun implementing the Aspect suite of customer contact and workforce optimization solutions. The first system is expected to go-live within the first quarter of 2014.