Aspect Software Acquires Quality Management Provider SophistiCom Technologies, Inc.

Aspect Software, Inc., the world’s largest company solely focused on the contact center industry, today announced it has acquired substantially all of the assets of SophistiCom Technologies Inc., a privately-held provider of quality management software based in Schaumburg, Ill. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

SophistiCom is the developer of a quality management application which provides quality assurance capabilities, as well as full-time call logging of all customer interactions to meet an array of recording requirements. The acquired application, which will now be known as Aspect® Quality Management™, enables companies to better address regulatory compliance, risk mitigation and employee development concerns.

With this acquisition, Aspect Software adds a significant piece to its contact center portfolio, which fills out its Performance Optimization offering, allowing for synchronization across all critical performance optimization capabilities ? quality management, performance management, workforce management and interaction optimization. This approach provides a greater benefit than the individual applications could deliver alone, and still greater benefits when coupled with other Aspect Software contact center products.

“With the addition of quality management, Aspect Software has essentially added the last major piece of the workforce optimization puzzle to its product set,” said Paul Stockford, chief analyst at Saddletree Research. “This technology acquisition and integration gives Aspect Software a highly competitive position in the emerging, high-growth performance optimization market. Whether inbound, outbound or blended, Aspect is in the unmatched position of being able to offer a performance optimization product designed to meet the unique requirements of each of these contact center market segments.”

Today, there are existing integrations with Aspect® CallCenter® ACD, the NEC CCDesign product line and the Apropos Interaction Management platform. Aspect has also established a clear, short-term product roadmap for integration with several other Aspect Signature products. Tight integrations with Aspect Software products using .Net and web services, enables greater effectiveness in recording, reviewing and reporting on customer interactions, helping to improve agent performance and job satisfaction, increase customer satisfaction and revenue generation, and better manage overall costs.

“Unlike most traditional vendors, Aspect Software is looking forward to providing our customers a quality management product that uses the latest technologies to provide quicker, tighter integrations. This new addition to our product portfolio is a terrific example of our continued efforts to provide our customers with the most innovative solutions to their business needs,” said Jim Foy, president and CEO of Aspect Software. “After reviewing other technologies in the market, we determined that the SophistiCom product?s rich quality management capabilities would perfectly augment our Performance Optimization product line and the addition of the experienced SophistiCom team and the tight integrations we?ve built to our Signature products will offer significant benefits to our customers around the world. Having such a robust set of offerings is the answer for companies looking for one focused provider to address their vast contact center needs.”

Implementing a quality management solution that is tightly integrated with other contact center applications ? such as predictive dialers, automatic call distributors (ACDs) or performance optimization products ? provides companies with a single source for all applications and product updates, as well as seamless support capabilities, which enables organizations to reduce complexity while increasing functionality and speeds implementation times to reduce costs.

Brian Derr, president and CEO of SophistiCom, joins Aspect Software as vice president of quality management sales.

“Joining the world’s largest contact center solution provider team is a very logical and obvious choice for SophistiCom and its employees. Aspect Software provides the opportunity to bring our quality management solution to a much broader market in a package that offers customers considerable business value,” said Derr. “The recording, reviewing and reporting capabilities of our product, coupled with the world-class products from Aspect Software, will create a clear edge for our customers, allowing them to distinguish themselves from the competition.”