For Aspect, customers are the strong driving force behind any innovation

Manish Bajaj, Country Manager, India and Middle East - Aspect Software speaks to VARINDIA, throwing light on the growth strategies of the organization and how with a stronger product portfolio and enhanced customer experience, the company tries to build a strong customer base in the country -

Aspect has a strong customer base both in India and Middle East, where it has been operating for more than 10 years. There are 2 focus areas for Aspect at present – one would be on how to grow the business by adding more value to the customers’ business and eventually look at building a roadmap for them in terms of how to evolve the technology. The second focus area is essentially to grow into newer segments to really have the exponential revenue growth that Aspect is looking at. To be able to do that there are multiple activities that Aspect is focusing on, whether it is by expanding the partner eco-system, onboarding new partners or introducing new consumption models.

In alignment with its growth and expansion plans, Aspect Software has recently elevated Manish Bajaj to the post of Country Manager, India and Middle East. The company is today present across multiple geographies but from a role perspective, Manish would be focusing on India and Middle East regions. “From my responsibility perspective I lead the business for both India and Middle East. In terms of business besides growing in each of the SAARC countries like Sri Lanka, Nepal or any other countries that we manage from India, or the Middle East countries like Saudi Arabia and UAE, there are plans and strategies to expand to other countries as well.

From a growth and customer perspective, Aspect also tries to look at the changes that are there in the market today. “Our business aspect is all about helping the enterprise communicate with its end customers with respect to the business that we are in. It is a fact that the way customers interact with any enterprise has changed over a period of time. Of late, with a lot of focus on digitization, end consumer nowadays tries to see of how they can translate it into their advantage and change the engagement model with the enterprise. It is not the other way round anymore, where enterprise used to see of how they can bring their consumers around their view. It is now all about how customers take control over the conversations happening with the enterprise. So now customers are in a position to say that ‘yes, this is the platform that I can help myself out rather than you helping me out’. Similarly at Aspect we try to see that whenever we interact with our customers we try to make it as personalized as possible and essentially adapt to their style. These are some of the growth areas which we are focusing on and helping both our existing and new customers,” explains Manish.

A growing customer base for Aspect...

Traditionally banking, insurance, financial sectors used to be strong focus areas for Aspect. The growth definitely still continues in these verticals but now it is witnessing that same growth at 2 levels – one is organic growth and the other is related to the Indian consumer behaviour, of how it implements newer solutions that complement the existing investment pattern. Apart from this, there has been a lot of focus on customer experience by essentially upping the technology and improving the Net Promoter score (NPS). “If we look at the enterprise and the SME vertical, there is a consolidation happening across industries like airline, ecommerce, travel and the focus is slowly shifting from acquisition of customers to retention of customers. The BFSI sector has adopted these collaborative-based technologies much ahead of these enterprise customers but now even the latter is catching on speed by focusing more on customer experience and starting to invest on these technologies,” points out Manish.

At a broader level, Aspect tries to solve 2 areas of focus for any enterprise – customer engagement and employee engagement. “If this is broken down further, every enterprise needs to engage with their end customers. These interactions fundamentally can start from as basic as the traditional voice-based engagements or the new-age digital solutions like Facebook Messenger or Twitter. We help enterprises to interact with their end customers across all these channels and most importantly building the context for continuity of those interactions through these channels. Whenever a customer changes his preferred mode of communication in terms of the channel, the past history of that interaction is stored to make the next interaction personalized and easy. So this is the customer engagement management area,” explains Manish.

The second area where Aspect provides solutions is the workforce optimization. “There are again 2 factors in it – one is how you optimize your operations in terms of having the right set of workforce and skillset and the second is how you keep your employees happy,” says Manish.

Aspect strongly believes that for any successful business, while the focus should remain on a happy customer, it is equally important, if not more to keep even the employees happy. So Aspect through its solutions tries to help them improve their skillset from time to time and performing their activities much better in a planned fashion. “So we have a number of solutions that help them improve their productivity as well as the quality of their workforce. We try to differ from our competitors in the sense that we do not just provide vanilla voice based solutions but we offer it across multiple channels. In fact we are growing much faster than most of the competitors,” sums up Manish.

Samrita Baruah
samrita@varindia.com