Aspect Unified IP vs. Salesforce Service Cloud

Aspect Unified IP is perfect to handle multiple outbound dialing campaigns, with tools that allow you to configure how customers must be reached, call them at different phone numbers by the time of the day, set priorities when dialing, or gather information about all running campaigns in dashboards in real-time.

Incentivized

It is a helpful tool, but it can be a bit cumbersome to manage. It is also a bit expensive, but we already use CRM for Salesforce and it is convenient to be able to immediately tag contacts and accounts when the tickets come into the system and tie them directly to the account. I do know an integration with Jira is possible (we use Jira internally for our engineering team to escalate issues) but it is not configured right now so managing the connection between support tickets and Jira tickets is manual and hard to keep up with

Incentivized

• Integrates inbound and outbound call routing in one platform, allowing agents to work in a seamless blend mode between all call types (inbound, predictive, manual).
• Allows you to associate an account number with every agent phone call, the call type, and the reccording ID giving you the critical datapoints necessary to research, put together a customers experience from a telephony perspective, etc.
• Create agent templates to streamline agent setup reducing the potential for admins to configure an agent incorrectly, placing them in services they aren't skilled for and vice versa.

Incentivized

• Allows us to make changes quickly and with relative ease
• Can be flexible enough to use among several teams who do very different work
• Salesforce in general provides SO much training that anyone on the team can skill up and help maintain the system

Incentivized

• The reports are very basic.
• There may be a broader reporting line, perhaps with more detailed records.

Incentivized

• There is a slight scope for error, but sometimes it has a heavy impact. So this can be improved.
• Costing is high.
• Maintenance is more.
• Expertise is required for implementation.
• The number of communication messages have some limit per organisation account.

Incentivized

Aspect Unified IP is very competent to handle most customers' needs in the contact center and it delivers what is promised. The only negative aspect is the costs of services, maintenance and professional services, too expensive.

Incentivized

Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.

I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.

Incentivized

Salesforce's Trust Center clearly communicates occasional issues to anyone who subscribes, down to an organization's cloud instance. Bundled sandboxes ease updates, and seasonal upgrades are seamless, scheduled well in advance with plenty of information about what's coming. Support agents have noticed intermittent Omni-Channel disconnects due to internet connections, and these are clearly notified.

The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce

Incentivized

Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.

Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.

Incentivized

Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.

Incentivized

I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations

Incentivized

We had evaluated Avaya. It was pretty good as well. However, we wanted a more software driven solution. Aspect also was able to give better results in our Proof of Concept.

Incentivized

Salesforce service cloud is more configurable than Zendesk and Freshdesk. It has its own inbuilt AI chatbot also which further improves service agent efficiency. Salesforce is more integration agnostic and has pre-built connectors with multiple 3rd party systems. However, in terms of pricing it is priced at a premium compared to the other solutions

The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports

Incentivized

• As stated before, we have been using UIP for over a decade now. Prior to this tool we had agents logging into Avaya for inbound, and using CTI fuctionality to bounce the agent back and forth between inbound and any predictive campaigns. By moving to Aspect it allowed us to streamline that process, reduce agent downtime, lost efficiency, while at the same time consolidationg all of our call center telephony data into one central location allowing us to easily track a customers telephony experience over any period of time.
• The only negative impact is due to the upgrade schedule that has made for some interesting challenges forcing us to utilize IT resources that could have been used on more critical corporate projects. These upgrades might not be as big of a deal for any company out there that does not have a lot of integration with Aspect such as custom reporting, data loads, API hooks, etc.

Incentivized

• Because this is a cloud service, the security, implementation framework and feature list is very mature and you don't have to develop these during implementation.
• The larger the implementation programme the better the licensing arrangements
• Free developer toolkit for proof of concepts or showcasing features
• Limited to annual subscription model

Incentivized