Aspect Communications Announces Aspect Portal Applications for Clarify, Remedy, Vantive Front-office Systems; Integrated eCRM Solutions for Centrally Managed eBusiness.

Business/Technology Editors

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 7, 2000

Aspect Communications Corporation (Nasdaq: ASPT), the leading provider of customer relationship portals, today announced the integration of Aspect(R) Portal applications with Clarify, Remedy and Vantive front-office systems. In January Aspect announced the integration of Aspect Portal applications with Siebel Systems' front-office applications.

An out-of-the-box solution, Aspect Portal applications for front office are integrated with the Clarify, Remedy or Vantive desktops into a seamless and complete system that can be quickly and easily customized to meet an organization's business requirements. Aspect Portal applications make available front-office and contact center information, customer Web collaboration and real-time contact center status on a single screen. Agents gain access to more information in real time, allowing them to be far more responsive to customers, regardless of whether they are contacting the company by phone, fax, e-mail or the Web.

&uot;With the emergence of eBusiness, brick-and-mortar companies are reshaping their call centers into distributed multimedia contact centers. Dot-com companies are expanding their eCommerce operations to encompass traditional call center functionality,&uot; said Beatriz Infante, co-president of Aspect Communications. &uot;The new IT requirements for building a successful electronic business strategy must include the ability for a company to synchronize all forms of customer media interaction, customer information and enterprise application integration and to be able to manage them centrally.&uot;

&uot;The Aspect Portal is rapidly being adopted by organizations as the foundation of their eBusiness system. The Aspect Portal application for front-office systems allows organizations to integrate a cost-effective eCRM solution into their IT environment quickly and easily, while taking full advantage of the Aspect Portal's rules-based management and real-time status capabilities,&uot; added Infante.

Aspect Portal Front Office applications utilize Aspect Architect(TM) software's drag-and-drop application development environment and templates of easy-to-use components that can be quickly identified and implemented. Aspect Architect has a set of predefined step objects that can automatically program call buttons for logon/logoff, ready, answer/hang up telephone, place call on hold and more. At the same time, this highly configurable development environment allows organizations to easily customize their applications and respond rapidly to changing business conditions.

Aspect's workflow software also allows companies to incorporate a wide range of enterprise resources in a workflow. Steps in the workflow, such as playing an announcement or querying a database, appear as icons in a palette. Then workflows can be constructed by dragging icons onto the workspace and linking them graphically to show how the work will be routed. Additionally, the Aspect Architect development environment can show real-time performance statistics on each step of the workflow so that application performance optimization is a simple visual task. Agents benefit from a screen-pop capability that gives them access to multiple databases on their desktops, which lets them trigger another workflow. Agents also have softphone controls that allow them to communicate with the Aspect Call Center System, and a real-time status and toolbar at the bottom of the screen gives them up-to-the-minute information. This increased access to diverse, real-time data empowers agents and enables them to be more responsive to the customer.

Aspect Portal applications for Clarify, Vantive and Remedy front-office systems are available now and support Aspect, Lucent and Nortel-based call centers.

Aspect Communications

Aspect Communications Corporation is the leading provider of customer relationship portals, a software platform for building and deploying eCRM applications that enable businesses to ensure consistent interactions with their customers from one centrally managed eBusiness system. Aspect's leadership position in customer relationship management solutions is based on its 14-year history and more than 7,300 customer contact center implementations. Aspect is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., with offices in major cities worldwide. For more information about Aspect, visit the company's Web site at http://www.aspect.com or call 1-888-412-7728.

Aspect, the Aspect logo and Aspect Architect are trademarks and/or service marks of Aspect Communications Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other product or service names mentioned in this document may be trademarks of the companies with which they are associated.