Now that I have your attention, this was a statement made at the recent Avaya Contact Center Analyst day in San Jose. What it referred to was that the Avaya Aura Contact Center from launch to booking, was the most successful new contact center product in Avaya history. Why is this important for Avaya? It is important because, today’s announcements should add even more fuel to the bookings fire.

Today’s announcements were anything but ho hum. Avaya tackled and delivered upon all the current trends that are evolving in the contact center; trends that are taking the traditional self-service (IVR) and agent handling of calls, to a new level of customer care.  In the past several years, Avaya has been part of this industry evolution already, but continues to add onto these trends, including social media integration, UC and the contact center, and elevating the customer experience across multiple channels. 

In their announcement material Avaya makes numerous points about how they  commissioned a study (Avaya Contact Center Customer Preference Study) that showed that 40% of consumers prefer alternate methods of contact (i.e., chat, text or email) for customer service, compared to the phone. Studies like this are ok, but they really just back up what the industry has been trying to do for a decade in creating multiple “customer touch points” or channels as alternatives or addendums to the contact center. We have been saying for years that we want to be able to provide customer service in the manner in which customers want to receive it, and we all are witness to the growing use of the Internet and mobile devices to access customer care. So it’s not revolutionary that Avaya is saying this, it is the way these announcements deliver on this that is important.  

Avaya Aura Contact Center (AACC) 6.2

At the core with this release Avaya is making it easier for the content/context of any interaction on any channel to be seamlessly transferred to another. So whether someone prefers chat, text, or the IVR, for example, when they want a live agent, their initial “customer service investment” is not lost in transition. This integration makes the experience consistent for the customer.

With the 6.2 release, Avaya added the ability for agents to easily bring in experts to assist in any call with a customer, in a collaborative fashion, along with additional integration with social media. Here is the difference. AACC takes the call, gathers all pertinent customer context, including the requisite customer account number, history, and anything else pertinent to that customer, and matches it to the most appropriate agent.  This is not just plain skills-based routing, but a far more fine-tuned version of that, plus, the agent simultaneously has the right resources, including any potential experts, displayed along with the call, so that they can seamlessly bring in additional resources if needed into the call. 

Collaboration is done through the combination of AACC and Avaya Aura which displays, using presence, experts that are appropriate and available for the particular call that came in.  This means that the agent doesn’t have to go and search for an expert, as one or more are populated on the agent desktop at the time the call is received. This is all configurable by the contact center manager based on skills, or time of day, or particular need. 

In addition to the experts being shown on the agent desktop, Avaya has also has provided for the integration of social media as well, so that agents can respond to social media postings such as tweets and Facebook updates, but in a single consistent view, making it easier for the agent to get the full picture without having to go to a separate screen or application. This is facilitated through the addition of Avaya Social Media Manager.

Along with the integration of Social Media Manager is the addition of a new Social Media Consulting Services practice, which really is critical for companies to provide to their customers as those customers start to navigate through the development of social media strategy. In the case of Avaya, this new consulting practice follows a consistent methodology to lead the customer through the creation of their own strategy, including a “social assessment”, creation of a roadmap, and a social media adoption plan.

Avaya Aura Experience Portal

Next, Avaya didn’t just strengthen the agent side of the contact center experience, but the self-service side as well, across multiple channels as mentioned above with the introduction of Avaya Aura Experience Portal.  The most significant capability of the portal is a more seamless hand-off of customer data, as well as context, from any self-service session to AACC agents.

On the deployment side, Avaya added new development tools to help develop applications that seamlessly hand off the data to the contact center, making it faster and easier to deploy self-service applications that improve the customer experience. This is done by the new Avaya Aura Orchestration Designer.

As for the nuts and bolts part of the announcement, AACC will now support up to 90,000 agents in a single virtual network, due to new integration with Avaya Aura.  Experience Portal can also be deployed in a virtualized environment, which converts a single server into multiple virtual servers too, reducing TCO.  In addition, AACC 6.2 is now unified with Avaya’s automatic call distribution application, Avaya Aura Call Center Elite, enabling unified desktop, reporting and administration.  To protect the investment of existing self-service customers, Avaya Experience Portal software and tools unify migration of standards-based applications from Avaya Interactive Response, Avaya Media Processing Server and prior releases of Avaya Voice Portal. 

In all, this is a well thought out and solid announcement, and should continue to help make those bookings numbers look good.

Tags: Collaboration, Contact Center, Mobile UC //