Studies undertaken by Avaya reveal that forty per cent of consumers now prefer alternate methods of contact (i.e. email, chat, text) for customer service. Avaya’s new contact centre applications address this trend by enhancing service across many modes of communication. They assemble customer context (history, account number etc.) and match it quickly with the right agent in a real-time collaborative session. This reduces the need for customers to repeat information and increases first contact resolution, driving competitively-differentiated service through improved customer satisfaction and revenue. The products joining the Avaya Aura Contact Center Suite are:
Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2: This multimedia assisted care application enables businesses to solve customer issues by bringing all key parties along with customer information into a session. New advancements include collaboration with experts simplified through integration with Avaya Session Manager. When a customer contact arrives, the agent’s portal displays the appropriate experts and their presence. Managers can also create custom views or large groups of experts based on available times and skills.
Social media can be integrated into the agent desktop, making it easier for agents to communicate with customers by automatically capturing and responding to relevant tweets and Facebook updates. This is achieved through customer integration of Avaya Social Media Manager: enabling a single view of all social media interactions without requiring a separate interface.
Avaya Aura Experience Portal: Avaya optimises its automated services platform for multimedia inbound and outbound interactions, enabling more efficient use of automation to enhance customer experiences. New advancements include improved customer experiences through integration with Avaya Aura Contact Center. This enables seamless hand-offs of customers and their context from self-service sessions to live or automated agents, eliminating the frustration of customers repeating data already captured in self-service.
More cost-effective self-service through Experience Portal’s ability to be deployed in a virtualised environment, which converts a single server into multiple virtual servers. This reduces a business’ hardware footprint, lowering the capital and operational expenses of self-service.
Faster application development for self-service is driven by the new Avaya Orchestration Designer, which enables the creation of multimedia self-service applications using existing Web applications. It includes new development tools to address hand-offs from self service to assisted care – a critical element for maintaining positive customer experiences.
Both products also improve investment protection. Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2’s multimedia capabilities are now unified with Avaya’s automatic call distribution application, Avaya Aura Call Center Elite, enabling unified desktop, reporting and administration. Avaya Experience Portal software and tools unify migration of open standards-based applications from Avaya Interactive Response, Avaya Media Processing Server[2] and prior releases of Avaya Voice Portal.
In addition to Avaya Aura Contact Centre 6.2 but with the ability to integrate seamlessly with it, Avaya is announcing Avaya Social Media Manager, a solution that allows customers to scan applicable social media content (such as tweets and Facebook updates) in an automated fashion, analyse the content for relevance and then enables customer service agents to take action. It can be used to enhance agent and customer experiences, improve branding and increase revenue streams via social media-driven customer service.
Onkar Birk, General Manager, Contact Center Division, Avaya, said “Today’s consumer interactions travel across many more communications modes – email, text, video and now social media. As these multimedia requirements evolve into ‘transmedia’ needs – characterised by the seamless transfer of information across all kinds of communications – companies must effectively integrate all of these modes for consistency. Avaya addresses this with products driving high-quality customer experiences across various media, turning those experiences into competitive assets.”
Drew Kraus, research vice president, Gartner commented, “Ensuring quality customer service across multimedia channels increasingly means the creation of sessions that not only bring together customers, agents and experts in a fast, efficient way, but also retain a customer’s context. The use of this approach to serve the heightened expectations of consumers is a differentiator for leading businesses.”