Customer Service in a Multimedia World

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. — Avaya, a global provider of business communications and collaboration solutions and services, today announced new contact center products that address the challenges businesses face in delivering superior customer sales and service in a multimedia world. The new products help improve both agent-assisted and automated service to drive more personalized and seamless customer experiences across today’s growing array of media channels.

Forty percent of consumers prefer alternate methods of contact (i.e. e-mail, chat, text) for customer service.(1) Avaya’s new contact center applications address this trend by enhancing service across many communications modes. They assemble customer context (history, account number, etc.) and match it to the right agent in a real-time collaborative session. This reduces a customers’ need to repeat information and increases first contact resolution, which can improve customer satisfaction and revenue, and drive competitively-differentiated service. 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—agent, expert and customer—along with customer information, into a session. New capabilities include:

Collaboration with experts is simplified through integration with Avaya Session Manager. When a customer arrives, the agent’s portal displays the appropriate experts to handle the query, and the experts’ availability via presence. Managers can 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 can be achieved through customer integration of Avaya Social Media Manager. A separate press release on Avaya’s social media advancements in customer service is here.

Scalability improves with support of up to 90,000 agents in a single virtual network, due to new integration with Avaya Aura Communication Manager.

Avaya Aura Experience Portal:Avaya optimizes its automated services platform for inbound and outbound multimedia interactions, enabling more efficient use of self-service to enhance customer experiences. New capabilities include:

Improved customer experiences can be achieved 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, helping to eliminate the frustration of customers repeating data already captured in self-service.

More cost-effective self-service through Experience Portal’s ability to now be deployed in a virtualized 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 automated to agent-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 standards-based applications from Avaya Interactive Response, Avaya Media Processing Server(2) and prior releases of Avaya Voice Portal.