Many firms claim when they are writing marketing and press material about their technology that theirs is the ‘next generation’ solution, when in reality all what they have done is add a few more features, cut back excessive code, and made it prettier to look at.
Sometimes the term ‘next-generation’ can be off-putting. It raises the specter for IT departments that they may have to deal with a nightmarish new application that doesn’t integrate well with existing tools.
Avaya has come out with a contact center application, the Avaya Aura Contact Center that actually is next-generation in the truest, most proper sense of the phrase. For the solution, aimed at mid-size (up to 1,000 seats per license initially, easily scalable) contact centers not only offers significantly new functionality but it also maintains and enhances legacy applications and other product lines. Avaya Aura Contact Center complements the large enterprise solutions of Avaya Aura Call Center Elite, and will serve as its multimedia extension.
The Avaya Aura Contact Center connects customers and their information to the right agent or expert via any communications mode (i.e. voice, video, e-mail, chat). It uses the Aura SIP-based collaborative session model to enhance the efficiency and quality of customer service. The solution also brings collaborative sessions to customer service, eliminating the process of having customers repeat information to several people as they progress through a call. By bringing the customer, agent and expert into a session to share information, a company can reduce customer frustrations, increase first-contact resolution and enhance experiences. Through this approach, Avaya says the Avaya Aura Contact Center can improve customer satisfaction by up to 50 percent based on the experience of its customers.
Avaya Aura Contact Center has been designed from the ground up to meet a rapid evolution and expansion of customers’ communications channels from landline to wireless voice, to text-based means and eventually to video; it treats them all equally in an adaptable platform. A single desktop agent application can be used to track and manage up to six types of transactions simultaneously, one voice and five non-voice.
The new Avaya product also lets businesses deliver advanced work items, such as online applications or claims, to agent desktops via an ‘open universal queue’, which used to require separate workstreams. During incoming customer instant messages or chats, the solution identifies context-sensitive keywords, which are matched up with prepared textual responses the agent can use to speed interactions. Keywords can also be used to create a list of relevant available experts, reducing the time spent searching for them.
Voice is becoming just one choice of mode rather than the sole means of customer interactions, Anthony Bartolo, general manager, Contact Center Solutions, Avaya points out. Individuals switch between them at any time, picking the one that is best suited for their needs at that moment. Suppliers, and contact centers can therefore no longer treat non-voice channels as adjuncts which they have done in the past because by doing so these communications means end up being neglected, resulting in poor customer service and satisfaction.
“We are not seeing any one or two replacements for voice, as it still is by far the most effective customer satisfaction channel that exists today, but what technology vendors like us have to do and what we have done is to create a flexible platform for all the channels, treating them equally because no one singular channel is going to emerge,” says Bartolo. “We, and contact centers have to treat multimedia with same energy, zest, metrics and analytics as we do voice today.”
Avaya Aura Contact Center has made blending automated (IVR both DTMF and speech recognition and web) and live agent interactions seamless. Instead of requiring callers and agents to back in and out of them, the new Avaya solution enables any type of communications mode, media or data to be conferenced in. Bartolo offers the example of a customer applying for a loan:
1. The customer fills out the application online
2. The customer submits the application as a web form
3. The web form starts the session
4. The session requires an agent; the agent is added to the session
5. An expert is required on the session; so the expert is then added to the session
The Avaya contact center product has also incorporated the Proactive Outreach Manager, which places all automated inbound and outbound multimedia interactions: voice, text and when required video on a single platform. The solution uses progressive dialing but will also incorporate predictive dialing in a future release.
Avaya Aura Contact Center also vectors customer and public information from the social channel into the contact center. The firm recommends that feeds from Facebook, Twitter, et al by harvesting and tracking tools not be connected into the contact centers but instead routed and filtered through Avaya’s Social Media Gateway, which is customized by Avaya’s professional services organization for companies based on their firms, offerings and markets. The Social Media Gateway, which will be generally available later this summer, looks at the content from all of the social media channels and parses through them for relevancy.
“While you can feed in this information directly there is so much of it that it can swamp contact centers and their agents,” explains Bartolo. “The Social Media Gateway makes this content contact-center ready, and we plan to evolve it further.”
The Avaya Aura Contact Center also incorporates workforce optimization functionality that will eventually include multimedia analytics. The new solution presently has both call recording and screen captures. Later upgrades will have speech and then text analytics that will provide a complete view of customers’ interactions with firms via live agents and through IVR, e-mail and web and in the near future video systems.
The SIP/collaborative platform in the Avaya Aura marks a significant evolution from utilizing CTI applications to link callers, their information on servers with contact center agents and/or IVR systems. Avaya’s Bartolo reports that CTI tools cannot readily permit collaboration and requires extensive and expensive customization to make it work. More seriously, CTI does not hold customer-entered data, such as names, passwords and account numbers, unlike Avaya’s SIP-based tools that houses data.
That creates the need to transfer data between the IVR and the agents and from agents to agent, and because the linkages are not always solid up to sometimes as much as 25 percent of the information obtained by the CTI from callers is lost, thereby requiring callers to repeat themselves. That increases call time and customer aggravation, thereby leading to higher costs and potentially lost business. The Avaya Aura Contact Center is inclusive of CTI, yet it extends beyond it with session based protocols such as SIP.
“There are a lot of effective CTI applications in contact centers, so what we are doing is leveraging our new technology to offer contact centers a solution to their needs to reduce data drop outs and to permit collaboration on a single open platform,” explains Jorge Blanco Vice President, Product and Solutions Management for Unified Communications.
Every new generation does have to rebel. The Avaya Aura Contact Center breaks free of the bounds of proprietary software by enabling new and customized applications to be developed and grow from it, as well as permitting existing ones to be grafted on through its use of service-oriented architecture as well as SIP. It also allows new applications to be tested without interfering with call and contact flows. This is unlike some of the competitions’ products, which locks in their customers to proprietary platforms and where testing has to take place on other servers.
“If you asked me 15 to 20 years ago that a vendor is going to open up their environment, go SIP and SOA-based and let anyone develop whatever they like on your platform so that they can innovate as far as possible it would never happen,” says Bartolo. “Here we are, number one in the marketplace, and we’re doing it. If you take away that locked in experience from vendors you are taking away a large revenue stream from them. Our view is that we’re better off very open as we see a lot of innovation as a result and because of it, because of that flexibility that is appealing to both the contact centers and the IT department we think we can grow and retain our customers.”