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Avaya Improves Aura Contact Center Suite with Three New Offerings
| Jul 14, 2011 | Unified Communications and Contact Center
| Analyst: Ken Landoline
Event Summary
July 12, 2011 -- Avaya announced three new contact center applications under the Avaya Aura Contact Center Suite umbrella. The offerings include Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2, a multimedia agent assisted application; the Avaya Aura Experience Portal, an automated self-service platform for inbound and outbound multimedia transactions; and Avaya Social Media Manager, an integrated solution which enables the scanning of social media content, analysis, and agent follow-through activity.
Quick Take
Analytical Summary
• Current Perspective: Positive on Avaya’s introduction of Avaya Aura Contact Center (AACC) 6.2, Avaya Experience Portal, and Social Media Manager, because they mark continued progress in Avaya’s solidification of its contact center strategy, post-Nortel acquisition. The announcements advance the company’s customer service portfolio in both the agent-assisted and self-service “context-based” directions of future-oriented customer interaction solutions.
• Vendor Importance: High to Avaya, because the company has met product roadmap goals laid out more than a year ago regarding SIP-based session manager and context-based customer care solutions, ensuring a hold on its leadership position in the contact center marketplace. Furthermore, the product announcements are reassuring to customers and channel partners that Avaya has a strong hold on technology leadership, which will help solidify working relationships and customer/channel longevity.
• Market Importance: Moderate on the contact center solutions market, because while the announcements were significant, they were a delivery on previously announced roadmap plans. They add stability to Avaya’s market-leading position, but will not likely result in major market share shifts or have a major effect on multivendor customer care environments.
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Avaya Helps Businesses Enhance Customer Service in a Multimedia World
New contact center products enable companies to compete more effectively through personalized customer experiences across media channels
• Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2 enhances agent-assisted experiences with new expert collaboration capabilities, direct integration with social media
• Avaya Aura Experience Portal drives automated service with greater speed, savings
• New products reflect consumer shift to multimedia—40% of consumers prefer alternate methods of contact for customer service
July 12, 2011 - Basking Ridge, NJ — 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. 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’s 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 and prior releases of Avaya Voice Portal.
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Avaya Delivers Social Media Solutions to Drive Superior Customer Experiences
New Avaya Social Media Consulting Services for customer service help businesses drive next-generation contact center strategies
• Avaya Social Media Manager can be integrated into new Avaya agent desktop application
• Contact center outsourcer Motiva selects Avaya Social Media Manager to help agents improve responsiveness to customers via social media channel
July 12, 2011 -- Basking Ridge, NJ — Avaya, a global provider of business communications and collaboration solutions and services, today introduced new services and capabilities to help businesses more effectively incorporate social media into their customer sales and service strategy. This announcement is part of Avaya’s launch of new contact center solutions to help businesses drive competitively differentiated customer experiences across an array of multimedia channels, including social media.
Avaya’s latest social media developments are driven by Avaya Social Media Manager, an integrated solution that allows businesses to scan social media content (such as tweets and Facebook updates) in an automated fashion; analyzes 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. A user of Avaya Social Media Manager is San Diego, CA.-based Motiva, a 450-agent provider of customer service solutions with contact center operations in Mexico (see quote below).
Social Media Enhancements for Customer Service:
Providing better customer service is the number one benefit that businesses seek to gain from social media customer support, followed by driving more sales . Tracking with this demand, Avaya today announces:
• Social Media Consulting Services: These new Avaya consulting services help businesses integrate a social media channel into their customer sales and service strategy. The services follow a consistent methodology—which includes a Social Assessment, Strategy Development, Roadmap Creation, and Adoption Plan—tailored according to a business’ specific requirements and that guide the company through a customer service evolution using social media.
• Integration of Social Media in Agent Desktops: Avaya Social Media Manager can easily integrate with Avaya Aura® Contact Center 6.2, the new version of Avaya’s agent-assisted experience solution announced today. This enables a company to incorporate social media into the single view that agents use for managing multimedia customer interactions. The result is a simpler, more productive way for workers to receive relevant social media messages, along with available customer history, and respond to it in a customer session. This differs from other solutions that require a separate interface for customer interaction via social media.
More Details on Avaya Social Media Manager:
Avaya Social Media Manager enables companies to bring social media into an agent desktop—like any other multimedia channel—to more effectively use the large amounts of content found in social media forums. Key capabilities include:
Automatic monitoring of customer feedback using key words or phrases set by a business. This helps agents avoid a ‘tweet deluge’ so they only receive the most relevant social media messages requiring attention.
• Sentiment tracking by assigning a score to social media communications such as tweets (i.e. higher positive number = more positive sentiment). This can identify trends in real-time, and the users driving them, to enable fast, relevant responses.
• Suggested responses can be provided to employees handling social media-driven customer inquiries, taking topic and customer history into account, while still enabling agents to personalize interactions with customers over social media.
