Avaya, a provider of business communications and collaboration solutions and services, today announced new contact centre products that address the challenges businesses face in delivering superior customer sales and service experiences in a multimedia world. The new products help improve both agent-assisted and automated service to drive more personalised and seamless customer experiences across an array of media channels – including social media.
“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,” said Drew Kraus, research VP at Gartner.
40% 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 and Avaya Aura Experience Portal.
According to the company, the former is a multimedia assisted care application enabling businesses to solve customer issues by bringing all key parties along with customer information into a session, while the latter is an initiative by Avaya that optimises its automated services platform for multimedia inbound and outbound interactions, enabling more efficient use of automation to enhance customer experiences.
Both products also improve investment protection, Avaya said. 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 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 scans large amounts of social media content (such as tweets and Facebook updates) in an automated fashion, analyses 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.
According to the company, the Social Media Manager provisions businesses with a host of elements like automatic monitoring of customer feedback, sentiment tracking and suggested responses feature.
“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,” saidMohammed Areff, MD-Gulf and Pakistan, Avaya.
