New contact centre products enable companies to compete more effectively through personalised, seamless customer experiences across media channels

    Avaya Aura® Contact Center 6.2 enhances assisted experience capabilities with new expert collaboration capabilities, direct integration with social media

    Avaya Experience Portal drives automated service with greater speed, savings

    Avaya Social Media Manager can be integrated into Avaya’s latest agent desktop application allowing customers the capability to implement a simplified and consistent approach to managing social media in the manner they choose

Guildford, UK – Avaya, a global 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.

Forty percent of consumers now prefer alternate methods of contact (i.e. email, chat, text) for customer service.[1] 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 is 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.

    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 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.

Social Media Enhancements for Customer Service:
Providing better customer service is the #1 benefit that businesses seek to gain from social media customer support, followed by driving more sales[3]. As well as the integration of Avaya Social Media Manager with Avaya Aura Contact Centre 6.2, 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.

More Details on Avaya Social Media Manager:
Avaya Social Media Manager enables companies to more effectively use large amounts of content found in social media forums. Key capabilities that may be leveraged by customers 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 social media messages requiring attention.

    Sentiment tracking by assigning a score to social media communication such as tweets (i.e. higher positive number = more positive sentiment). This can identify trends in real-time, and which users are driving them to enable immediate, 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 the agent to personalise the interaction and engage in dialogue with customers over social media.