Avaya helps businesses in the Middle East enhance customer service in a multimedia world

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. 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 integration with Avaya Social Media Manager and new consulting services: 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 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. 

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. 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 services help businesses define social media objectives for customer service and effectively integrate a social media channel using Avaya Social Media Manager. The services follow a consistent methodology – which includes a Social Assessment, Strategy Development, Roadmap Creation and Adoption Plan – that guides businesses through a customer service evolution using social media. 

More Details on Avaya Social Media Manager

Avaya Social Media Manager enables companies to treat social media just like any other multimedia channel, along with specialised capabilities 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 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.

Mohammed Areff, Managing Director – Gulf and Pakistan, Avaya, “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.” 

Drew Kraus, research vice president, Gartner, “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.” 

Avaya Online Event Information

Today, Avaya is holding an online customer event at 11 am EST to discuss key elements of today’s launch, along with strategies for customer service success. To register, visit here. 

Other Facts

55% of consumers said that in 1 to 2 years, email is what they will use regularly to reach customer service centres—compared to 15% who said email is their most often used method today.18% said web chat will be their preferred regularly-used contact method in 1 to 2 years, vs. 2 percent today. 

Tags: Contact centre, call centre, customer service, unified communications, CRM