Avaya Inc. (NYSE:AV), a global leader in business communications applications, systems and services, today launched for its customers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region Customer Interaction Express, a brand new full-featured contact center software suite built expressly for mid market enterprises.
Avaya Customer Interaction Express 1.0 (CIE), with simple integration and implementation, handles all incoming and outgoing customer transactions across multiple media channels, including phone, e-mail, fax and SMS. The solution also offers sophisticated call routing and reporting capabilities, enabling corporations from 100 to 1,000 employees with contact centers from 10 to 150 agents to deliver consistent service to customers from multiple locations. Avaya is showcasing CIE for the first time in the Middle East at MECC – the annual conference and exhibition on customer contact.
“Avaya estimates that the contact centre market across MENA is growing at more than 50 per cent annually based on the increased focus on customer service in sectors such as financial services, real estate, and telecommunications. Customer Interaction Express has been developed specifically with the needs of regional businesses in mind, and we anticipate significant demand for this software-only solution within 2007, especially in the GCC, Pakistan and Egypt” said Neville Perry, converged applications manager for Avaya MENA.
Customer Interaction Express is the first Avaya contact center solution that has been developed in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), and delivers the following additional capabilities:
• Outbound Campaign Management: Outgoing telemarketing and customer interaction campaigns can be automated and reported on from within the application.
• Sophisticated Routing System: Incoming communication is routed to match contact agent skills with customer needs, regardless of customer contact method or agent location in a call center, headquarters or branch office.
• Automated Self Service: Interactive voice response capabilities, speech recognition and text-to-text give mid-sized enterprises an affordable and integrated portal for customer self-service.
• Advanced Reporting Capabilities: Powerful but simple to use reporting tools give real-time and historical insight into customer interactions. Regardless of contact channel, all reporting can be smoothly deployed inside a single system, with the option of additional database integration.
• Flexible and Scalable Upgrades: Incremental licensing allows customers to slowly build on capabilities and license numbers as needs arise. Begin with a single contact channel, for example, and integrate reporting and other functionality across multiple media channels and additional agents as business grows.
"Coming to the MENA market just weeks after our IP office launch for SMBs. Customer Interaction Express (CIE) is a further testament to Avaya's focused effort on the region’s smaller businesses, which now have a full-fledged multimedia contact center solution available to them," added Neville. "Unlike many offerings for the mid-market, which are often watered-down versions of a large enterprise product stripped of functionality, CIE offers customers complex functionality in an easy-to-integrate software solution." That simple integration is a result of Avaya's drive to offer stand alone software solutions to all markets, and CIE is the company's first solution delivering complete contact center functionality via a software-only model.
Avaya currently supports over a hundred of contact center customers in the MENA region, including Etisalat, Arab National Bank, Showtime, and EFG Hermes. Aimed squarely at the region’s mid market, CIE also presents a new opportunity for Avaya Business Partners in the MENA countries, creating an avenue for increasing offerings and revenue via the mid market. Built on standard platforms, with straight-forward pricing, repeatable deployments, and functionality for a wide range of customer needs, CIE is an ideal packaged solution for Avaya partners that provide a single sales source for enterprises with multiple telephony requirements.
© 2007 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
