Avaya surprises with another modern contact center application, the Avaya Aura Contact Center that actually is next-generation in the truest, most proper sense of the phrase. For the solution, aimed at mid-size (up to 1000 seats per license initially, easily scalable) contact centers not only offers significantly new functionality, but it also maintains and enhances legacy applications and other product lines. Avaya Aura Contact Center complements the large enterprise solutions of Avaya Aura Call Center Elite, and will serve as its multimedia extension.

The Avaya Aura Contact Center connects customers and their information to the right agent or expert via any communications mode (i.e. voice, video, e-mail, chat). It uses the Aura SIP-based collaborative session model to enhance the efficiency and quality of customer service. The solution also brings collaborative sessions to customer service, eliminating the process of having customers repeat information to several people as they progress through a call. By bringing the customer, agent and expert into a session to share information, a company can reduce customer frustrations, increase first-contact resolution and enhance experiences. Through this approach, Avaya says the Avaya Aura Contact Center can improve customer satisfaction by up to 50 percent based on the experience of its customers.

The new Avaya product lets businesses deliver advanced work items, such as online applications or claims, to agent desktops via an ‘open universal queue’, which used to require separate workstreams. During incoming customer instant messages or chats, the solution identifies context-sensitive keywords, which are matched up with prepared textual responses the agent can use to speed interactions. Keywords can also be used to create a list of relevant available experts, reducing the time spent searching for them.

Voice is becoming just one choice of mode rather than the sole means of customer interactions, Anthony Bartolo (News – Alert), general manager, Contact Center Solutions, Avaya points out. Individuals switch between them at any time, picking the one that is best suited for their needs at that moment. Suppliers, and contact centers can therefore no longer treat non-voice channels as adjuncts which they have done in the past because by doing so these communications means end up being neglected, resulting in poor customer service and satisfaction.

Avaya Aura Contact Center has made blending automated (IVR both DTMF and speech recognition and web) and live agent interactions seamless. Instead of requiring callers and agents to back in and out of them, the new Avaya solution enables any type of communications mode, media or data to be conferenced in. Here is an example of a customer applying for a loan:

1.  The customer fills out the application online

2.  The customer submits the application as a web form

3.  The web form starts the session

4. The session requires an agent; the agent is added to the session

5. An expert is required on the session; so the expert is then added to the session

The Avaya contact center product has also incorporated the Proactive Outreach Manager, which places all automated inbound and outbound multimedia interactions: voice, text and when required video on a single platform. The solution uses progressive dialing but will also incorporate predictive dialing in a future release.

Avaya Aura Contact Center also vectors customer and public information from the social channel into the contact center. The firm recommends that feeds from Facebook (News – Alert), Twitter, et al by harvesting and tracking tools not be connected into the contact centers but instead routed and filtered through Avaya’s Social Media Gateway (News – Alert), which is customized by Avaya’s professional services organization for companies based on their firms, offerings and markets. The Social Media Gateway, which will be generally available later this summer, looks at the content from all of the social media channels and parses through them for relevancy.

“While you can feed in this information directly there is so much of it that it can swamp contact centers and their agents,” explains Bartolo. “The Social Media Gateway makes this content contact-center ready, and we plan to evolve it further.”

The Avaya Aura Contact Center also incorporates workforce optimization functionality that will eventually include multimedia analytics. The new solution presently has both call recording and screen captures. Later upgrades will have speech and then text analytics that will provide a complete view of customers’ interactions with firms via live agents and through IVR, e-mail and web and in the near future video systems.

The SIP/collaborative platform in the Avaya Aura marks a significant evolution from utilizing CTI (News – Alert) applications to link callers, their information on servers with contact center agents and/or IVR systems. Avaya’s Bartolo reports that CTI tools cannot readily permit collaboration and requires extensive and expensive customization to make it work. More seriously, CTI does not hold customer-entered data, such as names, passwords and account numbers, unlike Avaya’s SIP-based tools that houses data.

That creates the need to transfer data between the IVR and the agents and from agents to agent, and because the linkages are not always solid up to sometimes as much as 25 percent of the information obtained by the CTI from callers is lost, thereby requiring callers to repeat themselves. That increases call time and customer aggravation, thereby leading to higher costs and potentially lost business. The Avaya Aura Contact Center is inclusive of CTI, yet it extends beyond it with session based protocols such as SIP.

“There are a lot of effective CTI applications in contact centers, so what we are doing is leveraging our new technology to offer contact centers a solution to their needs to reduce data drop outs and to permit collaboration on a single open platform,” explains Jorge Blanco Vice President, Product and Solutions Management for Unified Communications (News – Alert).

DNA Solutions recommends Avaya’s outstanding call center solutions. Our customers have increased contact center performance and business results with the help of innovative, state-of-the-art enterprise solutions, such as: ACD, IVR, CTI, Call Recording, Call Reporting, Call Monitoring, Predictive Dialer, Voicemail, Enterprise SMS, Fax, Messaging, Contact Center on Demand etc.