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Avaya's New Route for Next-Gen Customers

SIP Trunking Featured Article

February 08, 2010


Avaya's New Route for Next-Gen Customers


By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor

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There is a new generation of customers that is emerging on the marketplace, one that is empowered and which have taken control of the interactions, armed with knowledge about the companies and their offerings, equipped via social media to make or break firms’ reputations. They are demanding that the organizations they interact with deliver to them via a widening array of channels of their choice: voice, web, chat, e-mail, SMS, social media and video the information, products and services right now.

 
Avaya is now building and will begin opening later this year a new route to help organizations to carry this new generation plus by likeminded older customers via the contact centers. The new expressway is the Avaya (News - Alert) Next Gen Context Center Portfolio for the contact center market, which will rest on the Avaya Aura SIP-based communications platform. The keyword here is “context.” The firm says next generation context-based customer service is the ability to streamline information, processes and communications to provide a consistent, high-value end-customer engagement. This will ultimately provide customers with the superior service experience they are demanding.
 
Avaya unveiled the highway Jan. 19 with its “Roadmap for Future of Business Communications,” which integrates its products with those from the former Nortel (News - Alert) Enterprise Solutions. Avaya acquired the division from the bankrupt communications equipment firm at auction in 2009 for $915 million.
 
The key guideposts of the Avaya Next Gen Context Center path include anticipating customer needs with proactive multichannel notification solutions and successfully automating voice and web self-service interactions via communications enabled business systems. They also include accelerating productivity goals by optimizing agent, expert, self-service interactions across channels for efficient operations.
 
“We’re focused on solving the next generation customer care challenge, which requires the delivery of holistic, seamlessly-connected services for a generation of customers that are expecting to receive care in a variety of different ways,” says Jorge Blanco, Avaya vice president, contact center product marketing. “We have also been focused on how we’re going to harness all kinds of information both realtime and non realtime and collapse them onto the customer care process. The plan we have developed is extensible and includes all communications channels.”
 
The Nortel acquisition has added substantially to the engineering talent, tools and the raw materials for the Avaya Next Gen Context Center route, which will help contact centers get where they want to go faster, with fewer bumps and with greater efficiency.
 
Avaya plans to leverage key elements from the Nortel contact center suite including media handling and workforce applications, plus some of the some of the views and supervisory capabilities such as agent stat views from Nortel’s desktop application. Avaya is incorporating the Nortel Agile (News - Alert) Communication Environment (ACE), which is an open software platform for building multi-vendor communications-enabled business processes and unified communications applications into the Avaya Aura solution.
 
“What we’re trying to do with both the Avaya and Nortel products is to make sure that their most innovative features and capabilities are included in the Next Gen Context Center,” says Blanco.
 
At the same time the Avaya roadmap is including onramps for existing Nortel customers so that they can move easily and gradually onto the new thoroughfare. Avaya has a standard product support policy of six years starting with manufacturers’ and then adding optional extended assistance. Owners of Nortel contact center products such as Symposium Express will have plenty of time to make the turn onto the Next Gen Context Center.
 
Avaya will be blending contact center call recording, reporting, and quality management capabilities of Nortel line with its own call management, recording and QA systems into the Next Gen portfolio. Companies have built their businesses around the reporting engines that they run, and can ill-afford to have them changed without seamless migration capabilities, explains Blanco.
 
Similarly Avaya is meshing Nortel’s IVR and speech recognition solutions via the Avaya Voice Portal. There are hundreds of thousands of such applications that Avaya and legacy Nortel customers have deployed in aggregate on those platforms, which are very scalable, reports Blanco, and which the firm is not looking to disrupt right now.
 
“We are looking at how those applications can be transitioned to the Next Gen environment over time,” says Blanco. “That’s what our customers expect.”

Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Erin Harrison

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