Call Center Software Featured Article

Avaya's New Aura Contact Center 6.2, Aura Experience Portal Integrates Experience

By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor

One of the most frustrating and irritating experiences customers face is reaching out to an organization over one channel, then changing channels especially from social media or the web to live agents and then having to repeat themselves. This procedure makes customers not surprisingly less satisfied—especially when they are on the go via wireless devices—while boosting total contact handling costs.

This multichannel integration, to meaningfully interact with customers in realtime regardless of means has become imperative for enterprises if they wish to retain and grow market share. More interactions taking place over nonvoice channels; a study for Avaya by callcentres.net reveals that 40 percent of customers state they prefer them to calls for customer service. Social media use by them and by employees for interactions is growing. And there are now reports that company staff are going “rogue” by responding to comments and posts outside of corporate frameworks, and control, which risks mixed messaging by different staff and confusion for all the world to see.

To resolve this issue and related matters Avaya (News - Alert) has now come out with Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2 and Avaya Aura Experience Portal, formerly the Avaya Voice Portal, which says Jorge Blanco, vice president, marketing, contact center says is “akin to two halves of the brain.” To”train” it Avaya now offers consulting services.

Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2, to be released shortly, features tighter and simplified integration between all live assistance channels. Fast becoming one of the most important of these is social media that has been accomplished through building in Avaya Social Media Manager to the platform.

Avaya Social Media Manager automatically monitors, captures and suggests responses to agents to relevant tweets and Facebook (News - Alert) updates for personalizable responses. The solution manages the huge information flow through using keywords or phrases set by businesses to avoid “tweet deluges”. Meanwhile sentiment track—assigning scores communication such as tweets (i.e. higher positive number = more positive sentiment) can identify trends in real-time, and which users are driving them to enable immediate, relevant responses. It can also track and alerts when anyone in the organization comments on social media to ensure accurate, brand-supporting and corporate policy-abiding messaging.

Another powerful Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2 feature is enhanced assisted experience with new expert collaboration capabilities via Avaya Session Manager, which uses session-based communications architecture as opposed to traditional CTI (News - Alert). With it 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. The Avaya Session Manager can take social media comments and create what Blanco calls “anchored sessions” on the Avaya Contact Center platform for multichannel interactions.

“With Avaya Session Manager Avaya uses a completely different model of assembling content,” explains Blanco. “Rather than take all that information and push it down to the first available agent as with traditional CTI we find the right match agent and put that agent onto that session. The firms would not be losing any contextual information, which happens in CTI, including self-service. ”

“We will continue to support CTI,” he adds. “Once customers have moved to session-based architecture the premise for CTI is no longer valid.”

Avaya has made the Avaya Aura Contact Center product in 6.2 more scalable and efficiently suitable for the largest enterprises and the smaller firms alike; version 6.0 had been aimed at midsized contact centers. Avaya trebled the interaction nodes from 1,000 to 3,000 agents with support of up to 90,000 agents in a single virtual network for Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2 via new integration with Avaya Aura Communication Manager. At the same time it can scale down to as low as to 75-200 agents.

The Avaya Aura Experience Portal, to be released later in August manages self-service interactions. It has tighter integration with the Avaya Aura Contact Center to enable seamless hand-offs of customers and their context from self-service sessions to live or automated agents, eliminating the frustration of them repeating data already captured in self-service. It supports outbound notifications and eventually predictive dialing.

Application development is faster in the Avaya Aura Experience Portal through employing the new Avaya Orchestration Designer, which permits creating new 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, the firm says “for maintaining positive customer experiences.”

Avaya has also made self-service more cost-effective via the Avaya Aura Experience Portal. The product now can be deployed in a virtualized environment, which converts a single server into multiple virtual servers. This reduces a business’ hardware footprint, lowering capital and operating expenses.

Both products improve investment protection. Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2’s multimedia capabilities are now unified with Avaya’s ACD application, Avaya Aura Call Center Elite, enabling unified desktop, reporting and administration. Avaya Experience Portal software and tools unify open standards migration of open standards-based applications from Avaya Interactive Response, Avaya Media Processing Server (formerly Nortel’s (News - Alert) self-service platform) and Avaya Voice Portal.

 “Today’s consumer interactions travel across many more communications modes: e-mail, text, video and now social media,” says Onkar Birk, general manager, contact center division, Avaya.

“As these multimedia requirements evolve into ‘transmedia’ needs—characterized 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; expectations of consumers are a differentiator for leading businesses.”