By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
July 21, 2010

Enterprise communications provider Avaya on Wednesday announced the global release of a new contact center application that hopes to address the changing customer dynamics of today, in order for contact centers to cope with the immediate needs of customers.

Dubbed the Avaya Aura Contact Center solution, the multimedia work assignment application will harness the power of collaborative communication in order to deliver a seamless customer experience across the contact center, Avaya executives announced during a Webcast with local and regional media.

This is achieved by reversing the conventional push-information model of addressing customer concerns and transforming it into an “anchored model,” where information is preserved in a single repository, making it available for anyone in the contact center and organization in a current and centralized fashion.

With this, contact center agents would only need to draw up one session file that contains all of the customer’s relevant information, edit it depending on the events during the session, and make it available in real-time to other departments across the organization.

Avaya executives remarked that this transformation is relevant in the information age where customers are demanding quick solutions and seamless experiences from contact centers. “Three trends influencing our strategy include the changing demographics, the changing style and preference of interaction, and the increased risk with customer dissatisfaction,” explained Anthony Bartolo, general manager for contact center solutions, Avaya.

Customers looking to resolve their individual concerns are now coming in from different methods of interaction, be it Web services, SMS, chat, social media, and the traditional voice function. “But not all of those give customers a seamless experience,” Bartolo added.

Jorge Blanco, the vendor’s vice president, product & solutions management for unified communications, stressed that in the duration of a push-type call, at least 25% to 30% of the information are lost along the way. “As information is getting pushed [along the organization], call information gets compromised, so many customers experience multiple requests for the same information,” he shared.

With the new solution, agents can have access to information in a contextual manner, which means they can bring in other types of information from various sources, such as from other departments, call history, and even social media.

Additionally, the contact center solution will enable increased worker productivity by employing the single desktop agent application to pool together numerous queries from different channels into one platform.

This will enable the agents to deliver a seamless interaction with customers, and give them the chance to manage the experience for the better, the vendor claimed.

With a better contact center experience, Avaya said customers are expected to remain loyal to the brand. “Today, there is an increased risk in having dissatisfied customers,” Bartolo admitted. “The impact of just one bad experience [with the contact center] is bigger than ever. Some customers will leave after just one bad experience.”

According to Gartner analyst Drew Kraus, who spoke during the Webcast, at least 92% of customers form their opinion of companies through their interactions with the latter’s contact center. “People today desire to receive customer service across different channels,” he emphasized.

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