Avaya Makes the Contact Center Mobile and Social

Avaya has always been on the cutting edge of technology for the contact center, and its demonstrations this year at SpeechTEK in New York City displayed nothing less for the company’s prowess in the space. Dr. Valentine Matula gave a presentation on what Avaya is doing to proactively engage contact center agents with customers through mobile and social means.

“Mobile” and “social” are the buzzwords thrown around SpeechTEK today, and Matula’s discussion of Avaya’s Customer Connections Mobile solution addresses the former of these terms. Allowing customers to engage in a self service portal on a mobile app helps the contact center agent better understand the customer’s history with the company and potential problem. As the agent receives the context of the customer’s previous experience with the company, he or she can better resolve the issue the customer is having. This prior knowledge enables the agent to more quickly process the needs of the customer, saves the company time and money, and provides a better customer experience.

This solution can also be added to a company’s pre-existing application or it can be built into it with the app itself built by Avaya. Avaya has the kit needed to manage the software’s analytics, which can then be delivered to the contact center.

Matula recalled some statistics about the state of the US’s mobile usage: 23 percent of people just have a cell phone, 68 percent have a cell phone and landline, and the usage rates are only growing.

So, how does a business enable its contact center to properly harness the growth of the mobile world? Especially when so much of this mobile growth has to do with social growth as well?

Avaya has been addressing this issue for the contact center of garnering the most important and relevant information from social media channels through its Social Media Manager solution. Matula told us that the vital requirement for the business is to look at all the information coming through social portals, and be able to filter it in a relevant way for improving business processes – in short, making social interactions like those that happen in a call center. The Social Media Manager can bring in the history of the customer’s interactions across social networks into its conversation with an agent so that the agent understands the sentiments of the caller in real-time.

“Brand is being built in social media today,” Matula said. One of the main reasons businesses need to monitor those channels is for the opportunities that lie latent. A customer indicating his or her desire to go abroad or complaining about a certain product are all opportunities for a business to jump on reaching out and either making a sale or resolving an issue. Knowing how powerful of a tool social media can be, Avaya brings the contact center into the social equation with its Social Media Manager, and can even prioritize social elements such as tweets through language analysis.

Bringing these elements into accord with each other occurs with the Mobile Supervisor solution. Using Avaya Flare, the contact center supervisor is able to walk the floor of the center, supervise agents efficiently, and process analytics through an iPad. This BYOD approach allows the contact center manager to be hands-on with agents while maintaining awareness of what is going on with all agents across the board on a tablet.

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