Avaya Delivers Customer Interaction Express and Meeting Exchange Express for SMBs

By Susan J. Campbell

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

Avaya (News - Alert) Inc., a provider of business communications applications, systems and services, enjoys a healthy market share in the contact center industry. The company is often the preferred vendor for contact center software applications, making seamless interoperability of other products a priority to ensure adoption. Now, the company has announced two solutions to further solidify its positioning.

 

Avaya has announced the global availability of Avaya Customer Interaction Express and Avaya Meeting Exchange Express. The former is a full-featured contact center software suit built expressly for midsize businesses, while the later is an audio conferencing software solution for small and midsize companies that is well-integrated with Web conferencing and other client applications from Microsoft, IBM (News - Alert) and Adobe.

 

The Avaya Customer Interaction Express was designed using common industry standards. The solution works with virtually any communications system, including Avaya Communication Manager, to help simplify integration and implementation. The solution also handles all incoming and outgoing customer transactions across multiple media channels, including phone, e-mail, fax and text messaging for mobile devices.

 

Offering sophisticated call routing and reporting capabilities, Avaya Customer Interaction Express can also enable corporations with up to 150 contact center agents at multiple locations to use Intelligence Communications to deliver consistent, personalized service to customers.

 

"Customer service plays a key role in gaining competitive advantage, and companies of all sizes recognize the benefits of enhancing customer care operations," said Mona Sultan, analyst at Datamonitor, in a Tuesday statement. "Market trends toward advanced service technologies, including self-service and multimedia, can be expected to continue across industries and business market segments."

 

 

Avaya Customer Interaction Express is designed to deliver such capabilities as advanced routing, automated self-service, outbound campaign management, reporting capabilities, and flexible and scalable upgrades. All features are delivered in an integrated, all-in-one software suite.

 

 

Avaya worked closely with midsize customers in Europe while developing the product, including Schoenherr Bindesysteme, Seevetal, Germany and SMS Schleinig Marketing Service GmbH in Frankfurt, Germany to deploy and test the solution in real-world environments.

 

 

"As a specialized mail order company for professional presenting and effective organizing, absolute top-class customer service is critical to our business success. Our order and service center is the core of that," says Reiner Kreutzmann, managing director of Schoenherr Bindesysteme, in Tuesday’s statement. "Avaya's Customer Interaction Express is a very good choice, because it's an excellent product solution to best meet our high standards, even in peak times."

The Avaya Meeting Exchange Express was designed with the ability to organize and conduct conference calls at a moment’s notice. As a result, businesses can quickly address changing business needs and customer requirements, using Intelligent Communications to gain competitive advantage while helping to reduce costs.

Avaya spent four years analyzing actual customer data in conjunction with industry-reported cost-per-minute service provider averages and found that companies spending $2,500 or more on monthly outsourced conferencing fees that can realize a return on investment within 10 months and can save an average of $1, 400 per month by switching to Meeting Exchange Express.

 

The University of Massachusetts Medical School implemented Avaya Meeting Exchange Express to help cut conferencing costs and improve conferencing efficiency. "Collaboration is an important part of medical research, medical care and teaching," said Edward Manzello, ACIO of Telecommunications, University of Massachusetts Medical School, in a Tuesday statement.

 

"With Meeting Exchange Express, we can set up conference calls as needed with a predictable cost structure and no need for pre-scheduling through an outside service provider. We were recently able to conduct a worldwide media call about a Nobel Prize win for a member of our faculty, right after the initial announcement, which helped us create awareness for this tremendous honor," Manzello added.

In configurations that support up to 300 simultaneous audio conference participants using a single server, Avaya Meeting Exchange Express software is designed to offer advanced functionality in a highly reliable, easy-to-implement, easy- to-manage, standards-based architecture that simplifies integration in multi-vendor networks. Using industry standards, such as Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) (SIP) or traditional TDM, Meeting Exchange Express can connect to Avaya Communication Manager Internet Protocol (IP) telephony solution or virtually any other communications server or PBX.

Avaya Meeting Exchange Express delivers such capabilities as integration with IBM Lotus Sametime and Web Conferencing; integration with Microsoft (News - Alert) Outlook; built-in Web-based interface; and advanced conference moderator capabilities.

The Customer Interaction Express solution and Meeting Exchange Express also present a new opportunity for Avaya channel partners as they both create an avenue for increasing offerings and revenue via the small and midsize enterprise market. The solutions are built on standard platforms, offer straight-forward pricing, repeatable deployments and functionality for a wide range of customer needs.

Avaya Customer Interaction Express and Avaya Meeting Exchange Express conferencing solution are positioned as sophisticated software applications that extend the capabilities of Avaya's portfolio for midsize businesses, which offering currently include Avaya IP Office, Avaya MultiVantage Express and other Avaya Communication Manager-based offerings.

 

 

 

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.