TMCnet Feature

Certain companies thrive during technology transitions, while others fail to capitalize on early technology advantages. For Avaya (News - Alert), leveraging technologies currently in transition, such as video and cloud computing, will help the company to build on its success in 2012.

Avaya, which kicked off ITEXPO (News - Alert) East this week in Miami with its “Technology on Tap” event, is investing in ways to solve the customer’s biggest social media challenge, namely understanding and planning for its integration with the rest of their experience components, according to Roberto Ricossa, marketing and channel director, Americas International Region.

TMC (News - Alert) CEO Rich Tehrani recently had a chance to catch up with Ricossa to talk market trends, social media and industry predictions for 2012. Their full exchange follows:

RT: What was the most significant technological advancement in the past 12 months and why?

RR: Mobile collaboration, especially video, without any doubt has been growing significantly during lasts months as well as social media and contact center integration.

RT: What has been the biggest trend in your market segment and how is it impacting your customers?

RR: Mobile collaboration, social media integrated with contact centers and consumerization of IT have been trends in our segment.

RT: What is the biggest challenge facing your customers today and how is your company helping address that challenge?

RR: Social media is rapidly becoming a core component of the customer experience, and by definition, fundamentally changing the experience and experience management is the primary challenge that organizations will face over the next five years:  connecting voice, video, social media, chat, email, SMS, web services, applications, and processes into a cohesive experience to grow, become more efficient and differentiate. The main challenges our customers are facing are understanding social media and its implications and planning, designing, implementing and integrating social media capabilities.

Avaya has created the Avaya Social Media Manager to enable companies to keep abreast of what customers and would-be customers are saying. It helps you quickly identify the social media conversations most relevant to the business. This solution gathers data on interactions from social media channels and analyzes the data using intelligent engines. These interactions range from potential sales opportunity comments to general inquiries and complaints. Social Media Manager efficiently and automatically processes the social media interactions, delivering relevant actionable mentions to the appropriate resource for response. Because the solution focuses only on meaningful and actionable interactions, your business experiences improved efficiency and effectiveness of social media responses. Manual monitoring and processing expenses are also reduced.

RT: What approach has your business taken to social media?  If you have implemented a social media program, have you been able to evaluate your program’s success?

RR: In Avaya, we are comprehensively investing to solve the customer’s biggest social media challenge, namely understanding and planning for its integration with the rest of their experience components.

Avaya has a social media program with a very clear strategy and through our solution, the  Avaya Social Media Manager, we and our clients can evaluate and identify anytime who is speaking about the company, where, when and, most importantly, the context of that conversation. This solution is fully integrated with Avaya Aura Contact Center Suite allowing us work in an integrated way, improve agent productivity, and reduce time to reaction to social media events with low costs.

RT: Does every business need a social media presence?  Why or why not?

RR: Without a doubt businesses need a social media presence today, however it is key before they start to figure out what they want to get out of social media – impact and benefits the company want to have and receive – and after being clear on that, create a solid media strategy with a strong objective, identify the necessary activities, and define measurable goals.

It is important also to count with a reporting tool and function in charge of receiving customer service requests through existing email interfaces to interact with customers and an agent’s desktop application that can displays specific contextual information and processed data about the customer.

RT: What can attendees expect from your company at ITEXPO?

RR: Lot of innovations and solutions created for every business size and industry.

RT: Make one technology prediction for 2012 and consider its impact.

RR: Consumerization of IT. Consumer applications conquering the enterprise and displacing work devices.  It isn’t just consumer devices that are making their way into the enterprise, but consumer applications as well. Using multimedia instant messaging to send text, photos, video and contact information to family and friends is commonplace, so why not use the same technology to communicate with colleagues in the workplace?  If you can see far-flung acquaintances via a simple video application on your home PC or laptop, it seems normal – even expected – to have the same easy-to-use technology at work. 

Even gaming is invading the workplace in new and profound ways, with game-like interfaces becoming central to many business processes.  In fact, Gartner (News - Alert) analysts say that by 2014, more than 70 percent of Global 2000 companies will have at least one “gamified” application. 

Gaming holds particular promise for innovation processes, customer service, training and other important corporate functions that benefit from a high degree of engagement and interaction. 

If you make gaming part of your unified communications network, for example, you can connect people in real time for more effective collaboration. You simply build an online environment that simulates a shared office or conference room. Employees in remote sites around the globe can build better rapport and establish closer personal relationships by working virtually as if they were in the same location. They can attend meetings, participate in joint training sessions or even share a private conversation as if they were standing side-by-side. 

To find out more about Avaya, visit the company at ITEXPO East 2012, being held through Feb. 3 at the Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami, Fla. ITEXPO is the world’s premier IP communications event. Avaya is a Platinum sponsor of ITEXPO East 2012. For more information on ITEXPO registration click here.