Short Message Service (SMS)

Avaya’s Route for Next-Gen Customers

By Brendan B. Read,
Senior Contributing Editor

There is a new generation of customers that is emerging in the marketplace, one that is empowered and has taken control of interactions, armed with knowledge about companies and their offerings, equipped via social media to make or break firms’ reputations. They are demanding that the organizations they interact with deliver to them via a widening array of channels of their choice: voice, Web, chat, e-mail, SMS, social media and video the information, products and services right now.

Avaya (News - Alert) (www.avaya.com) is planning to open by third quarter 2010 a new route to help organizations carry this
new generation plus by likeminded older customers via the contact centers. It unveiled the highway Jan. 19 with its “Roadmap for Future of Business Communications,” which integrates its products with those from the former Nortel (News - Alert)
Enterprise Solutions. Avaya acquired the division from the bankrupt communications equipment firm at auction in
2009 for $915 million.

Avaya’s new expressway is the Avaya Next Gen Context Center Portfolio for the contact center market, which will
rest on the Avaya Aura SIP-based communications platform. The keyword here is “context.” The firm says next generation
context-based customer service is the ability to streamline information, processes and communications to provide a
consistent, high-value end-customer engagement. This will ultimately provide customers with the superior service experience they are demanding.

The key guideposts of the Avaya Next Gen Context Center path include anticipating customer needs with proactive
multichannel notification solutions and successfully automating voice and Web self-service interactions via communications enabled business systems. They also include accelerating productivity goals by optimizing agent, expert and self-service interactions across channels for efficient operations.

“We’re focused on solving the next generation customer care challenge, which requires the delivery of holistic, seamlesslyconnected services for a generation of customers that are expecting to receive care in a variety of different ways,” says Jorge Blanco, Avaya vice president, contact center product marketing. “We have also been focused on how we’re going to harness all kinds of information both realtime and nonrealtime and collapse them onto the customer care process. The plan we have developed is extensible and includes all communications channels.”

The Nortel acquisition has added substantially to the engineering
talent, tools and the raw materials for the Avaya Next Gen Context Center route, which will help contact centers get where they want to go faster, with fewer bumps and with greater efficiency.

Avaya plans to leverage key elements from the Nortel contact center suite including media handling and workforce applications, plus some of the some of the views and supervisory capabilities such as agent stat views from Nortel’s desktop application. Avaya is incorporating the Nortel Agile (News - Alert) Communication Environment (ACE), which is an open software platform for building multi-vendor communications-enabled business processes and unified communications applications into the Avaya Aura solution.

“What we’re trying to do with both the Avaya and Nortel products is to make sure that their most innovative features and capabilities are included in the Next Gen Context Center,” says Blanco.

At the same time the Avaya roadmap is including onramps for existing Nortel customers so that they can move easily and gradually onto the new thoroughfare. Avaya has a standard product support policy of six years starting with manufacturers and then adding optional extended assistance. Owners of Nortel contact center products such as Symposium Express will have plenty of time to make the turn onto the Next Gen Context Center.

Avaya will be blending contact center call recording, reporting and quality management capabilities of Nortel line with its own call management, recording and QA systems into the next gen portfolio. Companies have built their businesses around the reporting engines that they run, and can ill-afford to have them changed without seamless migration capabilities,explains Blanco.

Similarly, Avaya is meshing Nortel’s IVR and speech recognition solutions via the Avaya Voice Portal. There are hundreds of thousands of such applications that Avaya and legacy Nortel customers have deployed in aggregate on those platforms, which are very scalable, reports Blanco, and which the firm is not looking to disrupt right now.

“We are looking at how those applications can be transitioned to the Next Gen environment over time,” says Blanco. “That’s what our customers expect.”

Petrov took the lead in managing the entire project from start to finish. She educated her team about what the numbers mean, and how to best address the multitude of scenarios that crop up in the contact center on a daily basis. She would sometimes allow an employee make the wrong decision and learn from it instead of working with a person who requires a supervisor’s sign off on every task.

“A contact center cannot rely on one individual or center of knowledge. Responsibility needs to be distributed and owned by the team in order for the operation to function successfully,” says Petrov. “I work to ensure that every member of our workforce management team is confident and capable to call the shots when they need to.”

Petrov’s estimate of what the workforce management/performance management strategy could achieve was way off the mark, in a good way. Improved productivity arising from hikes in schedule adherence to 93 percent from the 78 percent it was tracking prior to it materialized in approximately $2.5 million dollars per year cost savings. ICE’s initial investment repaid itself within just four months post implementation while sales revenue improved by 22 percent in 2007 compared to the previous year. In addition, the software saved 6,500 hours of frontline management time per year, translated into not employing four full time equivalent supervisors.

The increased efficiencies gained with PerformanceEdge (News - Alert) enabled ICE to survive the economic downturn that rocked the travel and hospitality industry. In late 2008, the company made the conscious decision to operate an under-staffed contact center during 2009 to survive the economic uncertainties.

“We were able to meet all of our service levels but this required a much higher level of analytical effort on the workforce management front,” says Petrov. “PerformanceEdge made it possible for us. We ran more efficient schedules, more robust forecasting, and intraday performance with the help of PerformanceEdge.”

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