Avaya works with Oracle to tightly integrate customer relationship management and contact centres

Avaya has announced that customers can now link Oracle Service Cloud with Avaya Customer Experience Management solutions, thus bringing customer management full circle from the start of the sales process to support services and ongoing management. This move will enable businesses to mine vast amounts of data about customers to create better products and significantly improve the overall customer experience.

Today, Avaya is making it easier for contact centre customers to connect to Oracle Service Cloud solutions with a new plugin that offers greater flexibility for integration and implementation along with a richer feature set that extends across the growing channels end-customers expect to use - mobile, Web, voice, self and assisted service. The new plugin will help businesses eliminate many of the unnecessary inconveniences that cause high-effort customer experiences and can incur significant costs to companies. According to the Avaya Customer Effort Impact survey, 66% of respondents are likely to stop spending money with a company as a result of a high effort experience.

"Organisations are looking to improve the customer experience seamlessly across channels and extend the value of their investments in contact centre and CRM technologies to their fullest potential. By collaborating closely with Oracle through all stages of the software life cycle, we're enabling customers to unlock new value, quickly adapt to the rapidly changing customer environment, and ensure great customer experiences," says Brett Shockley, senior vice-president and CTO, Avaya.

The combination of Oracle and Avaya allows companies to collect, streamline and organise vast amounts of information that can be fed back into the business and used across sales, marketing, product development and management, as well as service. The result is that companies can now gain greater insight into customer needs and desires and can quickly close the gap between planning and delivery. For example, the drive towards omni-channel retailing, which is a virtually seamless experience throughout shopping channels from showroom to Web to mobile and more, can be stepped up through the new use cases made possible with the integration between Oracle Service Cloud and Avaya Contact Centre solutions.

"We are excited to work with Avaya on integrating the Oracle Service Cloud with the Avaya Customer Experience Management solution. This will enable organisations to deliver consistent customer experiences across channels and device types, by optimising the routing of virtually all interaction types to the contact centre using proven and scalable technology, "says David Vap, group vice-president, Product Development, Oracle.

A growing number of companies are already taking advantage of key features and capabilities provided by an Avaya and Oracle solution today, including:

* Agent desktop integration - Telephony and agent control plus screen-pop functionality
* Data integration - Avaya Context Store integrated with Oracle Service Cloud RightNow's knowledge base, workflow and customer data for richer analytics
* Routing/assignment integration (e-mail, chat, voice/video) - Route e-mail, chat through Avaya routers/work assignment
* Media integration (video, VOIP, recording)
* Reporting and analytics integration
* Mobile media integration
* Outbound calling - Callback assistance for mobile and Web channels
* Workflow to workflow/business rules integration
* Speech menu synchronisation to the online journey experience - Oracle Service Cloud Guided Assistance Integration with Avaya Voice Self-Service