Avaya today announced new contact centre solutions that provide businesses with a more cost-effective, simplified and productive way to deliver customer service while improving experiences for customers.
The solutions include powerful new Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) capabilities, benefiting all facets of a contact centre for IT administrators seeking to streamline contact centre operations, customer service agents working anywhere, and customers demanding faster service with a personal touch.
SIP is an industry standard that enables businesses to fully leverage open environments and multimedia communications. Avaya's new solutions now provide 'end-to-end' SIP running from the service provider trunk to an agent's desktop phone, taking greater advantage of the open nature of SIP.
This approach helps businesses cut costs and simplify the implementation of customer service operations. A new, low-cost Avaya SIP contact centre phone completes the end-to-end SIP solution. The phone does not require the addition of CTI middleware (ie, softphone), further streamlining savings and network management.
Avaya's new SIP capabilities also drive greater flexibility and productivity for contact centre agents. The new SIP contact centre phone gives agents essential contact centre features (such as 'work mode display' and 'alert tones for skill changes'), while providing a foundation for evolving with presence-based capabilities, such as identifying real-time availability of experts.
The phone can also be set up in an agent's home via a secure VPN, increasing productivity for home-based agents. Other critical contact centre capabilities are now available via SIP trunks as an alternative to existing ISDN trunks. This includes the ability to pass customer calls and secure information between contact centres, which helps ensure customer data is available to agents assisting their customers.
Customer experiences are improved through a new Avaya video self-service solution that can use SIP to affordably deliver multimedia customer experiences through dynamic video content. Avaya enhances self-service, a process which lets callers use menu-based options to interact with a company by 'pushing' video-based menus and content to customers calling into a company using a 3G mobile device, video kiosk or PC. Customers can see branded visual menus to choose options, or they can view advertisements, presentations or instructional videos while waiting for an agent. A cable company, for instance, can show movie previews as a customer waits for an agent, or an electronics retailer can display instructional videos for a new product.
The new SIP capabilities announced today are powered by new versions of:
Avaya Communication Manager 5.0, the industry-leading IP telephony software[1] <#_ftn1> -- and Avaya Call Centre 5.0, the company's routing and resource matching software. The SIP-enabled contact centre phone is Avaya Agent Deskphone 16CC, and the new video self-service solution is called Avaya Interactive Voice and Video Response.
Avaya outbound calling strengthened for improved management, efficiencies
Avaya also announced the new version of its customer outreach solution, Avaya Proactive Contact 4.0, used for automated outbound calling to customers for loyalty purposes (such as appointment reminders) or revenue generation (telemarketing campaigns). The new version strengthens capabilities to simplify management and reduce the cost of outbound calling activity.
New 'wizards' enable contact centre supervisors to create and edit customer lists by themselves, saving time and money. Additionally, enterprise-wide licensing makes it easier to deploy agents during spikes and slowdowns in customer activity.
New open source Red Hat Linux support is also available, enabling easier integration of Proactive Contact with other Avaya contact centre solutions, all of which run on the Linux platform. Full Linux integration reduces the need to manage multiple operating systems, and cuts hardware procurement and maintenance costs.
Also strengthened is Proactive Contact's security, which now encrypts all data transmissions, including user names, passwords, and information passed between an agent desktop and the dialler.
Avaya Customer Voiceware reduces integration time by 50% to 60% with Avaya SIP
Voiceware, a leading provider of contact centre solutions and professional services in Spain, taps the benefits of Avaya's SIP-based solutions to serve clients ranging from regional utility companies to large financial institutions. Voiceware integrated SIP is a more cost-effective way to provide its clients superior customer service solutions. On average, Voiceware has been able to cut CRM integration time by 50% to 60% by using Avaya Call Centre 5.0 with SIP trunking.
"SIP lets us provide better service to our customers while simplifying integration. SIP enables us to have remote agents work from home and provide Tier 2 technical support. This not only reduces operational costs, but enables us to expand our business opportunities by offering offshore technical support to other countries," said Jorge del Rio, managing director of Voiceware. "One of the primary benefits that we have seen with the Avaya solution is the new open architecture based on SIP that enables us to integrate with other vendors and use SIP trunking to connect to new Telco services," he added.
Contact centre solutions available in standard, advanced packages
For greater convenience, Avaya's contact centre solutions are now available in standard and advanced editions, which offer bundled, end-to-end contact centre solutions for businesses.
The Standard Edition includes applications such as inbound/outbound routing, voice self-service and agent instant messaging, while the Advanced Edition adds capabilities such as adaptive predictive routing and SIP voice and video.
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