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The art of appiness

Avaya helps companies transform their communications from a traditional commodity to a critical digital asset, says Brett Butler, corporate consulting engineer at Avaya.


Johannesburg, 01 Dec 2016
Companies should focus on the customer experience and not on meeting their own priorities.
Companies should focus on the customer experience and not on meeting their own priorities.

"There's an app for that" has become a common term - but do apps alone lead to a better customer experience, asks Brett Butler, Corporate Consulting Engineer for Avaya.

According to various reports, 2016 has seen smartphone sales in Africa exceed feature phones for the first time - and with this increase in smartphone usage, we're inevitably seeing a rise in mobile applications. South Africa leads the rest of the continent for mobile app usage, with a third of the population using them regularly.

Businesses in South Africa are scrambling to provide mobile apps; customers today are being told "there's an app for that" here, as they are elsewhere. However, unfortunately, all too often, there is a disproportion between what is expected by consumers in today's digital economy and the customer experience that organisations are actually delivering.

While many organisations have bought into the mobility hype to have a "play in the game", they haven't necessarily undergone the digital transformation needed to make this meaningful. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), 30% of South African organisations don't currently have digital transformation plans in place.

What we are seeing is that some companies are using apps as little more than a means of holding customers hostage - there's a misconception that keeping them away from Internet browsers will decrease the chance they'll move to a competitor.

The reality is that these companies have forgotten that customer experience is the number one priority when it comes to designing apps, and not the company's experience. Our role at Avaya is to ensure these organisation realign their focus on how the digital transition will affect the way in which customers interact with the brand on an ongoing basis to maximise retention. Besides, according to SumAll, businesses with 40% repeat customers generate almost 50% more revenue than similar companies with only 10% repeat customers.

We are currently helping a number of organisations across various industries understand the benefits of an adequately designed app and enabling their digital transformation to ensure they stay ahead of their competitors.

Our development platform, Avaya Breeze, provides an entirely new way to develop business communications applications, profoundly simplifying application development, while delivering built-in capabilities for enhanced mobile, customer-facing and hybrid/cloud requirements. Avaya Breeze makes it easier to build new, turnkey applications, and deliver personalised customer experiences.

We are working with organisations in a range of industry verticals, from financial services to government, education, health, and many more, helping them transform communications from a traditional commodity to a critical digital asset.

And this is just the beginning: Avaya is making significant investments in various technologies that leverage automation and data analytics to enable organisations to transform their apps and customer experience capabilities.

Voice biometrics, for example, will automatically collect data on the tone of voice used by customers throughout each interaction and examine the most suitable action to remedy the situation if it becomes volatile. Should the user be angry or abusive, the system will instantly notify a senior supervisor, who will be able to assist the employee so that the customer's concern is resolved and their opinion of the brand can be remedied.

Automation, in combination with data analytics, will also enable apps to source data and evaluate from social channels, which are becoming increasingly attractive to consumers. Today, telcos, retailers, ISPs, streaming services, banks and a whole range of other organisations have dedicated social media teams to manage enquiries that come through this medium. But many of these are isolated from the overarching contact centre. Organisations that are ahead of the game have eliminated these silos to enable social media data to communicate with the app environment. Automation and analytics feeds the relevant data to contact centre operators who are then empowered to even further improve the contact centre experience.

Mobile apps have matured, but many organisations continue to either neglect the opportunity or fail to capitalise on the full potential on offer. In order to meet the expectations of today's consumers, organisations need to plan a digital transformation that focuses on delivering on customers' needs rather than their own priorities.

Instead of delivering apps that keep customers locked in, these companies need to invest in platforms that provide transparency and fast resolution times in order to optimise the customer experience to ensure retention.

For more information, please visit www.avaya.com or e-mail bbutler1@avaya.com.

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