Transforming Contact Centers Through Intelligent Communications
Avaya is a leading global provider of business communications applications, systems and services focused entirely on serving the needs of businesses large to small. Our unique combination of communications applications, systems and services help simplify complex communications and work with existing technologies from other vendors, enabling customers to unlock value and potential from their network. And by embedding communications into the very business processes of an enterprise, we help to improve the way organizations work â making people more productive, processes more intelligent and customers more satisfied.
As a leader in IP telephony we help customers to realize business value and create competitive advantage by driving the integration of communications and business applications across any network and device.
Through our innovative technology and services, customers can integrate IP telephony solutions with existing communications investments to enhance and evolve their networks and communications applications at their own path and pace.
Business Agility in the Age of Intelligent Communications
A key driver of the new age of intelligent communications is the increasingly pervasive and multiplying forms of communications supported by the growing adoption of IP-based converged networks that bring voice and data applications together on a single infrastructure and drive an unprecedented variety of smart business tools and processes. The development and maturation of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) has triggered a wave of innovation in business communications applications.
Business communications applications represent a new converged category of software applications and supporting services, running on open multivendor infrastructures, that bring together, under a single umbrella, a number of organizational needs and markets â telephony, email, voice messaging, unified communications, conferencing, collaboration, mobility and softphones, instant messaging and contact centers. These applications create business agility by connecting people and processes across the enterprise, intelligently embedding real-time communications into the fabric of the business.
Leveraging Intelligent Communications to Transform the Contact Center
Today an IP contact center deploys sophisticated applications and uses enterprise resources, both technical and human. Branch or remote sites can provide seamless global coverage and respond to spikes in call volume, all through a connection to the central hub. IP telephony enables the call center and supports the use of agents from anywhere, including their homes. This capability has become a cost control strategy for many contact centers.
To take the call center or contact center to the next level requires true integration â embedding intelligent communications in the very fabric of business processes. This revolutionary concept heralds innovative new ways of operating the contact center to win customers, be competitive and build revenue. It is a new way of doing business.
Lower Your Contact Center
Cost Structure With IP
Well-run contact centers are very good at
leveraging the right agents for the right customers
at the right time. The obstacles in achieving this
operational state are greatly amplified when
multiple centers are involved. Traditional TDM
(time division multiplexing) technologies are not
known for their ease of integration â whether
itâs the integration of a widely distributed set of
agents, the technological integration with backoffice
operations or seamlessly interoperating
with multivendor applications.
Case in point: The classical model for large contact center operations with multiple locations involved complex designs, considerable duplicated infrastructure across all of the sites and high operating and connectivity costs.
In stark contrast, todayâs start-of-the-art IP servers equipped with intelligent call processing applications (like Avaya Communication Manager) allow enterprises to flatten out and consolidate contact center infrastructures. Multiple locations can easily run off a single centralized set of applications (although redundancy is a definite plus when it comes to business continuity).
When your contact centers are based on IP, you have great flexibility to add home agents, satellite locations, outsourced resources and subject matter expert employees as extensions to the center â all under a consistent, centralized set of controls and management tools.
Making the Most of the
Customer Moment of Truth
Enterprises that utilize distributed contact
centers can leverage a larger pool of agents to
handle periods of high call volumes. But these
benefits also bring a thorny challenge â how to
consistently ensure that the right customer is
matched with the right resource.
When this is done well, the upside is clear â customer satisfaction is higher, your ability to upsell or cross-sell is improved and you have the capability to treat higher-value customers with a special touch. Costs also decrease when the right agents handle the right customers; the calls are handled more efficiently, with a resulting increase in contact center throughput.
Avaya Contact Center solutions excel in advanced contact routing and sophisticated contact prioritization. Using its unique predictive decisionmaking capabilities, contact centers with Avaya Contact Center solutions commonly report match rates in the 70 to 80 percent range â all the while maintaining multichannel service levels across their various voice, email or Web transactions.
Avaya also excels when it comes to resource optimization. Agent pools are automatically managed, with reserve agents being introduced before service levels start dropping. Intelligent distribution of contacts also ensures that your most skilled agents donât experience burnout by carrying a disproportionate share of the load.
Self-Service Efficiencies That Go
Right to the Bottom Line
New and improved speech application systems
are finding their way into an expanding array of
uses â from utility bill payment to the placing of
newspaper classified ads. There is no question that
speech transactions have a definite place in todayâs
contact center. Overwhelmingly, centers that have
implemented this new breed of speech interface
report significantly improved transaction success
rates. The feedback we are receiving from large
customers that are using the speech capabilities of
Avaya Interactive Response is extremely impressive
â some are realizing annual cost savings in excess of
$1 million for every 1 percent shift of agent-handled
transactions to speech-enabled self-service.
Do these savings come at the expense of customer satisfaction? In fact the opposite has been the case. The same customers that have substantially reduced their operational costs also report higher customer satisfaction scores, especially when it comes to transactional ease and speed.
Behind the scenes, SOA-based application development tools can streamline and reduce the cost of developing speech-based applications. For one customer in the healthcare industry, Avaya natural language speech recognition tools allowed new applications to be developed more quickly and easily and has helped them to reduce operating costs, since they are now able to perform more application programming using internal resources.
Business communications applications act as the glue that brings together end users, networks and other enterprise business applications. These applications create business agility by connecting workers, customers and business processes to the right people at the right time by the right communication medium.
For businesses that hope to prosper today, Avaya Business Communications Applications are essential building blocks on the road to business agility and competitive success. For more information on how Avaya can take your enterprise from where it is to where it needs to be, contact your Avaya Client Executive or Authorized Avaya BusinessPartner, or visit us at www.avaya.com.
