Avaya Enhances Customer Experience Interaction Management Portfolio

BASKING RIDGE, NJ--(Marketwire - Jun 27, 2012) -

• Avaya focuses on Customer Experience Interaction Management for next-generation contact centers
• Avaya delivers new and expanded applications for Mobile, Video and Social Media Interaction 
• Doubles the performance and capacity of the market-leading contact center solution for increased productivity and efficiency

Avaya today announced the next step in the evolution of customer service technology with new and enhanced products for its Customer Experience Interaction Management portfolio. Avaya Customer Experience Interaction Management solutions enable companies to serve more customers through more channels while providing a streamlined, orchestrated experience for customers, agents and managers.

Customer Experience Interaction Management is at the heart of Avaya's next-generation contact center strategy, extending beyond the traditional contact center to include branch, retail, remote employees and back-office environments, providing a comprehensive approach to creating a differentiated, quality customer experience. The portfolio helps companies prudently balance objectives for top line revenue and cost reduction with improving the customer experience across every interaction and every touch point -- including the growing number of methods and devices available for customer interaction and consumers' decreasing tolerance for unsatisfactory service.

Today, Avaya adds the following enhancements to its Customer Experience Interaction Management portfolio:

• Mobile: Avaya Customer Connections Mobile enables a customer to navigate dynamic smartphone menus which guide them through self driven inquiries and tasks. If further assistance is needed, the customer can make a request to be connected to an available expert. An estimated wait time is provided if no agent is immediately available; customers can choose to wait, request an immediate return call or schedule one for a more convenient time. All customer information from the start of the activity is carried throughout the entire interaction -- from self service through assisted -- for a seamless service experience that eliminates the need for the customer to repeatedly provide the same information.
• Social Media: Avaya continues its focus on enabling companies to efficiently encompass social media within the contact center. Avaya Social Media Manager adds support for additional languages and integration with more social media sites, including Google Alerts, RSS and YouTube in addition to FB and Twitter.
• Web Video: Avaya One Touch Video helps enable faster, richer customer collaboration and resolution to build better relationships. A simple hyperlink embedded on web page or sent via email enables voice and video collaboration between agents, experts or other enterprise employees and end users outside of the enterprise who have access to any Internet-connected device with a browser.
• Routing Optimization: Avaya Aura Call Center Elite -- the gold standard in contact center call routing and distribution -- delivers significant increases in performance, consolidates and simplifies administration and reduces hardware, upgrade and maintenance costs. Call Center Elite 6.2 can now help customers handle up to twice the calls in any given time period over previous versions of the product. In addition, new Avaya 96x1phones are tailored to contact center agent needs, enabling fast access to common agent features and embedded agent greetings. Companies can buy these new phones as SIP or as H.323 and later convert them to SIP endpoints for investment protection as their needs evolve.

Avaya Customer Experience Management solutions are enabled by Avaya Aura®, a flexible, centralized architecture from which companies can cost-effectively support multiple locations and services -- including local, remote and home agents -- with streamlined, simplified management. Avaya Customer Experience Interaction Management solutions are also supported by Avaya CS1000 in standalone environments or integrated with Avaya Aura.

Avaya has a full continuum of consulting, professional, support and managed services that can help customers plan, design, implement and operate their Customer Experience Interaction Management solutions. These services help customers align business goals with technology, business processes and people, enabling faster adoption and performance optimization.

QUOTES:
"Social Media Manager will allow the Minnesota Wild to stay more closely connected to its fans. As we migrate away from a social media strategy that was dominated by monologue, we can now more successfully execute a dialogue strategy that will foster more nimble and efficient communication between the Minnesota Wild, the Xcel Energy Center and its fans."
Jim Ibister, vice president, Facility Administration, Minnesota Wild and GM, St. Paul RiverCentre

"Avaya's Customer Connection Mobile is an innovative solution that provides our customers with a unique ability for smart phones that can increase satisfaction while reducing costs. Most of our customers are seeking ways to increase self service and improve the customer experience. Avaya Customer Connections Mobile will help them meet both of those goals while enabling the customer to connect with a live agent just at the point they need. We're very excited about bringing best-in-class solutions such as this to our enterprise customers."
Doug Wilson, vice president, Sales, DDV

"As a provider of business and technology services for approximately 60 healthcare practices and over 200 practice sites across the U.S., Integrated Medical Partners needs to bring customers online as quickly and efficiently as possible. Prior to implementing Avaya Call Center Elite, it was a major project to bring new customers online, taking as long as several weeks. Now, from the communications perspective, it's about 10 minutes. We have the flexibility to balance workloads among our centers; this is a big plus for optimizing resources and improving business continuity when a center might be closed due to weather, for instance. Most importantly, we've reduced costs by over 50 percent while increasing our service levels. Technology like this allows us to reduce costs to our healthcare clients, allowing them to shift resources to focus on patient care."
Steve Goodman, CIO, Integrated Medical Partners

Supporting Facts:

• Avaya leads the worldwide contact center market for 2011 with 36 percent share in terms of revenue and 37 percent in terms of shipments.
• Avaya has more than two dozen patents/patents pending for social media in contact center technologies.

Additional Resources
Avaya Customer Connections Mobile Fact Sheet 
Avaya One Touch Video Fact Sheet
How Mobile Devices are Driving Innovations in Contact Centers White Paper
An Architecture for Mobile Communications Innovation in the Contact Center White Paper
Social Media Manager demo

Tags: Avaya, customer service, contact center, mobile customer service, call center, web service, call routing, video

About Avaya
Avaya is a global leader in business communications and collaboration, providing unified communications, contact centers, data solutions and related services to companies of all sizes around the world. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.

Certain statements contained in this press release are forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "might," "plan," "potential," "predict," "should" or "will" or other similar terminology. We have based these forward-looking statements on our current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While we believe these expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections are reasonable, such forward looking statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. These and other important factors may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. For a list and description of such risks and uncertainties, please refer to Avaya's filings with the SEC that are available at www.sec.gov. Avaya disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

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