Avaya Helps Businesses Enhance Customer Service in a Multimedia World

BASKING RIDGE, NJ--(Marketwire - Jul 12, 2011) -

• Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2 enhances agent-assisted experiences with new expert collaboration capabilities, direct integration with social media

• Avaya Aura Experience Portal drives automated service with greater speed, savings

• New products reflect consumer shift to multimedia -- 40% of consumers prefer alternate methods of contact for customer service

Avaya, a global provider of business communications and collaboration solutions and services, today announced new contact center products that address the challenges businesses face in delivering superior customer sales and service in a multimedia world. The new products help improve both agent-assisted and automated service to drive more personalized and seamless customer experiences across today's growing array of media channels.

Forty percent of consumers prefer alternate methods of contact (i.e. e-mail, chat, text) for customer service.⁽¹⁾ Avaya's new contact center applications address this trend by enhancing service across many communications modes. They assemble customer context (history, account number, etc.) and match it to the right agent in a real-time collaborative session. This reduces a customer's need to repeat information and increases first contact resolution, which can improve customer satisfaction and revenue, and drive competitively-differentiated service. Products joining the Avaya Aura® Contact Center Suite are:

Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2: This multimedia assisted care application enables businesses to solve customer issues by bringing all key parties -- agent, expert and customer -- along with customer information, into a session. New capabilities include:

• Collaboration with experts is simplified through integration with Avaya Session Manager. When a customer arrives, the agent's portal displays the appropriate experts to handle the query, and the experts' availability via presence. Managers can create custom views or large groups of experts based on available times and skills.
• Social media can be integrated into the agent desktop, making it easier for agents to communicate with customers by automatically capturing and responding to relevant tweets and Facebook updates. This can be achieved through customer integration of Avaya Social Media Manager. A separate press release on Avaya's social media advancements in customer service is here.
• Scalability improves with support of up to 90,000 agents in a single virtual network, due to new integration with Avaya Aura Communication Manager.

Avaya Aura Experience Portal: Avaya optimizes its automated services platform for inbound and outbound multimedia interactions, enabling more efficient use of self-service to enhance customer experiences. New capabilities include:

• Improved customer experiences can be achieved through integration with Avaya Aura Contact Center. This enables seamless hand-offs of customers and their context from self-service sessions to live or automated agents, helping to eliminate the frustration of customers repeating data already captured in self-service.
• More cost-effective self-service through Experience Portal's ability to now be deployed in a virtualized environment, which converts a single server into multiple virtual servers. This reduces a business' hardware footprint, lowering the capital and operational expenses of self-service.
• Faster application development for self-service is driven by the new Avaya Orchestration Designer, which enables the creation of multimedia self service applications using existing Web applications. It includes new development tools to address hand-offs from automated to agent-assisted care -- a critical element for maintaining positive customer experiences.

Both products also improve investment protection. Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2's multimedia capabilities are now unified with Avaya's automatic call distribution application, Avaya Aura Call Center Elite, enabling unified desktop, reporting and administration. Avaya Experience Portal software and tools unify migration of standards-based applications from Avaya Interactive Response, Avaya Media Processing Server⁽²⁾ and prior releases of Avaya Voice Portal.

Quotes:
Mike Taylor, Chief Technology Officer, SPS
"One of our goals as a technology solutions provider is to help clients find the most productive way to deliver customer service. This means serving customers through a range of multimedia channels, including web chat, e-mail and now, social media. In the past, this could be costly and require lots of customization. Now, Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2 makes multimedia service simple and cost-effective by bringing many capabilities, like web chat and reporting, into a single solution. We offer it to our clients -- and use it in our own customer service strategy.

"We also like that the new Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2 release seamlessly integrates with our existing Avaya Aura Call Center Elite voice solution, enabling us to layer multimedia right into our voice infrastructure. This preserves our investments, even as we evolve our customer service capabilities."

Onkar Birk, general manager, Avaya Contact Center Division
"Today's consumers use many more modes of communications -- e-mail, text, video and social media. As these multimedia requirements evolve into 'transmedia' needs -- characterized by the seamless transfer of information across all kinds of communications -- companies must effectively integrate all of these modes for consistency. Avaya addresses this with products driving high-quality customer experiences across various media, turning those experiences into competitive assets."

Drew Kraus, research vice president, Gartner
"Ensuring quality customer service across multimedia channels increasingly means the creation of sessions that not only bring together customers, agents and experts in a fast, efficient way, but also retain a customer's context. The use of this approach to serve the heightened expectations of consumers is a differentiator for leading businesses."

Other Information and Facts
Avaya Online Event Information: Today, Avaya is holding an online customer event at 11 am EST to discuss key elements of today's launch, along with strategies for customer service success. To register, visit here.

Art: A photo of Avaya Aura Contact Center is available here.

Facts: 55% of consumers said that in 1 to 2 years, email is what they will use regularly to reach customer service centers -- compared to 15% who said email is their most often used method today.18% said web chat will be their preferred regularly-used contact method in 1 to 2 years, vs. 2 percent today.⁽³⁾ For more findings, visit press release here.

About Avaya
Avaya is a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, 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.

Tags: Contact center, call center, customer service, unified communications, CRM, social media

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.

⁽¹⁾ Results from Avaya Contact Center Customer Preference Study commissioned by Avaya and surveyed by callcentres.net. 40% state they prefer alternate methods of contact to phone-based customer service.

⁽²⁾ Formerly Nortel Enterprise Solutions (NES) self service platform. NES was acquired by Avaya in December 2009.

⁽³⁾ Results from Avaya Contact Center Customer Preference Study commissioned by Avaya and surveyed by callcentres.net.

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