New Avaya Intelligent Customer Service Solutions Enhance Cost-Savings and Customer Experiences

End-to-End SIP For the Contact Center Helps Businesses Streamline Customer Service Operations, Boost Agent Productivity and Serve Customers Better; Updated Proactive Contact, New Video Self-Service Improves Customer Outreach and Interaction

Avaya today announced new contact center 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 center – for IT administrators seeking to streamline contact center 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 center phone completes the end-to-end SIP solution. The phone does not require the addition of CTI middleware (i.e. softphone), further streamlining savings and network management.

Avaya’s new SIP capabilities also drive greater flexibility and productivity for contact center agents. The new SIP contact center phone gives agents essential contact center 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 center 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 centers, 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 - and Avaya Call Center 5.0, the company’s routing and resource matching software. The SIP-enabled contact center 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 center 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 center 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 dialer.

Avaya Customer Ryla Cuts Contact Center Costs in Half with Avaya SIP
Ryla, a leading provider of customer contact and crisis response solutions, taps the benefits of Avaya’s SIP-based solutions to serve clients ranging from regional utility companies to large financial institutions. Working with Avaya business partner Presidio, Ryla integrated SIP as a more cost-effective way to provide its clients superior customer service solutions. According to Ryla, on average they achieved savings of about fifty percent by using SIP trunking as compared to traditional TDM.

“SIP is a phenomenal money-saver that lets us operate in a less hardware-intensive environment,” said Ruben Maury, Ryla vice president of Information Technology. “Speed and flexibility are essential to customer service, and Avaya’s SIP capabilities let us quickly scale up in volume, as client needs dictate.”

Ryla also uses the new version of Avaya Proactive Contact to provide outbound communications campaigns for their clients. It helps them deliver customer outreach more efficiently, while serving the highly-sensitive needs of their clients’ brand image and customer communication.

According to Ruben Maury, the solution also helps Ryla streamline functions such as billing and forecasting through the integration of Proactive Contact’s outbound calling with inbound, helping to ensure an agent’s time is used in the most efficient way.

Contact Center Solutions Available in Standard and Advanced Packages
For greater convenience, Avaya’s contact center solutions are now available in standard and advanced editions which offer bundled, end-to-end contact center 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.

About Avaya
Avaya delivers Intelligent Communications solutions that help companies transform their businesses to achieve marketplace advantage. More than 1 million businesses worldwide, including more than 90 percent of the FORTUNE 500®, use Avaya solutions for IP Telephony, Unified Communications, Contact Centers and Communications-Enabled Business Processes. Avaya Global Services provides comprehensive service and support for companies, small to large. For more information visit the Avaya Web site: http://www.avaya.com.