New Avaya Contact Center Solution Helps Businesses Raise the Bar on Customer Service Excellence

Avaya Intelligent Customer Routing Solution Uses Advanced Routing and Self-Service Capabilities to Improve Customer Experiences and Cost Savings; Solution Includes New Avaya Voice Portal 5.0 Self-Service Software

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. - Avaya today announced a new contact center solution that uses advanced Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) technology to help businesses enhance customer experiences while improving efficiencies and cost savings in their contact center operations.

The solution, Avaya Intelligent Customer Routing, delivers customers and their essential information to the correct agent or expert through the quickest and most efficient route possible. Customers can use speech self-service to provide key information - such as account number, transaction history and primary needs - and get connected to the best available resource in any location of the business. Higher levels of customer satisfaction, cost savings and organizational agility are achieved with this solution by using SIP, an open standards-based protocol that sets up multimedia communications sessions.

Intelligent Customer Routing will be the first solution enabled by Avaya’s new multi-vendor SIP communications platform - Avaya Aura™ also announced today separately. With SIP, businesses can more easily route communications to global locations using multi-vendor systems. This allows customer service organizations to maximize all of their agents and experts, regardless of which vendor’s equipment they use or where they are located. As a result, customer calls can travel farther, faster and with key information intact.

This results in many customer benefits, including improved “wait treatments,” which is the time a customer spends waiting for the correct agent. Intelligent Customer Routing not only gets customers to the most suitable agent anywhere but also enables a more reliable transfer of customer information to an agent. These advancements help erase common customer frustrations by reducing the time it takes to reach an agent, helping eliminate repetition of information upon reaching the agent and even offering to call back customers if a hold time is deemed excessive. Additionally, the solution can deliver messages while the customer is waiting that are personalized for a customer’s profile. For instance, if a caller is identified as a user of frequent-flier miles, he or she can get information based on prior travel or upcoming trips.

These self-service capabilities can be delivered visually through the use of video-based menus and content - accessible via a 3G mobile device, kiosk or computer - which enables customers to see their options. This includes the ability for calling customers to view instructional videos or advertisements tailored to their profile while they wait for an agent. For example, cable TV customers can view coming attractions, entertainment news or “how to” videos that match recent purchases. These video self-service capabilities are made possible by the new version of Avaya Voice Portal, also being announced today (further details below).

“Companies want to get the benefit of enhancing customer service, while improving their return on investments,” said Mary Wardley, program vice president, CRM and enterprise applications, IDC. “Avaya’s new architecture and contact center solution achieves this by tapping the potential of SIP and Web applications in a way that continues to prioritize cost-efficiency and reliability.”

Using SIP to Deliver a More Cost-Efficient Customer Service Operation

Intelligent Customer Routing also uses SIP to help contact center and information technology (IT) administrators reduce the costs and complexity of customer service. With Avaya’s multi-vendor SIP architecture, enterprises can deploy a global contact center operation using their existing multi-vendor systems, which improves cost savings and simplifies management. SIP also enables a more direct path from a customer’s call to an agent - regardless of the agent’s global location - a process that reduces the amount of off-network communications used and drives costs down further.

“Customers today have very sophisticated demands, having grown comfortable with instant information, social networks and other avenues of intelligent communications,” said Bob Lyons, general manager and vice president of Avaya’s contact center division. “Avaya Intelligent Customer Routing is designed for this new generation of savvy customers, giving businesses the tools they need to deliver faster, more flexible and dynamic customer service, while reducing the total cost to serve in the process.”

Intelligent Customer Routing is composed of capabilities from Avaya’s enterprise communications software, Avaya Communication Manager and by the company’s speech self-service software, Avaya Voice Portal. The solution is powered by the new Avaya Aura platform and is further enabled by Avaya’s new consulting framework - Avaya Strategic Communications Consulting - which helps businesses evolve communications using the most advanced expertise, tools and capabilities. This new consulting practice solves business issues by maximizing technologies, such as unified SIP-based architectures.

Avaya Voice Portal 5.0: The speech self-service engine for Intelligent Customer Routing

All of the self-service capabilities of Intelligent Customer Routing are made possible by the new version of Avaya’s speech automated self-service software, Avaya Voice Portal 5.0, which enables customers to use verbal commands to provide information, navigate options and complete transactions. Avaya is a leader in the expanding self-service market.

Avaya Voice Portal’s new capabilities meet the high expectations of a new generation of customers, and they are also available within the Intelligent Customer Routing solution. They include:


* Integrated Video and Voice Support: Voice Portal now embeds dynamic video self-service capabilities and is one of the first self-service solutions to support the standards-based Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL). This language provides open-standards support for system integrators and companies, so they can implement advanced customer experiences using dynamic video content.



* Increased Scale Capacity: The product can support up to 5,000 concurrent sessions, or voice calls per Voice Portal system, increased from 2,000 sessions. Further, the solution can cluster self-service systems for tens of thousands of sessions.



* New Measurement Tools: Businesses can provide designated people or divisions with exactly the data they need to determine the effectiveness of a self-service program. This eliminates the “all or nothing” approach to sharing information, allowing IT supervisors to provide tailored views for specific business users, while helping IT maintain control and confidentiality over information.