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Business communications and collaboration solutions and service provider Avaya announced the launch of contact center products designed to address the challenges businesses face in delivering customer sales and service in a multimedia world. The new products aim to help improve both agent-assisted and automated service to drive more personalized customer experiences across a growing array of media channels and offer integration with social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
The Aura Contact Center 6.2 multimedia assisted care application helps enable businesses to solve customer issues by bringing all parties-agent, expert and customer-along with customer information, into a session. New capabilities include collaboration with experts 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.
“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,” said Drew Kraus, research vice president at IT analytics firm Gartner. “The use of this approach to serve the heightened expectations of consumers is a differentiator for leading businesses.”
Social media platforms can be integrated into the agent desktop, making it possible for agents to communicate with customers by automatically capturing and responding to relevant Twitter feeds and Facebook updates. This can be achieved through customer integration of Avaya Social Media Manager.
Avaya social media consulting services let businesses integrate a social media channel into their customer sales and service strategy. The services follow a methodology that includes a social assessment, strategy development, roadmap creation and adoption plan-tailored according to a business’ specific requirements and that guide the company through a customer service evolution using social media.
Other features include automatic monitoring of customer feedback using key words or phrases set by a business, which helps agents avoid a “tweet deluge” so they only receive the most relevant social media messages requiring attention, and sentiment tracking by assigning a score to social media communications such as tweets (i.e., a higher positive number equals more positive sentiment) that can identify trends in real time, and the users driving them.
In addition, suggested responses can be provided to employees handling social media-driven customer inquiries, taking topic and customer history into account, while still enabling agents to personalize interactions with customers over social media. Aura Contact Center 6.2’s multimedia capabilities are also unified with Avaya’s automatic call distribution application, Aura Call Center Elite, enabling unified desktop, reporting and administration.
“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, email and now, social media,” said Mike Taylor, chief technology officer at communications firm Strategic Products and Services. “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.”