In the annual report, Avaya was cited as a contact centre infrastructure leader based on two key criteria: ‘ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision.’ Gartner defines contact centre infrastructure as “the products (equipment, software and services) needed to operate call centres for basic telephony support and contact centres for multimedia support. This type of infrastructure is used by customer and employee service and support centres, inbound and outbound telemarketing services, help-desk services, government-operated support centres and other types of structured communication operations.”
Avaya offers a complete Customer Experience Interaction Management solution, which enables businesses to deliver high-quality agent-assisted experience across multimedia channels, integrated self-service and optimised workforce and reporting for insight into the customer’s experience. Both integrate with Avaya Aura®, which provides Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based communication services that enable unified communications and contact centre solutions to be deployed to connected endpoints, regardless of the infrastructure the endpoints reside on. Avaya also recently announced a number of new and expanded solutions to enable companies to offer and manage social media, mobile and video customer service.
The Gartner report noted that in 2012, various broad trends are influencing the planning and deployment of enterprise contact centre infrastructure, representing a change from a more conservative market seen in prior publications of this Magic Quadrant document. Included among these trends are the following:
Infrastructure consolidation and centralisation projects among companies that operate multiple contact centres. These companies increasingly are looking to leverage the location independent nature of IP-based infrastructure to reduce duplication of infrastructure investments.
Momentum for multimedia routing, including email response management, Web chat and customer collaboration solutions. These solutions, which have been traditionally purchased from best-of-breed or point solution providers, are now increasingly being evaluated within the portfolio of the traditional ACD vendors.
Once almost solely limited to point solution providers, workforce optimisation functionality is now included in many contact centre infrastructure suites or portfolios. This functionality encompasses varying combinations of contact recording, agent evaluation, workforce management, coaching and e-learning tools, post-contact survey, and agent performance speech analytics.
Increasing awareness of social media influences and the potential impact on contact centre operations.
Growing interest in adding tighter linkage between customer service operations and both internal- and external-facing mobile applications — Mobile applications are seen as a way to provide customers with easier access to self-service information by supporting a visual interface to option selections and data that previously was available only to those accessing the company using a more traditional computer interface. These solutions can also provide customers with additional information and options based on real-time information regarding contact centre operations, such as expected wait times and callback options.
Brett Shockley, SVP and GM, Applications and Emerging Technologies, Avaya, commented “Delivering a consistent, world class customer experience requires a deep understanding of your customer, their needs and preferences over time, regardless of the voice, video, social, mobile or web channel they may choose to use … this time. It directly influences brand preference, loyalty, and profitability that will translate into positive business results. We are completely focused on enabling the interactions – both live and automated - that delight customers every time. Our goal is nothing short of helping our customers deliver extraordinary experiences to their customers by connecting the channels of interaction, the processes, and metrics into cohesive, end-to-end solutions.”