Customers are more mobile and informed today and expect companies to support them with quality service over the channels of their choice. Unfortunately, many companies lack a clear understanding of their customers’ priorities and fail to develop a comprehensive strategy for responding to customers as they want to be supported. Not keeping pace with customers’ expectations erodes customer loyalty and decreases satisfaction.This new consumer presents unique challenges and problems for the orchestration, distribution and management of customer interaction: Quality service requires personalization Online venues for social collaboration and information exchange (such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and blogs) provide Consumer 2.0 with a new, and much louder, way to express their delight or frustration with a company as well as collaborate with fellow consumers to solve a product or user problem. traditional Consumer may have shared their negative experience with 13 others, the 2.0 Consumer now has the power to share that negative experience virally with millions of others with just a few keystrokes.The traditional, command and control, and cost oriented voice channel management appears to be out of synch with this next-generation, enlightened Consumer 2.0.--------------Compounding this paradigm, today’s consumer is better than informed than ever: They have access to information via a multitude of on-line sources including search engines, databases, and billions of webpages and .pdf documents including consumer reports, academic journals, government regulations, user manuals, white papers, and periodicals. They access this information from traditional PCs and mobile devices like smart phones and tablet PCs. Many enterprise contact centers recognize the value of personalized service, however they have not implemented “personalized” solutions for a variety of reasons.The typical enterprise agent rarely knows all of the relevant details of the customer at the moment of contact.Is the call center ready for this new type of customer?This Consumer 2.0 vs. Consumer 1.0 knowledge gap must be addressed and cared for in an entirely new way – it is one that does not exist within legacy contact center environments today.All of the call center best practices that have been learned over 25 years to support Consumer 1.0 such as forecasting, scheduling, skills based routing implementations, call flow optimization, multi-site virtualization and pooling, reporting, outsourcer integration, and onshore-nearshore-farshore contact center wage arbitrage does not disappear with Consumer 2.0.
AVAYA COMMUNICATIONS NOW DELIVERS THREE LAYERS OF VALUEAT THE INFRASTRUCTURE LAYER (WHICH THE LOB DOESN’T CARE ABOUT)AT THE USER LAYER – WHICH MATTERS TO EVERYONEAND AT THE BUSINESS LAYER WHICH ENABLES THE BUSINESS TO DRIVE NEW CAPABILITIESSo how do we deliver value at each layer? Well, we start with the infrastructure layer: Avaya Aura™ is the core communications platform supporting unified communications and contact center solutions for midsize to large enterprises. It extends Communication Manager and enables SIP-based session management with innovative capabilities. Leveraging a revolutionary SIP architecture and virtualization technology, Avaya Aura simplifies complex networks and reduces infrastructure costs. Employees at any location can be connected regardless of the infrastructure the endpoints reside on – connecting Avaya and Nortel heritage systems and most common competitive platforms. Avaya Aura enables faster and easier deployment of communications capabilities such as voice, video, messaging, and presence because core components can be centralized in the data center. As a result, productivity and business agility can be increased. Branch, Standard, and Enterprise Editions offer simple per-user licensing. Additional software and hardware are offered to support various levels of scalability and redundancy.The majority of customers who have moved to Avaya Aura over the last few years have done so because of the savings that they have realized. Savings from consolidating infrastructure into the data center which reduces infrastructure but also reduces administration and management costs. They have also taken advantage of the virtualization of the Avaya Aura software to reduce the number of servers needed. Finally they have saved by consolidating their dial plans across all their locations and reducing the costs of trunking between those locations..Users get strong value from IP based communications because it enables them to work remotely, and by bridging their mobile phone to their office number they can use “find me follow me capabilities.” Most recently, Avaya introduced our new user interface called The Flair experience. This interface makes communications easy and fun – it allows drag and drop connectivity to people using ANY mode of communication: voice, video and text. It interfaces with MS exchange, Facebook, Google, Linked-In and in January Lotus environments. Click on any contact to view your communications history. Have sidebar conversations with users while in conference calls. Escalate from text to voice to video. Share files. The Flare Experiences brings value to the user in terms of productivity, enabling people to communicate easily and effectively, and to know about their communications and collaborations. And then, finally, our Ace portfolio, enables us to integrate and sequence-in, applications from a wide variety of sources. It enables us to write adapters and connectors to Microsoft, IBM, applications like SAP and www.salesforce.com. Ace allows us customers to easily integrate communications into any application. Example: law firms billing applicationExample: