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Lou D'Ambrosio just finished his keynote, and his emphasis was on customer service as a key to helping enterprises overcome the fact that, as D'Ambrosio put it bluntly, "We are in an economic slump." And when you get into the nitty-gritty, this has a lot to do with the contact center.Several of the previous posts I've done from the show have dealt with the issue of integrating the contact center with the enterprise, and much of the back-and-forth has had to do with whether it's effective and cost-efficient to bring non-contact-center employees into the loop to help CSRs answer questions. D'Ambrosio's keynote showed how limited this view is.

D'Ambrosio cited several customer examples of this type of integration, but in none of these cases was the service based out of the contact center. Instead, it was based in the store, and it involved bringing contact center-based agents into the on-site sale. As D'Ambrosio put it, "We have to bring IP telephony solutions to the place where people work."

For example, Avaya is integrating its SIP Server, Communications Manager IP PBX and IP Contact Center with handheld devices supporting voice and bar-code scanning, plus systems for in-store call boxes. That way, the customer can scan the bar code for a product they're interested in and get an expert agent on the phone--a useful scenario for companies that have more customers than service people on the floor.

A similar type of integration came at the University of Washington Hospital, where they're using the technology to provide translators for patients. They started doing it just with voice, and found that in a patient relationship, video is crucial, so they added this. The hospital can now access a wider range of language skills than you could procure on site.

The full details and releases on the suite of Avaya offerings that support these scenarios are here.

There was more to D'Ambrosio's presentation that I'll get to later, but right now I'm off to hear what Gurdeep Singh Pall of Microsoft has to say. Will report on that shortly.

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