At Avaya Engage, I had the opportunity to meet with two of Avaya’s strategic partners, two names I keep hearing about: Journey and Cognigy. Both exhibited at the Avaya Engage conference last month and presented in the analyst track. Each company offers Avaya customers the opportunity to reimagine and reinvent how they interact with their own customer bases, bringing secure interactions and AI to customer interactions.
Journey
Journey is making waves for its singular focus on simplifying and securing customer interactions. Brett Shockley, the CEO and chairman, and Alex Shockley, the co-founder and president, have assembled a talented team that continually explores new use cases across the customer lifecycle. These use cases encompass various scenarios, including inbound customer interactions, outbound communications, payment processing, and document signing.
At the heart of their vision is improving customer satisfaction while preventing fraud and optimizing business operational and cost efficiencies. To achieve this, Journey has centered its approach around establishing verified
digital identities as the bedrock of trust. Journey streamlines the entire contact center experience and reduces risk for the contact center and its customer.
For example, there's a pressing need for mutual customer-agent identification and verification, and that need has been exacerbated by two separate circumstances: the growing trend of remote work-from-home agents and the ever-increasing burden of regulatory compliance. Journey, however, has incorporated best-in-class biometrics for personalized and secure commerce.
Journey allows contact centers to leverage all of the smartphone’s capabilities, such as the biometric sensors and cameras. For example, if an interaction requires ID or age verification, a customer can “scan’ and upload their driver’s license with the smartphone’s camera. However, the image is not presented to the agent (nor is the address, age, weight, and other personal information). Journey validates the information and delivers the encrypted data directly from the user’s device without storing it or exposing it to themselves or any intermediaries. For example, the customer’s age may not be relevant, but only that the customer is over 18 years old. The customer’s age, weight, and address simply don’t need to be shared. Journey provides a zero-knowledge model that works with existing apps and infrastructure.
This provides contact centers with many benefits. It’s optimized for identity and security, so. It’s a service add-on that doesn’t require the replacement of a contact center’s infrastructure or vendors. It reduces friction, increases security, and decreases liability. The company has successfully gained interest from many of Avaya’s customers, especially in financial services, business process outsourcing, and retail. Journey has emerged as a formidable player, offering a compelling solution to establish trust and security in these challenging circumstancesvia its best-in-class biometrics for personalized and secure commerce.
Cognigy
Cognigy and Avaya have a long-standing history, but the partnership expanded earlier this year. Now, the Cognigy conversational AI platform is available directly from Avaya and its channel partners, and it is tightly integrated with the Avaya Experience Platform and Avaya Elite application.
Cognigy’s conversational AI platform is known for its ability to deliver personalized, round-the-clock service at scale through voice and chat interfaces. It leverages cutting-edge AI technologies, including Large Language Models AI (LLMs), to ensure natural and engaging experiences. At the same time, it can be implemented as a standalone solution to enhance customer experiences. Being fully integrated streamlines the implementation.
The platform offers various services, including conversational AI for self-service options and agent assistance capabilities. Furthermore, Cognigy offers 25+ prebuilt channel connectors, including WhatsApp, Teams, and Slack, among many others.
One of the critical advantages of Cognigy's integration with Avaya is that it does not necessitate rip-and-replace actions. Instead, it sits comfortably on top of Avaya's existing infrastructure, allowing contact center customers to implement personalized interactions across multiple channels and devices effortlessly. The platform harnesses foundational and generative AI capabilities, which are accessible through a low-code UI that streamlines implementations.
Avaya is able to offer its customers an improved value proposition via strategic partners. Both Journey and Cognigy are separate companies that can complement most contact centers, but pre-integration with Avaya’s products is a powerful customer benefit.
Additionally, Journey and Cognigy work together. Journey is developing a Cognigy xApp; a mobile-first, micro web application that leverages multiple modalities within the Cognigy platform. xApps are integrated into Cognigy’s low-code environment and enable conversations to transition across channels. They can be embedded into a Virtual Agent workflow or available as standalone self-service web apps.
The combination of Journey and Cognigy deliver innovation to Avaya's customer base without disrupting existing operations.
Dave Michels is a contributing editor and analyst at TalkingPointz.
