The news hook for Avaya's major contact center release of the year has focused on its expanded capabilities around social networking, but the current state of the industry is a bit more complicated, as I learned when I discussed the new release with Jorge Blanco, who heads up Avaya's contact center unit.
And Jorge said that the long-term key to next-gen customer contact success boils down to a word that I've been hearing Avaya people use a lot lately: Context.
The new release is Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2, which the company describes as a "multimedia assisted care application" that integrates with Aura Session Manager to bring the customer, the contact center agent, and any internal expert that may be required, into a session that can deliver assistance over multiple channels. Those channels include social media integration, bringing tweets and Facebook updates into the application.
As Sheila McGee-Smith pointed out in a recent posting, social media is a very hot topic of discussion among contact center technologists, while actual implementations within contact centers of this sort of integration have been building rather slowly. This isn't an unusual state of affairs for any new technology--the hype always outstrips the adoption--and Jorge confirmed to me that the reality on the ground among Avaya customers is that multichannel contact is a very fragmented world right now.
Avaya's own research shows that customers want choice when it comes to contact channels, but voice is still the clear #1 channel, and "there is no obvious #2," Jorge said. Plain old e-mail still registers strongly, but a generational change is clearly on the horizon and so customer contact operations "have to be able to move up to an environment that does not have a prejudice against any media," but can equally serve whatever the customer wants to use.
And the challenge for contact centers is as much about organizations and personnel as it is about technology. Jorge noted that most contact centers still segment their agent workforce according to medium, with separate groups of agents handling voice calls, emails, web chat, etc. So there's clearly less utility in integrating the technology if different channels can only be handled by different agents.
However, SIP-based session management opens the door to what Jorge called "a brewing evolution from routing to matching" of contacts with agents--in other words, a refinement of the traditional skills-based routing that's able to glean more information about the customer, their likely purpose in contacting the enterprise, etc. With SIP-based session management, this "context" can accompany the customer as the system or a live agent brings additional resources and experts to bear on the customer and the issue they're trying to address.
In addition to the new social integration, the 6.2 release increases scalability to 90,000 agents: 3,000 agents per node, with the ability to network up to 30 nodes--this triples the previous capacity and scales the system up to handle the largest contact centers, Jorge said.
The other piece of the announcement is enhancements to Avaya Aura Experience Portal; the most noteworthy addition is a new Avaya Orchestration Designer, a service creation environment intended to take the traditional IVR functionality to the next level. Though it can be used for basic IVR functionality if that's all the enterprise wants, the goal is to use the Orchestration Designer to develop multimedia self-service applications.
