The corresponding transformation of Avaya’s contact center portfolio begins today with the introduction of five new products or major updates, including: two flavors of contact center to support “experience management”; two new “performance solutions” including IQ 5.1 for reporting and analytics across multiple channels and agent activities and a major update of Avaya Workforce Optimization (WFO); and a new application called Proactive Outreach Manager 2.0 which is part of Avaya’s Automated Experience Management Suite.

The new approach was described to analysts by Jorge Blanco, Avaya’s VP Product Marketing-Contact Center Solutions. He sees the core Contact Center Suite as a “multimedia work assignment engine”. Its components and architecture are depicted in this diagram:

Over the next 10 months, Blanco promises a rapid succession of product refinements and announcements. The result will be software, services and platforms designed to “orchestrate the user experience” across multiple channels, culminating in the introduction of the full-fledged Avaya Experience Manager in May 2011. At that point, the venerable Voice Portal will be supplanted by the next-generation Avaya Experience Portal as the contact center fulfills its role as an “Experience Center.”

Blanco explained that the product introduction strategy is predicated on the idea that managing the user experience is paramount and it is dependent on four major factors: orchestrating the user experience, applying real time data to support contextual or “purpose driven” collaboration, establishing the “full context” of a contact (so that data isn’t lost), and bringing live agents into the experience in order to accomplish “first session resolution” of a customer’s concern.

This sounds like a lot to accomplish, but Blanco asserts that the solutions that Avaya is introducing will not result in a forced migration to a complex set of products and services. Instead, as he put it, “We will have a complete, easier to sell portfolio when we’re done.” Acknowledging that Avaya’s Professional Services group has a major role to play, Ajay Kapoor, Managing Director, Strategic Communications Consulting, provided an overview of the support services that Avaya will bring to bear to make the fundamental transformation take place.

Avaya has a team of approximately 1,300 professionals comprising its professional services group. Traditionally, these were communications professionals, but the company it is in the process of changing the teams mix and chemistry to put greater emphasis on the business operations and front-end tasks like discovery, requirement design and defining what it takes to “get started” on business transformation.

One element of the Professional Services offering that will be especially important comes under the banner of “Assurance”. It includes “stress testing” and “readiness testing” based on simulation of real call traffic and customer activity in advance of bringing a new system, feature or service online. As companies grow more ambitious in their efforts to provide multichannel, multimodal and context-sensitive customer service, “assurance services” will be a necessity. Such confidence-building, risk reduction activity should provide enterprise decisionmakers the confidence they need to deploy new technologies that ensure a better user experience.

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For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).

Click Here to View the Report Summary

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Webcast On-Demand – Sign-up Below!

There’s still time to register for this free Webcast. I’ll be sharing results from a survey of “shoppers” regarding actual use of multiple channels when dealing with vendors.

In both preference and practice, people have established personal preferences in how they interact with selected vendors. A recent Opus Research survey shows the increasing sophistication in how consumers choose shopping and support options based on these preferences.

Among the survey highlights, it is clear consumers first identify products or services to purchase online. Subsequently, consumers apply all means of communication — including search, toll-free numbers, social networks, and mobile interactions — to pursue and support these transactions.

While phone-based customer support remains an important link in customer conversations, the survey provides empirical evidence that merchants and their technology providers need to extend support to all communications channels — including those with which their customers are growing most comfortable.

In this free webcast, Dan Miller, senior analyst with Opus Research, and Dan York with Voxeo, discuss the survey results and how emerging modalities (chat, IM, SMS, video) are influencing merchants in developing customer care solutions.

Speakers:
Dan Miller – Senior Analyst, Opus Research
Dan York – Director of Conversations, Voxeo

Webcast On-Demand – Watch Below!

In both preference and practice, people have established personal preferences in how they interact with selected vendors. A recent Opus Research survey shows the increasing sophistication in how consumers choose shopping and support options based on these preferences.

Among the survey highlights, it is clear consumers first identify products or services to purchase online. Subsequently, consumers apply all means of communication — including search, toll-free numbers, social networks, and mobile interactions — to pursue and support these transactions.

While phone-based customer support remains an important link in customer conversations, the survey provides empirical evidence that merchants and their technology providers need to extend support to all communications channels — including those with which their customers are growing most comfortable.

In this free webcast, Dan Miller, senior analyst with Opus Research, and Dan York with Voxeo, discuss the survey results and how emerging modalities (chat, IM, SMS, video) are influencing merchants in developing customer care solutions.

Speakers:
Dan Miller – Senior Analyst, Opus Research
Dan York – Director of Conversations, Voxeo

One customer like Kaplan is all it takes to showcase Genesys’ broad line of software. Deployments span the “core” call routing resource, SIP server, voice processing (Genesys Voice Platform), task distribution (called intelligent Work Distribution, based on the Conseros acquisition) and multiple flavors of knowledge management and analytics. The entire fabric of software “resides behind”, “augments” or simply “extends the life of an installed base of Avaya or Nortel ACDs or PBXs.

That said, from my point of view, the main issue that both Genesys and Alcatel-Lucent addressed at the Analyst Relations meeting (which had the Twitter hashtag #genesysAR) was how the combined company plans to support efforts by third-parties that expect to benefit from development, marketing, sales and channel development by both Genesys and Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise Software Group (ESG). Merging the two organizations has been a complex process, under the auspices of ALU Executive VP of Enterprise Products Tom Burns in conjunction en Paul Segre (serving simultaneously as CEO of Genesys and president of Alcatel-Lucent’s Applications Software Group (ASG).

But the other B-I-G deal for ALU revolves around efforts to build a community of partners and application developers to leverage its considerable repertoire of platforms, tools and other resources that promote enhanced network services. As this link demonstrates ALU has invested a considerable amount of money and energy into promoting the emerging architectural and business models that leverage ALU’s intellectual property into “open” environments and APIs. And it tried to drive its point home with this video, which describes how Alcatel intends to support service providers’ (that means telco’s) efforts to support open business models and multivendor environments. The effort has already enlisted participation by tens of thousands of developers and integration partners.

Meanwhile, on the enterprise side, the combined Genesys/Alcatel-Lucent entity need a name for its enterprise-oriented developer network. In the coming months, we expect Alcatel-Lucent, and Genesys, to extend their efforts to support third-party developers and integrators. At the highest levels, it involves HP, Accenture, IBM and the like, but Genesys (with ALU) has an opportunity to expand into the middle markets in order to grow.

Genesys and ALU execs noted that their near term rivals are Avaya and Cisco, with Oracle looming in the future along with global rivals like Huawei. If they are going to compete, they must highlight their efforts to support Recombinant Communications and an active and involved developer community.

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Rejiggering its sales channel and partnership model to reflect product changes has been a tougher nut to crack. Central to today’s announcement is the combination (or, in some cases, re-combination) of the Genesys and Alcatel Lucent Enterprise Software Division sales forces into a single entity offering a single set of solutions which are, in turn, constructed atop a “hybrid cloud” – acknowledging that real-time, B2B and B2C interactions are indifferent to whether resources are physically in an enterprise or carrier’s data center.

Bottom line: this is an important, evolutionary step for Alcatel-Lucent and Genesys as it sorts out its own presence in an “open”, cloud-based, multi-vendor world. Cisco and Avaya stand out as the direct competition ALU/Genesys. Avaya, especially in recent months, has been promoting a message of simplicity in a world where large-scale solutions are necessarily complex. The reorganization at ALU has the feel of a market-driven necessity as customers look to their vendors to provide simple solutions to their own transformational challenges.

According to Greene, Baratz calls the new terminal “a compute engine designed specifically to support real-time broadband audio and low-bandwidth video traffic.” That’s a little bit dry, but there are several aspects to the device that should make it palatable to enterprise purchasing agents and IT personnel. For one thing, Avaya is apparently working out deals with Google, Yahoo and Skype to make the device a terminal for “enterprise hardened” versions of their real-time, presence-enabled communications services. It will be hard-wired at first – presumably for contact centers, conference rooms and cubicles. But, as I wrote back in August, Avaya already has a well-established history of developing downloadable apps to extend such capabilities to wireless devices.

Based on the description in the preview, this isn’t the dream phone-like appliance for personalized portals. For me, that would be a browser-like screen that would let me assemble my own personal portal from a choice of “objects” – windows, widgets, buttons, etc. As described, this piece of hardware comes close. It will be dominated by a large screen that can become the ultimate softphone with instant messaging capabilities. Users will be able to choose from a wide set of options for pre-configured buttons. One of the design criteria is to keep a consistent look-and-feel across a broad variety of appliances.

The devices will be rolled out over the next six-to-nine months. At the same time, Avaya’s “Aura” architecture will be tweaked to support auto detection and registration of the devices as they are attached to the network.