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.

Advisories are available to registered users only.

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

Featured Research Reports are available to registered users only.

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

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Tuesday, June 1, 2010 — 1 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m. PDT
LIVE TODAY – Sign Up Below!

The proliferation of smartphones, e-commerce Web sites and social networks has cultivated a new generation of highly connected “anywhere customers” who are taking command of “how, when and why” they are interacting with their selected vendors and service providers.

In this webcast, Dan Miller with Opus Research and Zor Gorelov, CEO with SpeechCycle, will showcase:

• Changing patterns in self-service and assisted service as customers take command
• Strategies for customer care architectures that leverage internal resources and provide consistently good experiences
• Best practices for enriching the customer experience across multiple media and modalities
• New forms of customer dialogs that blend automated speech, visual components, live agents and text as appropriate.

Attendees of the webcast will receive a free white paper (“Reaching the Anywhere Customer”) published by Opus Research detailing the new roles for contact centers in customer interactions.

Those 2010 figures were spurred in no small part by growth in sales of its “cloud-based” offerings, marketed as CaaS. Product Manager Roe Jones told us that 25% of the dollar volume in new orders was driven by CaaS contracts. He added that from 2008 to 2009 CaaS revenues grew 59%. It is no surprise that InIn could make the transition to cloud-based services so quickly, when compared with its largely premises-based rivals. From its beginnings, InIn’s offerings amounted to the application of a “private IP-based cloud” for its existing clients. Once customers built confidence in IP-based VoIP transport, the transition to distributed (or cloud-based) implementations was just a matter of time.

That said, InIn’s packaging of CaaS, specifically its “Local Control VoIP” approach, represents good product positioning. It is able to capture “pull” in the form of enterprise customer demand for “hosted” or “managed” services that have the potential to eliminate capital expenses, reduce operating expense and staffing needs without sacrificing reliability or business continuity. It is doing so without a radical alteration in its long-standing technological approach, which has been software based and data center driven.

The CaaS approach moves the Data Center (which houses application logic and communicates with premises-based resources over SIP Signaling) into “The Cloud” where it communicates over MPLS-based data or signaling links with enterprise, premises-based resources. Those resources include a Media Server and SIP Proxy, agent workstations and the corporate database (which could be moved to The Cloud if desired). The voice path is entirely premises based, allowing for greater security, as well as the ability to store and analyze voice files for compliance purposes.

InIn is holding the Spring tour to announce three new features (which will be available “late Q2 or early Q3), which differentiate the CaaS offering. The CaaS portal is a Web page which serves administrative functions, like displaying billing summaries and details, as well as enabling the ability to make moves, adds and changes. In the coming months InIn will add call monitoring and access to an archive of voice files to the mix, making it a very robust supervisor portal. More features are coming as the company pursues its cloud-based destiny.

A second, new feature of CaaS is browser-based Work Force Management (WFM). It provides mechanisms for scheduling and managing relatively large contact center staffs. InIn calls the third feature “Agentless Dialing”, but Opus Research has long called the sorts of services offered “intelligent notification”. This software supports automated, outbound messaging for alerts, appointment or payment reminders or other “updates” that comprise customer service strategies. The application also enables called parties to be put in touch with a live agent should that become necessary in the course of a call.

As mentioned above, InIn its roll-out strategy, thus far, can be considered a success. Its timing is great and its product architecture and sales strategy has been largely friction free for prospective implementers. The services are offered on a per user/per month basis with a price that ranges from $65 to $200 depending on volume levels and features that are included. As the new services come on line in the coming months, we would expect revenue growth to accelerate. But growth could be tempered as non-traditional competitors from the cloud-based community – think Voxeo, Salesforce.com, Amazon.com and even Google along with telephony partners – aim their sights (and sites) on the “next generation” customer care services, which are destined to support more social networking and mobile interactions.

I was directed to one thought provoking rationalization of the phenomenon by Charlie Stross here. But the idea that the PC will be left behind (or at least marginalized) in the Recombinant Communications era was made even stronger when Microsoft, itself, endorsed HTML5 in conjunction with the H.624 as the prescribed video codec rather than a Flash player as part of the forthcoming version of Internet Explorer (IE9).

Disputes about specific players, mobile platforms and device form factors are here to stay. As a matter of fact, it may be a desired state in that it should be the goal of every content and service provider to enable end-users to define how, when and where they gain access to the Internet and Web-based services. Fragmentation and mobility are a given.

At the recent Mobile Voice Conference, I was impressed how the community of attendees – many of whom were Voice User Interface experts and specialists – had made the transition to advocacy of multichannel and multimodal interfaces. Google gets it. So does Nuance. And now Apple and Microsoft are making it clear that the interface of the future will try to make it as seamless as possible to carry out conversations that transcend space, time and modality.

In the coming weeks, Opus Research will be working with our clients and others to make sure that high-quality customer care remains part of the equation. In June, we will start with a Webcast and White Paper, produced in conjunction with SpeechCycle, called “Recombinant Communications: Extending Care to Anywhere Customers”. While we call them “Anywhere Customers”, we’re really out to capture the idea that they are calling the shots and it starts with them selecting the time, place and nature of their interactions.

Speech Recognition – Getting It Right

Webcast on-demand

Effective change management and staff engagement in a risk averse environment. How the Australian Department of Defence introduced an open menu voice recognition system which didn’t upset the customer whilst dramatically reducing queue times and reducing average handle time by 15%.

Speakers:

• Dan Miller – Senior Analyst, Opus Research
• Luke Johnston – Business Integration Coordinator, Australian Defence Service Centre

Tuesday, June 1, 2010 — 1 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m. PDT
Sign Up Below!

The proliferation of smartphones, e-commerce Web sites and social networks has cultivated a new generation of highly connected “anywhere customers” who are taking command of “how, when and why” they are interacting with their selected vendors and service providers.

In this webcast, Dan Miller with Opus Research and Zor Gorelov, CEO with SpeechCycle, will showcase:

• Changing patterns in self-service and assisted service as customers take command
• Strategies for customer care architectures that leverage internal resources and provide consistently good experiences
• Best practices for enriching the customer experience across multiple media and modalities
• New forms of customer dialogs that blend automated speech, visual components, live agents and text as appropriate.

Attendees of the webcast will receive a free white paper (“Reaching the Anywhere Customer”) published by Opus Research detailing the new roles for contact centers in customer interactions.

Advisories are available to registered users only.

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

Speech Recognition – Getting It Right

Wednesday, April 28, 2010 — 4 p.m. PDT
Sign Up Below!

Effective change management and staff engagement in a risk averse environment. How the Australian Department of Defence introduced an open menu voice recognition system which didn’t upset the customer whilst dramatically reducing queue times and reducing average handle time by 15%.

Speakers:

• Dan Miller – Senior Analyst, Opus Research
• Luke Johnston – Business Integration Coordinator, Australian Defence Service Centre