Exactly one year after its ambitious set of announcements of transformational technologies for contact centers, Avaya has formally rolled out upgrades to the Avaya Aura Contact Center (AACC) suite aimed to help its customers handle unprecedented amounts of contextual information that accompanies customer conversations.

As Jorge Blanco, VP Product Marketing-Contact Center Solutions, explains, “We are at the earliest stages of helping companies connect their disassociated experience.” Yet many customers (or prospects) find it unforgivable for companies to “disconnect” media from one another. In Blanco’s view, this is especially true when they make the transition to real-time conversations, especially voice communications with contact center agents.

As we noted a year ago, when Avaya announced its programs and products to support the transitional contact center, Avaya had set out to provide software and resources that “orchestrate the user experience” based on the rich set of context received via a number of channels. This year, Blanco encapsulated Avaya’s efforts by asserting that “We are at the earliest stages of helping companies connect their disassociated experience.”

At the heart of today’s product announcements is the Avaya Aura Contact Center Version 6.2 (AACC 6.2) which is the third major rev of its core contact center technology. The emphasis on end-to-end customer experience awareness and orchestration, which naturally shifts attention to the tools needed to create and support new applications (Avaya Aura Orchestration Designer) and the resources that provide for monitoring and analytics for fine tuning applications (Avaya Aura Performance Center, which will be coming out later this year). In addition, the operations and administrations capabilities of the Avaya Aura Control Manager are being expanded to have purview over the whole stack of contact center and “experience management” features and functions.

Another noteworthy development is the transformation and evolution of the Avaya Experience Portal (which is the re-branding and repositioning of the Avaya Voice Portal). Blanco notes that, even though many people continue to refer to it as “the IVR” the Avaya Experience Portal is adding video (as demand grows) and provide for more multimodal features and functions, especially as they add enhanced routing and outbound services.

[Opus Research provides deeper description and analysis of the Avaya announcement in a forthcoming Advisory.]

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Tags: Avaya, Social CRM, contact cener