In a pre-holiday-rock-your-world moment, Avaya and Salmat jointly announced a multi-million dollar (meaning between $10 and $20 million) deal whereby the Australian contact center outsourcer would replace its Genesys-based platform with “a broad suite of Avaya technology and expertise.” According to this media release, “Salmat will commence the rollout of the Avaya technology across all of its contact centre operations in February 2012.” It is expected to take 12 months to implement, at which time 7,500 contact center agents will be using Avaya’s technology.

According to coverage in the Australian press Salmat, which handles over 100 million inbound and outbound calls each year on behalf of its clients, had “scoured the world” for a new solution provider. Its vendor selection started with 10 prospective winners but, in the end, was winnowed down to Avaya and one other (unnamed) candidate.

We’ll presume that Genesys, as incumbent platform provider, was considered as a candidate from the start. Indeed, it had shown an impressive array of enhancements to its core Customer Interaction Manager (CIM), including the introduction of a Conversation Manager to support “intelligent” handling of multi-channel and multi-modal interactions. Genesys also has a longer history of hosted implementations of CIM as well as the use of the Genesys Voice Portal (and its precursor VoiceGenie platform) for applications involving voice-based authentication.

The transition to a totally new platform is, to the best of our understanding, something of a rip-and-replace operation during which business continuity could be something of a challenge. This is especially true because Avaya, has had a love/hate relationship with “hosted” or “cloud-based” implementations. The move to IP-based implementations provided some initiatives toward hosted renditions of IP-based ACD and Contact Center resources. According to literature, both Telecom Italia and Sprint have offered hosted renditions of Avaya’s IP-based call processing resources.

However, to the best of our knowledge, Avaya has yet to bless or integrate voice biometric authentication into its IP-based Contact Center or its Experience Portal. By contrast, Salmat has made a point of differentiating itself by offering caller authentication as a service to financial institutions, healthcare providers, telecom service providers and government agencies in Australia and New Zealand. We’re anxious to see how smoothly the re-hosting takes place in the coming year. And we want to welcome Avaya into the community of voice biometrics-based solution providers.

Categories: Articles

Tags: customer care, Voice biometrics, Avaya, hosted services, Call Center