Kathy Gibson reports from Gitex – As the business landscape shifts, the contact centre is becoming more important to businesses looking to leverage cloud computing and advanced analytics to redefine the customer experience they offer.
Todd Zerbe, senior vice-president: engineering at Avaya, believes the contact centre is rapidly becoming a core part of the business rather than a separate department charged with handling calls as it was for so long.
“The contact centre is so much more today: with integration into digital and social media, it can give you insights into what people are saying about your company; and it is becoming a strategic part of the marketing function, helping you to reach more customers,” he explains.
On the technology front, Zerbe points out that there is a lot of consolidation going on, with the contact centre coming together with unified communications; and taking a more strategic role in customer relationship management.
He says the big trend that customers are asking for is analytics, and unified systems can now offer them insights that they can action to improve their businesses.
“Because systems are less compartmentalised, they can bring together insights from all channels – including social media – and customers can start to use the wealth of information that isn’t really full utilised now.”
Customers are asking for cloud solutions: they know it’s what they need, and are looking to Avaya for guidance on how to get there.
Not all customers want to replatform their contact centres, but are looking for practical solutions for how they can get to cloud at their own pace, Zerbe explains.
The Covid pandemic was hugely disrupting for companies of all sizes, but the solutions that emerged as a result of it are continuing to make an impact now.
“Remote working was the big disruption during Covid, and it is still an important trend,” Zerbe says. “And Avaya has responded to customer requirements with the integration of the media processing core.”
The Avaya Media Processing Core uses unique patented frictionless AI integration technology to dramatically accelerate multi-experience innovation.
It is a cloud-native service is designed to power the next generation of communications applications.
Sitting at the heart of the Avaya OneCloud architecture is multi-tenant, multi-app design hides the complexity associated with developing, hosting, controlling, and scaling complex realtime media services.
The Avaya Media Processing Core delivers security and simplicity, quality and scalability, and flexibility and consistency to accelerate multi-experience innovation.
This technology is particularly useful in remote working situations, and in applications where AI services are added to the analysis of voice, video and chat.
The Avaya MPC offers frictionless AI integration into communications media processing, delivering security with simplicity; quality with scalability, and flexibility with consistency.
“These are great innovations that we have introduced,” Zerbe says. “Customers are telling us that the pandemic may be over, but people will never fully go back to the way we were. And we have responded to that.”
Looking to the future, Avaya will launch its new roadmap within the next month.
Avaya’s theme at Gitex is “innovation without disruption”, and one of the key directions for the technology roadmap will focus on eliminating disruptions.
“Customers will be able to consume from the cloud while leveraging their on-premise assets, with a single interface solution,” Zerbe says. “They will have one experience, with blended analytics across channels.”
Technologies like the MPC, cloud computing capabilities, the integration of social media and analytics – including an expansion of digital channels – will play into the focus on innovation without disruption.
Also expected in the upcoming roadmap will be a bigger focus on APIs and openness. This will enable even greater integration into partner solutions, who will be able to include things like the metaverse, additional analytics and more.
“The roadmap will cover a couple of broad directions,” Zerbe says. “One will be over-the-top services for existing customers looking to integrate legacy and cloud systems.
“Another will be on digital and social media services, bringing in extra channels.
“A third will be around automation and cloud services, where there will be a number of bundles that will be part of the go to market.”
The metaverse is a hot topic today, and Gitex visitors are keen to learn more about how they can leverage the ecosystem in their business – and customer experience is key here.
On its stand, Avaya demonstrated how it is executing on Dubai’s metaverse vision.
Developed in by Avaya’s Dubai-based team in collaboration with Avanza, the ‘Metaverse Experience’ solution will support Dubai’s ambition to be one of the top 10 global cities for the metaverse economy, aims to create 40 000 virtual jobs by 2030 and contribute to the economic prosperity of the emirate.