Avaya recently announced that it has been positioned in the Leaders Quadrant in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Centre Infrastructure for 2013. This is the 13th consecutive year that Avaya has been placed in the Leaders Quadrant as the only company that has consistently appeared in this section since the inception of the Magic Quadrant for Contact Centre Infrastructure in 2001.
The annual report covers vendors that provide equipment, software and services to operate contact centres used for customer, employee and service support, including outbound telemarketing, helpdesks and other structured communications operations.
The Gartner report outlines the types of interactions, requirements and dominant architectures for supporting effective contact centres today, noting that a wide range of functions, architectures, features and services are needed.
The types of services are people-assisted and self-service, which can be supported by a number of channels such as interactive self-service, speech recognition, voice, Web chat, e-mail, instant messaging, social media, video and mobile devices.
The Gartner report also found that contact centre managers increasingly prefer to purchase much, or all, of their contact centre infrastructure from a single source in the effort to simplify integration and operations, which bodes well for those infrastructure vendors offering complete portfolios of solutions comprised of their own products and those of partners and other strategic suppliers.
In addition, cloud-based, contact centre as a service (CCaaS) models for hosted, multitenant systems are gaining attention but not yet widely deployed.
Since the 2012 Magic Quadrant, Avaya has continued to evolve its end-to-end contact centre portfolio to reflect the changing requirements of companies that strive to deliver a holistic, low-effort customer experience through multiple channels for both assisted and self-service needs.
New and enhanced solutions for Customer Interaction help address increasingly mobile and self-service oriented consumers that may use several different modes of contact within a single service interaction, such as social, web chat and video. New additions for Performance Management help boost, refine and simplify critical analytics and workforce management tools.
“Too many businesses are serving today’s consumers using yesterday’s technology out of fear that an IT disruption will negatively affect their service operations. The reality is that they may already be risking customer relationships through inconvenient, high effort experiences.
“Avaya Customer Experience Management solutions offer an end-to-end portfolio of solutions that minimise disruption while enabling mobile, multichannel interactions and providing new, actionable insights into consumer behaviour which help build loyalty, brand and revenue,” says Mark de la Vega, VP, Contact Centre Solutions, Avaya.
Avaya has also introduced new packaged solutions that simplify contact centre operations and accelerate deployment:
* Avaya Customer Experience Virtualised Environment provides organisations with Avaya contact centre applications such as skills-based routing, multi-channel interactions, reporting and self-service capabilities optimised for VMware environments; and
* Avaya Outbound Contact Express is the first, fully integrated, turnkey solution for proactive customer communications specifically designed for the midsize contact centre.
Avaya Contact Centre solutions are also available in several deployment models: premises-based solutions, managed and outsourced services, and in a CCaaS model through Avaya Collaborative Cloud for Cloud Service Providers.