Avaya Mobile Experience can help businesses improve their customer interactions, and offer potential cost savings, according to Dustin Fails, telecommunication network administrator, ACS Technologies in Florence, South Carolina.
“We were able to save on toll calls and enhance or disaster response capabilities,” said Fails at an Avaya ENGAGE 2020 session, “How Avaya Mobile Experience Can Replace Your SIP Provider and Save You Money.”
ACS Technologies is a leading provider of software and services to churches and schools with a small call center and a disaster recovery site. “About 25 percent of our calls are mobile,” said Fails, who began piloting the platform with Avaya in 2018. “Moving from the carrier to AME resulted in about 45 percent savings or $121,000 in our first year,” he said. “Instead of 3 cents a minute, our cost is less than a penny a minute for inbound calls. Plus we have the advantage of a more robust disaster recovery platform.”
Robert Tarr, director of innovation and architecture, Avaya, noted that more than a growing percentage of consumer calls to businesses came from mobile devices – a trend likely to continue. “We wanted to change that interaction model, providing businesses with additional context for those calls, as well as mobile location services,” he said.
The result was Avaya Mobile Experience, a SIP-based toll-free and DID service provider, now available in the U.S. “Now, we can interrogate the carrier and pass on more data to the customer,” he added.
If a call comes in from a landline, it continues directly to a contact center, Tarr said. But if it comes from a mobile device, the Avaya platform can augment the experience by adding context or metadata before sending on the call.
With Avaya Mobile Experience, businesses can identify mobile callers and provide them a web experience for fast access to the information callers need, cutting wait times and freeing agents to focus on higher-value activities. “You can enhance the customer experience, drive digital transformation and improve agent performance,” Tarr said.
With Avaya Mobile Experience, businesses can add an option to deflect certain callers to the web, giving them faster access to information and reducing wait times. “You want to offer help to callers, so you need to ask questions in the right way,” Tarr said. On the other hand, certain call flows should not be deflected, such as emergency or weather-related power outage calls.
“You also want to be sure you offer a great mobile web experience in conjunction with a great Avaya Mobile Experience,” Tarr added.
Along with cost savings, Fails says ACS Technologies has gained other benefits from Avaya Mobile Experience, such as ensuring that callers will not encounter a busy signal when trying to connect with the call center—even during times of unusually high volumes.
“We’ve never quite had a problem with callers getting busy signals because the infrastructure was overwhelmed, but we’ve been close a few times,” said Fails. “Now, if one of our products goes down and we get a sudden spike in calls, Avaya Mobile Experience is elastic enough to accommodate that spike. Callers never get a busy signal—that call will be served.”
