When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down global economies, many enterprises scrambled to find work-around solutions to keep their contact centers operating. No longer could dozens or hundreds of agents gather in one facility, sharing an on-premise platform under the guidance of a team of supervisors.
Instead, enterprises rapidly deployed Avaya’s cloud-based solutions to support agents working from home. For instance, HydroOttawa, a community-owned, private utility company in Ontario, Canada, shifted to Avaya OneCloud Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) in less than a week. “Avaya CCaaS allowed HydroOttawa to make this seamless transition with no interruption of service, ensuring customers could continue to communicate with the company while also facilitating the safety of employees,” said Daniel Séguin, director of communications at Hydro Ottawa.
That success story was repeated many times this spring, said Paul Lang, senior marketing director for Avaya’s contact center portfolio, at an IAUG WIRED presentation. “You have many options with CCaaS, including private, public or hybrid cloud deployments,” said Lang. “Our flexible CCaaS solution offers scalability, security and in-depth analytics so you can deliver a consistent customer experience across different channels and devices while maximizing agent and team performance.”
As enterprises around the world return to more normal operations – while following sanitizing, distancing and other public health guidelines – one question is how best to support contact centers in the months ahead. Should a limited number of agents return to a central facility, continue working from home, or find the right combination of both strategies.
“Today, everyone needs to do more with less,” said Lang. “Our CCaaS solution lets you empower customers, fully engage your agents, and move forward with speed and agility.” He then outlined the key benefits and features including the following.
• Self-serve administration, with the ability to configure CCaaS to your business needs.
• Browser-based desktop to improve agent productivity and the customer experience by empowering. Your team can use the built-in web-based phone app to receive inbound calls, make outbound calls, transfer calls, conduct conference calls, make a consultative call with the customer on hold, change agent states, employ click-to-dial, and more.
• Voice support, including skills-based routing, enhanced transfer and conference, and historical and real-time reporting.
• Digital channels so customers can interact with your organization across multiple channels (email, web chat, SMS and MMS while empowering your agents to manage all digital interactions through one single desktop.
• Voice-to-text transcriptions. Powerful, AI-driven end-to-end transcriptions can increase agent performance in real time by delivering prompts, initiating work flow actions, and enhancing compliance based on words or phrases spoken by customers. They can also reduce agent after-call work by automating reporting into your CRM system.
•IVR. Customers can complete all or part of their voice inquiry using touch tones. Make pre-recorded announcements on frequently requested departments, hours of operations, promotions, alerts and more.
• Call recording to capture customer contacts in their entirety, including the initial IVR experience, hold time, customer-agent interactions and any transfers and conferences. Supervisors can employ an advanced search engine to locate calls easily using metadata parameters, while agents can restrict the capture of sensitive information.
• Screen recording. You can capture desktop screen activity to gain a better understanding on how agents use web chat, email and other business applications to serve customers. Identify opportunities for process improvements to increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and expose unauthorized personal activity.
• Compliance. Enhance Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) security and compliance practices with data redaction capabilities.
• Live monitoring. Supervisors can promote a more consistent and reliable customer experience by listening to customer calls and, when needed, join the customer conversation.
• Surveys. You can engage customers immediately following their interactions with agents to understand their perceptions of your products and services.
As Lang said, “Avaya offers a hassle-free, always-on contact center that delivers a comprehensive, integrated, and open CCaaS architecture. We provide all the features your contact center requires to meet the needs of your customers and agents, using the power and versatility of a true cloud solution.”
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