Call centres used to be a boring part of enterprises, often viewed by executives as a cost centre.
Today, smart leaders know that if properly handled call centres can be a key way to satisfy customers and generate sales.
To improve what the industry calls the customer experience, Avaya Inc. on Tuesday made some key announcements in its call centre portfolio, including a new hosted service.
For organizations using the Aura Call Centre Elite software for managing voice calls, a multichannel pack is available for purchase that adds Web chat, social media SMS, instant messaging and email.
Laura Bassett, an Avaya director of product marketing, said the pack allows these multichannel capabilities to be added with little disruption to existing operations or reporting systems.
Also new for Call Centre Elite is Contact Flow Analytics, which lets organizations track the flow of customer calls to find out, for example, which agents are the most effective or where customers hang up.
The data is displayed through flow graphs, dashboards and tabular reports.
The announcement also includes the release of Avaya Speech Analytics, an application that mines voice calls for information for everything from regulatory compliance to upsell opportunities.
It can be integrated with almost any recording environment.
However, arguably the biggest part of the announcement Avaya Automated Chat, a hosted service that integrates with existing live chat capabilities of a call centre to deliver more personalize service.
Bassett said that some customers want to be able to contact a call centre online, text in a question and if they can’t get what they need from the automated answer switch to a live agent. The service gives that capability.
Automated Chat is run by an automation engine that learns from customer interations.
An optional Answer Desk feature allows non-chat agents to tap the automation engine to quickly get answers for their non-chat customer contacts.
Automated Chat costs from US$100 to $120 per seat per month. Pricing varies on the number of virtual agents the business needs.
