Avaya Unveils Multimedia Contact Center

Avaya

Regardless of whether customers contact a business through e-mail, Web chat, IP telephony or traditional telephone calls, call center agents using Multimedia Contact Center can see and manage the interactions, said Lawrence Byrd, CRM evangelist at Avaya, Basking Ridge.

"You want the agent taking the call today to be able to see the e-mail sent yesterday about the Web transaction last week," Byrd said.

Multimedia Contact Center, scheduled to ship at the end of June, includes two components: a new product called Operational Analyst that generates realtime and historic performance reports, and Interaction Center 6, the latest version of Avaya's modular application suite for customer data management, call and e-mail routing, online collaboration and automated telephone dialing.

"A lot of companies spend a ton of money to alienate their customers [through inefficient call centers. This lets customers contact you how and when they want," said John Slauson, product sales manager at HTI Voice Solutions, a solution provider based in Marlboro, Mass.

What sets Multimedia Contact Center apart from competitive contact center products is its ability to deliver intelligent routing, Slauson said.

Through the Interaction Center component, Multimedia Contact Center can identify the importance of incoming calls and transactions and route them to agents accordingly, said Slauson.

"Interaction Center can [intelligently route chats, e-mails and calls in one queue. You will not find that from any of their competitors," Slauson said.

The new version of Interaction Center adds the ability to perform natural language analysis of the text of e-mail messages and route them to the appropriate service agent based on their content, Byrd said.

Typical pricing per concurrent user ranges from $2,000 to $4,000.