Avaya Collaboration, Contact Center Portfolios Receive Upgrades, AI Injection

Avaya is smartening up its contact center portfolios with artificial intelligence and is making its low-cost collaboration application more robust.

Avaya IX Spaces, the company's cost-effective cloud team collaboration application, can now scale to accommodate more users in cloud meeting "spaces" and integrate with existing Avaya hardware, as well as third-party collaboration tools, the UC giant announced at Avaya Engage 2020 in Phoenix on Tuesday.

In the contact center space, Avaya revealed a new partnership on Tuesday with Afiniti, an AI-based behavioral pairing technology provider. The team-up is bringing forth a new offering for the Avaya IX Contact Center portfolio; Avaya AI Routing with Afiniti AiRo.

[Related: Avaya Engage Features RingCentral-Powered UCaaS Offer, UC Subscription Models For Partners ]

Avaya IX Spaces offers messaging, meeting, content sharing and task management via browser or mobile device. Avaya today announced that IX Spaces is now available in over 60 countries and can support up to 500 video meeting participants. The product also now features connectivity with existing Avaya IX Collaboration Unit CU360 huddle and SIP-based video room systems and integrations with Google, Slack, Microsoft Office 365, Outlook, and Teams.

Avaya IX Spaces is also now available via a monthly subscription-based pricing model, which includes upgrades to the latest releases and Avaya support. Avaya partners have access to sell via Avaya IX Spaces in subscription bundles to their customers, said Karen Hardy, vice president of product marketing for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Avaya.

Avaya AI Routing with Afiniti AiRoy in the call center will help businesses improve customer interactions and employee engagement by pairing customers with the right contact center agents using AI. The product can identify subtle patterns in human interactions in real-time, which translates to better outcomes in the contact center space, Hardy said.

The new offering gives businesses measurable results that can be tracked via customer retention, first contact resolution, and average handle time metrics through a self-service interface. Avaya AI Routing with Afiniti AiRoy is also available in a subscription pricing model, the company said.

Altura Communication Solutions, an Avaya Diamond partner, is seeing a lot of interest in from its customers in AI. The Fullerton, Calif.-based solution provider is serving up contact center solutions to state and local government agencies and healthcare customers, said Bob Blazek, president and CEO of Altura Communication Solutions.

Most recently, Altura has been helping healthcare clients integrate Avaya's contact center solution with their Epic Systems' electronic health record platforms. Features like AI will help Altura's customers get the most out of their contact center investments, Blazek said.

"A lot of hospitals have invested a great deal of money into their electronic health record systems and now they are looking to get a return on that investment. To be able to integrate your communications system in with your entire patient record system has a lot of advantages and now they can show they are adding value to the patient experience," he said.

Anthony Bartolo, executive vice president and chief product officer for Avaya, said at Avaya Engage 2020 that contact center as a service will be a key investment opportunity for the UC giant and its channel partners in 2020.