Richard Humphreys |
Avaya and Microsoft have cultivated a strategic partnership spanning over a decade to deliver joint solutions that enable outstanding customer and employee experiences. By combining Avaya’s expertise in customer experience with Microsoft’s strengths in cloud, collaboration and artificial intelligence, the two companies provide complete end-to-end solutions tailored for large enterprises seeking seamless, personalised and proactive customer engagement across multiple channels.
Avaya deploys its cloud contact centre offerings on Microsoft Azure and integrates them natively with Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365. Agents can manage voice, video, chat, email and SMS conversations seamlessly within Teams, providing a comprehensive omnichannel experience. The integration of AI-powered virtual agent technology, which understands natural language, enables the automation of simple enquiries. Complex issues are then handed off to live agents.
“Many of the largest enterprises in the world rely on Avaya – including the national governments of 97 countries, the world’s top 10 airlines and automotive companies, and the top 19 global banks,” says Gabe Rivero, leader of customer experience services at Avaya. “Avaya also serves over 8,000 healthcare organisations and 3,500 educational institutions.”
All these firms require seamless customer experience services, which can be achieved via cloud adoption, according to Rivero.
“Migrating legacy contact centres and systems to the cloud can be highly complex for large enterprises,” he says. “Professional services expertise helps align business and IT stakeholders, execute phased transitions, and avoid wasted time and budget on ineffective approaches. In many cases, instead of moving our larger customer workloads to the cloud, we bring the cloud services to them – with a hybrid model. This enables them to build on top of existing investments and processes and accelerates time to market with new experiences.”
Avaya helps organisations to navigate factors like industry regulations, integration complexity, security requirements and change management.
“We can help a global bank conduct an application portfolio assessment to determine the optimal migration plan for transitioning their customer service systems to the cloud in a compliant and secure manner,” explains Rivero. “Or we can assist a healthcare provider in building cloud solutions that are compliant with HIPAA [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] and leverage automation for improved patient experiences.”
According to Rivero, choosing the right modernisation approach is critical to prevent unnecessary expenditure of time and resources.
“Performing assessments to determine the root cause of legacy application issues is the best approach for moving contact centre operations to the cloud, whether that be rehosting, rebuilding or replacing,” he says. “Overall, migrating contact centres to the cloud and modernising legacy systems enables improved customer and employee experiences. Avaya bases its initiatives on thorough analysis and alignment with business objectives to increase efficiency, resilience and innovation capabilities for businesses. The Avaya-Microsoft partnership provides integrated cloud capabilities combined with professional services to support these transformations.”
Atento, which provides customer relationship management and business process outsourcing services in Latin America, leveraged a combination of Avaya cloud and on-premises contact centre solutions. This provided the flexibility needed to move to an operational expenditure consumption model. Plus, Avaya’s AI-powered voice transcription and real-time sentiment analysis tools helped to increase customer satisfaction for Atento.
“Atento saw significant gains in call centre agent productivity, customer satisfaction and cost efficiency,” says Rivero. “By innovating together, Avaya and Microsoft help make mega customer experience providers like Atento more successful in transforming processes and strengthening their customer relationships.”
This article was originally published in the Winter 2023 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.