Avaya Unveils New Mobile Cloud Service for Contact Centers

/EINPresswire.com/ -- ORLANDO, FL--(Marketwired - March 12, 2018) - Enterprise Connect 2018 -- Avaya Holdings Corp. (NYSE: AVYA) today announced a unique service that will enable contact centers to accelerate digital transformation, reduce toll-free carrier costs, increase the accuracy of contextual information, and enhance the customer experience for the ever-growing number of mobile callers. Avaya Mobile Experience, a consumption-based cloud offering, identifies when an incoming call originates from a mobile device, transports contextual information on the caller to the contact center, and enables selected calls to be deflected to the mobile web for a mobile application-enriching digital customer service experience.

Avaya and Post-Quantum also announced today that they are collaborating on Identity-as-a Service ("IDaaS") using blockchain and other emerging technologies to improve contact center security. IDaaS will initially be incorporated into the Avaya Mobile Experience (see separate announcement here).

Toll-free numbers remain a central customer contact point for most organizations, with up to 70 percent of calls to contact centers coming from mobile devices.(1) Contact centers pay carriers for each call arriving over a toll-free line regardless of whether the call originates on a mobile device or a non-mobile device, adding substantially to operational expenses. In addition, the confluence of mobile callers with the limitations of legacy toll-free solutions often leaves additional challenges for businesses operating toll-free lines. For example, the area code of many cell phone numbers does not reflect the actual location of the caller, which can affect routing accuracy to an appropriate contact center resource.

Owned and operated by Avaya, Avaya Mobile Experience will help enterprises bridge this technology gap. Avaya Mobile Experience will identify mobile callers and collect high-fidelity caller-identification information. A mobile user calling a toll-free number will be given an option to deflect the call to the web. When the caller selects this option, the toll-free call ends-along with the associated per-minute costs-and they receive a message with a link for personalized access to the required information on the company website. Website interactions can be augmented with additional self-service solutions such as chatbots or re-escalate to voice, video and co-browsing for an enhanced, omnichannel customer experience. If the mobile caller chooses to interact via voice, the customer information collected by Avaya Mobile Experience will be passed along to help the agent handle the call more efficiently, reducing toll-free line costs and increasing agent productivity.

Avaya Mobile Experience will provide contact centers with flexibility, agility and simplicity which will improve customer responsiveness under changing business requirements. The service will easily integrate with any vendor's technology, enabling contact centers to maintain their existing infrastructure. Organizations with Avaya technology-based contact centers can also take advantage of Avaya Breeze Snap-ins to add differentiating service enhancements, such as webRTC and co-browsing.

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As part of the Avaya Mobile Experience, IDaaS will reduce the risk of identity fraud by using biometrics to authenticate mobile callers and unlock sensitive data, and blockchain to allow contact centers to verify the customer's validity.

Avaya Mobile Experience will be offered with simplified pricing and no annual contracts or minimum spend requirements. Initially, this service will be sold directly to U.S. companies, and will be applied to mobile calls originating from U.S. or Canadian-based phone numbers.

Avaya Mobile Experience is an integral component of the Smart Banking Demo presented in Avaya Innovation Lounge and can also be seen in the Avaya Booth (1918) at Enterprise Connect, a premier industry conference held March 11-15 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, Florida.

More information can be found at http://www.avaya.com/mobile-experience, including a form where customers can submit their contact information to receive future updates.

Quotes

"The number of mobile calls coming to contact centers over toll-free lines is far outpacing those that come from landlines. With a service unlike anything else available today, Avaya transforms this growing number from a challenge into an opportunity. Avaya Mobile Experience is another example of our mobile-first approach to UC and CC innovation that aims to enhance customer experience by delivering contextual information between customers and contact centers in a way that represents how customers interact with companies today, and to do so in a more cost-effective manner."

David Chavez, vice president, Architecture & Innovation, Avaya

"While companies today could identify callers and attempt to route for them with more fidelity, few do because of the additional integration and complexity. With Avaya Mobile Experience, the mobile network identifies and differentially treats mobile callers providing expanded experiential options to the caller. In addition, utilizing an Avaya Breeze snap-in, companies can build routing logic to easily improve personalized service."

Sheila McGee-Smith, president & principal analyst, McGee-Smith Analytics, L.L.C.

Sidebar: What Identity-as-a-Service will bring to Avaya Mobile Experience

Although Avaya Mobile Experience makes use of mobile subscriber data to identify a caller, it is often necessary to fully authenticate a mobile caller prior to the start of confidential interactions with a contact center or mobile web. Whereas the demarcation point for Avaya Mobile Experience extends to the smartphone, Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) delivers a next-generation multi-factor authentication (MFA) service to the user. IDaaS is mobile-centric and relies upon establishing a binding between the caller and their smartphone. In addition to using the possession of a smartphone as the first factor of authentication, IDaaS makes use of leading multi-modal biometric technologies (e.g. fingerprint, voice print, facial recognition) as additional factors. IDaaS brings all of this together with the use of distributed ledger (blockchain) technology in order to permanently record proofs-of-identity for mobile callers. In this way, different parties can fully authenticate a mobile caller in a consistent and highly confident manner. For the contact center, this can potentially reduce agent talk time up to 45 seconds. It can also eliminate considerable user "friction" for the mobile caller and result in a far better customer experience. IDaaS is expected to go live in late CY2018, at which point it will seamlessly ride on top of Avaya Mobile Experience.

About Avaya

Avaya is a global leader in digital communications software, services and devices for businesses of all sizes. Our open, intelligent and customizable solutions for contact centers and unified communications offer the flexibility of Cloud, on-premises and hybrid deployments. Avaya shapes intelligent connections and creates seamless communication experiences for our customers, and their customers. Our professional planning, support and management services teams help optimize solutions, for highly reliable and efficient deployments. Avaya Holdings Corp. is traded on the NYSE under the ticker AVYA. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com

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Source: Avaya Newsroom

(1) Figure based on actual Avaya customers' internal analytics.