Avaya trying out data analytics for customer service contact centers

Citing market trends favoring the use of social media data and channels to improve customer service, Avaya is trying to catch up by bringing the power of big data to its call centers.

The unified communications business isn't the first to toy with big data for the purpose of boosting the customer experience.

But Avaya, which recently moved its headquarters from New Jersey to Silicon Valley, is aiming to frame its new solutions as unique by targeting every "access point" in the customer lifecycle.

From the business perspective, the Avaya Customer Experience Management solutions are touted to sync up all customer interactions from every channel as well as come with a simple deployment strategy for virtualized environments.

One method designed to enable this is the Avaya Aura Call Center Elite Multichannel suite, which unifies multiple channels of communications (i.e. IM, email, social media, etc.) onto Avaya's call center software. Contact center users should then be able to layer more communications from other channels onto the same customer file for a more comprehensive, cross-channel profile.

When it comes to mining big data, Avaya has introduced its own form of speech analytics, which integrates the actual voice of the customer into performance management practices while trying to pick up business intelligence that might otherwise be missed in text-based or manual analyses.

Additionally, Avaya's Contact Flow Analytics dashboard comes with a number of visual tools to provide contact center employees with a better view into how customer service communications are being routed and answered.

For virtualized environments, Avaya is optimizing for VMware customers, in particular with contact center applications for skills-based routing, tracking multi-channel interactions, and self-service capabilities.