Vonage adds platforms, software for better customer support

TMCnet columnist David Sims offers a detailed analysis of Vonage's Vonage America sales and service arm hooking up with Avaya to deploy its SIP-based telephony and contact center solutions.

The deal will enable Vonage contact centers to run Avaya's Customer Interaction Suite. The suite is powered by Avaya Communication Manager IP Telephony software.

Vonage's goal, Sims writes, is "to improve its customer service, expand its customer service capabilities and increase the number of callers the company handles daily."

The killer app, at least the way I see it, is a fairly underpublicized Customer Interaction Suite capability of, as Sims puts it, (enabling) "Vonage agents to establish buddy lists of fellow agents or experts located anywhere in the (company) who could be quickly tapped through presence and instant messaging while a customer is online."

To me, that sounds so much more efficient than just being routed from department to department, or from Level 1 to Level 2 tech support. If this capability is deftly deployed, it could mean that if a Vonage tech or customer support person did not know the answer to a caller question, they could find out who knows rather than transferring the call to a department where someone might know. 

The Avaya deal comes on the heels of a contract Vonage signed a few weeks ago with Synchronoss Technologies. That contract was signed to enable Vonage to use Synchronoss' ActivationNow order gateway and workflow management platform to correctly provision VoIP transactions. The portability module lets Vonage track the sometimes lengthy and oft-problematic migration of new customers' legacy phone numbers to the Vonage network.