The Avaya Call Center provides a total solution for customer’s sales and service needs. Call Center is built on proven and innovative automatic call distribution (ACD) technology that offers a suite of call routing and resource selection capabilities. These capabilities are designed to help agents handle calls more effectively and to boost the overall level of the call center's productivity.

 

Avaya delivers improved overall call center performance by helping agents handle calls more effectively with the proven and innovative call routing and resource selection capabilities in Avaya Call Center. Avaya Call Center simplifies customer management, contact center administration, results tracking, and agent training. It offers conditional (if/then) call routing that makes use of context-based inputs, coupled with versatile resource selection capabilities.

 

One of the most popular features is the ability to choose whether inbound calls will go to the least busy agent, the first available agent, or the agent with the skills needed by a particular customer. In addition, virtual routing capabilities offer multi-location enterprises the ability to maximize resource utilization across all sites. Each customer interaction can be more effective by leveraging all customer knowledge across the enterprise and enabling business-defined routing strategies.

 

Using innovative applications like Avaya Business Advocate along with Avaya Expert Agent Selection (EAS) can assist customers in driving optimal call center performance, even in today's environment of quickly changing strategies and direction. This software application features expert routing algorithm software from Avaya Labs that lets customers implement complex customer service, agent resource, and enterprise planning strategies as critical formulas in call center operations.

 

Advanced Segmentation is an option with Call Center software application for the Call Center Elite package. Advanced Segmentation further extends the power of the Avaya routing capabilities by using external data to provide finer customer segmentation, improving call center effectiveness and personalization. Starting with CC 3.0, customers can further enhance their agents' efficiencies by the addition of simple screen pop capabilities using IP Agent.

 

Avaya Call Center software is highly versatile, spanning all communication infrastructures from traditional circuit switched to H.323 and SIP environments. This interoperability provides investment protection. The Avaya Call Center is made to enhance the power of all the Avaya Customer Contact solution components: call center, multi-media contact center, proactive contact, self service, agent performance, centralized real time and historical reporting.

 

 

 

 

 

The Location Preference Distribution feature is intended for use by Avaya customers who have a distributed call center WAN configuration with agents located at a main switch site as well as at Avaya gateways, and who prefer to connect an incoming ACD call to an agent within the same WAN location as the ACD call's trunk facility.    

 

Location Preference Distribution saves bandwidth and makes consolidation of existing agents easier to administer. By reducing the number of incoming ACD calls distributed to agents across the WAN, inter-node WAN bandwidth can be used for other purposes. For distributed Media Gateway IP environments with the Multiple Locations, this feature can help to reduce use of VoIP resources and improve quality with lower bandwidth requirements.

 

 

Advanced Segmentation allows for the segmentation of contacts based on data collected from sources both internal and external to the contact center. Advanced Segmentation  provides the tools to implement enterprise routing strategies to enforce rules designed to maximize every customer interaction. With Call Center 3.0 and later, Advanced Segmentation also provides the capability to include a "simple" screen pop application when used in conjunction with IP Agent R6. Information collected by Advanced Segmentation that is used for making routing decisions, and deposited in the Advanced Segmentation call log, can also be delivered to the desktop. This solution does not require additional CTI servers and relies on IP Agent at the desktop for communication.

 

Advanced Segmentation provides an out of the box solution for screen pop that does not require custom development, it simply uses the IP Agent screen pop feature to open a browser window to display the customer data at the time of call arrival. Offers greater efficiency, improved first call resolution, and a reduction in the number of transfers per transaction.

 

 

A number of enhancements are added to Call Vectoring to improve existing capabilities and make vector programming more efficient and flexible. They include Vector Subroutines, up to 9 VDN Variables plus 702 Vector Variables, assigning ASAI UUI to the  "set" vector command to assign a value (or transfer values) to a vector variable or to the digits buffer during vector processing, a duplicate vector command, a comment step, and many other enhancements described in the functional attributes section.

 

Provides the concept of "vector subroutines" to help customers consolidate redundant vector routines which will help reduce the need for more vector capacity and simplify administration. Dramatically increases the power and flexibility of vectoring by providing more variables (9) that have association with the called VDN rather than at the vector level. This can be used to "re-use" common vector steps but allow VDN level variation which will help reduce the need for more vector capacity and its associated administration. Better and more personalized customer handling can be accomplished. The "vdntime" variable provides additional loop control ability based on the total time the caller has waited while the ANI variable type will allow assigning the ANI (or selected portion) for the call to a variable. The step-count type provides more vector programming flexibility. Ultimately provides more robust call center availability via resource awareness particularly effective when providing call treatment throughout a distributed enterprise according to the local time zone of each office.

 

 

A number of ACD agent and call selection related options that are currently only available on system basis prior to Call Center Elite 3.0 have  been added to the Expert Agent Selection Agent Login ID form to be able to optionally control  the optional operation on a per agent basis. The options to be added to the Login ID form are:

 

 

It gives the Expert Agent Selection customer more flexibility to assign selection options on a granular per agent basis. In consolidation scenarios, it can avoid costly agent retraining.

 

 

The Locally Sourced Announcements and Music feature of CM 3.0 and later releases adds significantly to the resiliency of the contact center. These capabilities include:

 

 

Prior to Communication Manager 3.0, an announcement was associated with a single announcement source. Now with locally sourced announcements, Avaya has added the concept of Audio Groups. Now multiple announcement sources (such as TN2501AP VAL boards and Media-Gateway Announcement sources) can be placed in a group and assigned to an announcement extension.

 

Locally Sourced Announcements and Music provide improved survivability of announcements in a fragmented or Local Survivable Processor (LSP) configuration, and protection against an individual announcement source failure. These features could also provide a reduction in network bandwidth as a local source plays the announcement and higher audio quality. With Audio Groups, a request to play a specific announcement extension will take into account the location of the party requiring an announcement and will first attempt to use the source that is most local to the caller. If that board is unavailable it will search for the next best choice, and so on through all the available audio resources residing in the audio group.

 

 

Support of conditionals in Call Vectors that can be set by the user and/or external conditions provides added flexibility in allowing changes to call processing based on customer selected variable values. Each of 702 variables is assigned as a certain type, which in turn specifies its characteristics and how it gets set. The variables can be either globally applied or locally applied, and Call Vector processing can be more easily changed by the user and/or external conditions. The global variables are set for the system and local variables are set for individual calls.

 

By improving the general efficiency of vector administration, manager and application control over call treatments is increased and the creation of more flexible vectors can better serve the needs of the whole contact center operation. This capability is available as a standard component of Elite Call Center package.

 

 

Consisting of a set of algorithms and capabilities designed to optimize the level of service with the given staff, it maximizes agent utilization to meet service level targets. Performance parameters like "answer 80% (X) of skill 1 calls within 20 (Y) seconds", can be set based upon a number of variables. Different targets can be administered to each skill to differentiate service levels based on the value of this type of call to the business.

 

Starting in Call Center 3.1.2 and later releases, there is an alternative algorithm called Actual Service Level (ASL) that provides more accurate results with low staff or traffic levels.

 

Assigned on a per skill (hunt) group basis, Service Level Maximizer (SLM) is an agent selection strategy that provides the ability to allocate agent resources in a dynamic manner to better serve specific call center service goals. Service Level Maximizer is available as a standard component of the Avaya Call Center Elite package. It helps agents provide consistent customer experiences regardless of call surplus or agent surplus conditions. This enhancement allows call centers to better utilize their agents to match the needs of their business.

 

 

A system wide feature for all agents in the system (allowing an objective threshold setting between 0 - 100 percent occupied). Other applications have attempted to limit an agent's utilization, but until now there has never been a way to ensure that an agent will not be engaged for 100% of their time.

 

This optional feature was created to support ongoing agent efficiencies and minimizing agent burnout.

 

 

This provides call center customers with the ability to connect audible feedback locally for calls that are queued remotely.

 

It decreases the use of IP resources and the number of packets sent over the IP trunk, thus decreasing costs for global customers who incur trunk charges on a per usage basis. It provides cost savings to customers by minimizing cost of queuing should an agent suddenly become unavailable at offshore location(s).

 

 

Call Center 4.0 improves integration with the CTI Dialer to account for outbound time as ACD time. This includes accounting for outbound time in reporting and in call distribution algorithms such as MIA and LOA.

 

Closer integration with Proactive Contact where outbound calling is accounted for as ACD time will improve the overall Avaya solution to the customer.

 

 

This feature enables up to 2 observers to observe the same entity and if a conference occurs between 2 different observed entities, allows the conference to occur with up to 2 observers total, each still associated with their entity being observed

 

This enhancement allows customers with Avaya Agent Performance systems (NICE, Verint, and Witness) to do separate quality monitoring on agents who are also being Service Observed for call recording. In addition, retaining the observing association when two observed entities are merged in a conference allows uninterrupted call recording/quality monitoring of the individual entities within the limit of a maximum of 2 observers in a conference.