Avaya announced a new focus with leading technology partners centered on speeding the development and application of artificial intelligence technologies (AI) in contact centers and unified communications for Avaya customers.

The A.I.Connect initiative will focus on enabling Avaya customers to deliver more engaging experiences for their own end customers, enhancing and integrating workflows with smarter, more personalised interactions through the use of AI and machine learning technologies.

AI offers significant opportunities to address many of the complexities and issues faced by companies in delivering an optimal customer experience. For example, it can enable companies to capture and utilise real-time customer sentiment to defuse or re-position situations that could lead to customer dissatisfaction. AI can also help them instantly organise vast amounts of available data input using predictive analytics to deliver optimal information in real time, where it can help achieve the most effective outcome or impact an ongoing customer interaction.

Through the A.I.Connect ecosystem, Avaya and its partnering technology firms will collaborate on creating the broadest set of technology options of AI capabilities for the next-generation digital customer experience built on and integrated into Avaya Oceana™ and Avaya Breeze™.

A.I.Connect will initially focus on five key areas:

• Effortless Self-Service, including adoption through conversational interfaces, and extending Bot-based interaction capabilities.
• Smart Routing, using Big Data and interaction history, as well as customer sentiment and other analytical/statistical measures, to provide pinpoint customer routing strategies.
• Agent Augmentation, to drive upsell/retention opportunities through proactive guidance and Next-Best-Action suggestions consistently across voice, video, chat, email and messaging channels.
• Interaction Insights, using trend spotting and sentiment analysis among other techniques to allow enterprises to elevate offerings and enhance business processes with improved best practices and voice-of-customer analytics.
• Enhanced Workforce Optimisation, automating and improving QA and discovery of best practice models with the assistance of AI, as well as improving resource scheduling by predicting volumes and absentee rates within the enterprise.

A.I.Connect launches with a number of partners and will grow as more are added in upcoming months. Afiniti and Scoredata offer capabilities to analyse various data sets – such as historical interactions, or data that is typically external to an enterprises’ direct customer information, i.e. demographic information. They also use behavioral cues to simultaneously provide dynamic routing, agent script management, and cross-sell to customers. Nuance and Cogito augment those behavioral aspects with core capabilities for voice biometrics, live speaking guidance, sentiment analysis, and more to provide a higher level of agent performance and coaching. Nuance and Sundown.ai expand self-service capabilities with increased automation augmented with AI capabilities.

Partners like EXP360 extend the customer experience with Virtual Reality (VR) capabilities, giving agents new techniques for describing, explaining, and addressing customer issues. Arrow System Integrators (ArrowSI), which is experienced in the delivery of complex, AI-enabled solutions for Avaya environments, complements the technical solution capabilities of other A.I.Connect partners.

More information on A.I.Connect can be found at www.avaya.com/aiconnect. Technology firms interested in joining the A.I.Connect ecosystem can request consideration through aiconnect@avaya.com.

“Digital technologies have opened a door to the future that demands the close collaboration of an ecosystem to ensure workable solutions with tight integration. These A.I.Connect technology partners, as well as others to be announced in the coming weeks, will help ensure that investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning produce better customer and user experiences with long-term value and minimal disruption.” Eric Rossman, vice president, Alliances & Partnerships, Avaya

“We are excited to strengthen our relationship with Avaya by becoming an A.I.Connect partner. This partnership highlights the shift in the communication and collaboration marketplaces towards artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies as tools for enhancing enterprise profitability. Today, Afiniti’s AI technology is delivering transformational levels of revenue, cost reduction, and customer satisfaction to our clients. Our increased collaboration with Avaya will further accelerate the pace at which our customers can drive shareholder value.” Zia Chishti, CEO, Afiniti

“Since the 2012 launch of Nina, the first virtual assistant for mobile customer service, Nuance has led the charge in bringing AI to customer engagement, including innovations in conversational AI, human-assisted AI and predictive targeting. As one of the A.I.Connect technology partners, we believe that the time has come where customer service can be more automated, more accurate and more convenient – and where AI can help turn customer service into something consumers love.” Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Division, Nuance

“Adoption of AI/ML in the enterprise is all about making better decisions, increasing the value delivered by human judgement. The more data available, and the more predictive analytics that can be developed, refined, and applied to customer interactions, the richer and more effective the customer experience becomes. Working with Avaya through the A.I.Connect ecosystem will provide customers with an immediate opportunity to accelerate this adoption and ultimately proactively direct their customer interactions to a positive outcome, rather than just relying upon after-the-fact analysis.” Vas Bhandakar, CEO, ScoreData