Avaya announced advancements in delivering and integrating artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into contact centres to improve the customer experience. Avaya Ava™, a new AI architecture including natural language processing, machine learning and innovative analytics, enables effortless customer engagement through social media and messaging platforms.

Avaya Ava is a cloud, messaging-agnostic solution that offers new AI capabilities for social messaging integration and automation of digital interactions. Avaya Ava was originally introduced as part of Avaya’s online support community, helping customers and partners get their questions answered about Avaya solutions without human intervention. Ava has now evolved to include AI capabilities, complementing Avaya’s Customer Experience portfolio and is the ideal solution for any contact centre to modernise their infrastructure with AI.

Avaya Ava can engage with customers using social media, chat and messaging channels, and provide immediate self-service support as well as deliver the customer to agent based customer care. When handing off to agents, Ava transfers the full context of the upfront automated experience, eliminating the need for customers to repeat information and steps already taken.

Capable of AI mining via multi-lingual, natural language identification, contextual and sentiment analysis, Avaya Ava extends scale and efficiency to customer care operations. Ava can support 34 languages and Facebook, Twitter, WeChat and LINE, with more to be added as the solution evolves. The open API approach enables integration with third party AI solutions from the Avaya A.I.Connect initiative.

The announcement of Avaya Ava comes on the heels of Avaya’s announcement of a definitive agreement to acquire Spoken, a leading innovator in Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions for enterprise customers and a provider of transformative real-time customer experience management applications built on conversational artificial intelligence.

Spoken’s specialised agent quality software applications and services as well as IntelligentWire solutions use artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies on live voice conversations to reduce after-call work, drive more intelligent responses and gain deeper insight into customer sentiment and experience.

Avaya also announced an expansion of the A.I.Connect initiative with three new members, and new solutions and services focused on the user experience, including Avaya Equinox Experience and the Avaya Desktop Experience.

Mary Wardley

“Artificial Intelligence offers significant benefits to improve the customer experience. Avaya Ava can provide an outstanding customer experience that blends personality, efficiency and information to capture service opportunities in digital channels with less effort on the part of the customer. Ava, like Avaya, enables companies to stay on the forefront of the customer experience.” says Laurent Philonenko, SVP and GM, Technology and Solutions, Avaya.

Mary Wardley, IDC, vice president, Customer Care and CRM comments, “The increasing number of channels customers use for service needs presents a significant opportunity for artificial intelligence technologies. While it’s nearly impossible for a company to dedicate enough live agents to monitor and be responsive to all channels including social media and messaging platforms, an AI-enabled solution offers the capability to quickly engage the customer as the first – and potentially, the entire interaction in a highly satisfactory experience.”

Read the whitepaper here.

Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @ VanillaPlus OR @jcvplus