Avaya: Best Reporting, IP Contact Center Essay

Course Project
NETW250
Johnathon A. Royes

In order to have an efficient call center we must deploy an effective system. After evaluating the company needs for an IP PBX solution and diligent research, I have come to the conclusion that the IP PBX system should be based on Avaya IP Office and Aura. These reasons include the experience and connectivity that Ayala provides, as well as Multimedia support and Total cost of the System. Avaya currently services more than 95% of the Fortune 500 organizations at over 1 million customer locations worldwide with operations divided globally in 5 regions including Asia Pacific; Caribbean, Latin America; Europe, Middle East & Africa; Middle East & Africa (MEA) and United States and Canada. Below is a table describing key aspects of the contact-center packages reviewed for Avaya.

Avaya
Total contact center seats shipped (all products), per vendor
6 to 8 million (25,000 contact centers globally)
Contact center package, version reviewed
Interaction Center 7.0
Contact Center Express 2.1
Contact center server(s) required
Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, and/or Windows
Windows
DBMS
Oracle or IBM DB2 SQL server; customer-provided
MS SQL Server; customer-provided
Typical/avg no. agents per contact center
100-200
50-100
Max agents per contact center
5,200
150
Est. percent new systems shipping with 30% multiple media
40%
15%
PBX infrastructure (over which contact center was reviewed)
S8500-based CommMgr 3.0 (on Linux)
S8500-based CommMgr3.0 (on Linux)
Other PBX support
Siemens, Nortel, Ericsson & Aspect ACD
None; requires Avaya Comm Mgr 3.0 PBX

Avaya was awarded the “Best Reporting, IP Contact Center,” 2005 IP Contact Center Review. The 800-pound gorilla of call and contact centers, Avaya estimates it has shipped well over 6 million contact-center seats over the last dozen years, equating to some 25,000 active contact centers around the world. And it is also clear that the competition is gunning specifically for Avaya, touting their packages as doing things better, cheaper, faster, easier, better managed as or with more integrated features than Avaya. Avaya has implemented much of its contact-center call handling and routing right within its Linux-based, PBX operating software, called Communication Manager, or CM. Some very basic call-routing capabilities applicable to contact centers are available to Avaya PBX customers at no extra price. But most features require contact-center customers to take out additional licenses for increasing levels of call routing and handling sophistication. These PBX software options—called Elite, Advocate, Advanced Segmentation, and Virtual Routing—can add $250 to $650 per concurrent agent, based on a Contact Center with 300 concurrently active agents. Avaya Aura Agent Desktop is used by agents to manage both inbound and outbound voice interactions, as well as email, web chat, text (SMS), social media, instant messaging (IM), fax, and scanned documents. Each agent can be configured to handle up to six interactions simultaneously. The agent desktop interface provides information on the contact history and screen pops, delivering added business intelligence. For voice-based interactions, agents can record a greeting for every skillset they are assigned, and the appropriate greeting is played to minimize repetitive information. For text based interactions, auto responses can be configured and response suggestions offered to agents based on the context of the interaction. In the multimedia space, all the packages reviewed support e-mail—integrated to varying degrees with their agent client, management, and reporting interfaces. Most have also effectively implemented Web chat, along with the ability to push and pull Web URLs also the implementation of instant messaging and more intense Web collaboration. Below is a table describing Avaya IP Contact Center Multimedia, and Application support.
Multimedia, other features

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