Avaya CEO highlights how Avaya can help in-country brands deliver AI-powered experiences without disrupting existing estates.
Avaya, a global leader in customer experience solutions, demonstrated how United Kingdom and Ireland brands can infuse artificial intelligence (AI) into the experiences they deliver without disrupting existing operations.
At the JOURNEYS with Avaya event, held in London, Avaya CEO Alan Masarek said that UK and Ireland enterprises, like their global counterparts, are increasingly turning to Avaya to help them fully realize the promise of AI within the customer experience industry. With these organizations running “bullet-proof,” premise-based Avaya contact center estates, he said that “Avaya is able to infuse AI into the experience without disrupting what’s already working well.”
“Our UK and Ireland customers are demonstrating the immense potential for customer-specific and industry-optimized AI solutions. We’re supporting those customers as they seek to bring these innovations, on a large scale, into their contact centers to address their own customers’ most pressing challenges,” he said.
According to Frost & Sullivan, in 52% of UK organizations, CX improvements are one of the main drivers for implementing AI technologies. Such improvements represent a pressing industry challenge; as call volumes for most UK and Irish contact centers increased over the course of 2023, while call abandonment and the average time for an agent to answer reached an all-time high1.
“UK and Irish organizations recognize the fundamental importance of delivering frictionless experiences to customers. They aim to harness a seamless stack of UC, CX, and AI applications and focus on deploying analytical tools at scale and reducing the time it takes to introduce self-service applications. To modernize their contact centers, large organizations in particular opt for a ‘lift-and-shift’ method, avoiding the ‘rip-and-replace’ approach to existing estates,” said Alexander Michael, Vice President, ICT Practice Leader, Frost & Sullivan.
Enabling Innovation Without Disruption Across the UK and Ireland
Avaya counts the NHS, top high street banks, and leading telecom service providers among its customers – along with a large number of top brands from diverse industries.
In Ireland, among other top government and private organizations, Avaya supports RelateCare, a leading provider of innovative healthcare consulting, administrative and clinical support solutions. RelateCare has continued to expand its investment in Avaya contact center and workforce optimization solutions as part of its focus on enhancing client and patient experience.
Masarek said that these large-scale, consumer-facing organizations feel the most pressure from customers to modernize the experiences that they deliver.
“These customers are moving quickly to get digital experiences right. They want to add new capabilities like AI and chatbots, but they don’t want to give up their existing solutions. That’s why we aim to meet our customers where they are on their innovation journeys,” he said.
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Demonstrated at JOURNEYS with Avaya was the company’s ability to deliver such innovation without disruption. Product showcases included Avaya Experience Platform, which empowers organizations to access omnichannel voice and digital channels, as well as AI capabilities and more from the cloud – while leveraging their existing on-premises infrastructure for voice routing, call handling, and more.
Another solution demonstrated at the event was Avaya Enterprise Cloud, which was recently adopted by Kura, the UK’s largest independent outsourcer. The solution enables Kura to offer its clients – including leading energy and financial services companies – complex inbound and outbound contact centre services on a robust platform hosted in a dedicated cloud instance with options to add services such as speech analytics, digital and social channels and secure PCI payments as required.
“From readying us for initial go-live, to leveraging all the advanced features and innovation, and training us to become fully autonomous, Avaya, with its Avaya Customer Experience Services (ACES), has been key in guiding and supporting us in our journey, and we are looking forward to realizing the full potential of this new solution,” said Janine Hunt, Client Partnership Director, Kura.
