Avaya and AI – the story so far
Avaya has been investing in AI for some time to improve the customer experience. That includes chatbots to answer queries, provide product information and help with troubleshooting. In addition, machine learning is used to improve the performance of AI-powered solutions. For example, virtual agents can be trained to spot trends in existing interactions and answer requests more effectively.
Here are some Avaya platforms where AI is used:
- Avaya Vantage – Avaya Vantage is a cloud-based AI platform that helps businesses automate tasks, improve customer service and make better decisions.
- Avaya IX™ Contact Center Suite – Avaya IX™ Contact Center Suite is a contact center platform that uses AI to automate tasks, personalize customer experiences and improve agent productivity.
- Avaya Aura® One – Avaya Aura® One is a unified communications platform that uses AI to provide users with a more personalized and intelligent experience.
Avaya is a leading provider of AI-powered solutions for businesses of all sizes. By continuing to invest in AI, Avaya is helping businesses to improve their customer experience, increase productivity and make better decisions.
This focus will certainly continue since their swift and successful exit from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2023 – which is reflected in their subsequent launch of Avaya AI Virtual Agent Enhanced.
What is Avaya Virtual Agent?
Of course, Avaya AI Virtual Agent Enhanced isn’t a completely new development. It’s the next level of Avaya Virtual Agent – a cloud-based AI solution that helps businesses automate customer service tasks and provide self-service options. Through various channels such as web chat, audio, and email, virtual agents can answer consumer questions, resolve issues, and even make tailored recommendations.
Avaya Virtual Agent is powered by Avaya’s AI platform, Avaya Vantage. It uses natural language processing, machine learning and other AI technologies to enable virtual agents to understand customer requests and provide accurate and helpful responses.
Virtual Agent is a scalable and cost-effective solution that can be used by businesses of all sizes. It is easy to deploy and manage – and doesn’t require any coding skills. With Avaya’s latest release, things just got even better.
The capabilities of Virtual Agent Enhanced
Avaya’s AI Virtual Agent Enhanced update brings a number of new capabilities to the platform, including:
- Natural language processing (NLP) – Avaya AI Virtual Agent Enhanced now uses NLP to better understand customer queries. This means that customers can interact with the virtual agent in a more natural way, using conversational language.
- Context awareness – It can understand the context of customer queries too. This allows the virtual agent to provide more relevant and helpful responses.
- Multi-turn conversations – Multi-turn conversations with customers are another capability of Avaya AI Virtual Agent Enhanced. As such, customers can ask follow-up questions and the virtual agent can keep track of the conversation.
- Integration with Google Cloud Dialogflow CX – Avaya AI Virtual Agent Enhanced is now integrated with Google Cloud Dialogflow CX. This integration provides access to Google Cloud’s latest AI capabilities, such as natural language understanding and machine learning.
These new capabilities make Avaya AI Virtual Agent Enhanced a more powerful and versatile tool for improving customer experience. Virtual agents can now handle more complex customer requests, provide more relevant and helpful responses and engage in more natural conversations with customers. This can lead to improved customer satisfaction, increased customer loyalty and reduced costs for businesses.
So, how can my organization use it?
The capabilities above lend themselves not only to different applications, but also to a long list of sectors. Here are some examples of how Avaya AI Virtual Agent Enhanced can be used to improve customer experience:
- A telecommunications company can use Avaya AI Virtual Agent Enhanced to answer customer questions about their bill, troubleshoot technical issues and make changes to their account.
- A bank could use Avaya AI Virtual Agent Enhanced to provide customer service for checking accounts, savings accounts, loans and credit cards.
- Or a retailer might use Avaya AI Virtual Agent Enhanced to answer customer questions about products, place orders and track shipments.
What are the benefits?
Avaya AI Virtual Agent Enhanced can help businesses of all sizes improve customer experience. If you’re looking for a way to reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction and increase customer loyalty, then it’s a great option to consider. Here’s a rundown of the benefits you can expect:
- Reduced costs: Virtual agents can help businesses to reduce the cost of customer service by automating tasks and providing self-service options.
- Improved customer satisfaction: They also give customers a more personalized and efficient customer service experience.
- Increased productivity: Virtual agents can free up agents to focus on more complex tasks, such as handling escalated issues.
- Improved data insights: Finally, they can collect data on customer interactions, which can be used to improve the customer experience and make better business decisions.
Is AI replacing humans?
For some, this announcement will fuel the misconception that AI is replacing humans in customer service. However, it’s important to note that these worries have been around for a long time – and they’re yet to be justified.
As far back as the 1960s, the media has been fearmongering about robots stealing everyone’s jobs. Why? They know it will get clicks and shares. It draws on our natural instinct to pay more attention to negative information and our attentional bias towards anything novel, unexpected or threatening. Not to mention the simple fact that bad news spreads quickly.
In reality, AI has been used for years to reduce the workflow and improve outcomes in customer service, such as:
- Chatbots asking routine questions at lightning speed
- Augmented messaging detecting when a human is needed
- Detecting sentiment, urgency or the type of problem
- Voice AI asking similar questions over the phone
- AI content assistants personalizing emails or articles for customers
- AI tools predicting customer behavior based on real-time data
- Translating messages or detecting a customer’s language
The real acid test is whether current AI tools are being developed to replace humans. Clearly, the answer is no. Microsoft Copilot aims to enhance productivity for employees using Teams and Office 365. Amazon is developing call analytics for human-based contact centers. And Avaya’s Virtual Agent is all about improving the customer experience while making things more efficient for human staff.
Getting the most out of Avaya
Avaya continues to develop new solutions to help organizations get the most out of their communications estate. At Aura, we go one further with global support from the world’s largest ecosystem of Avaya experts.
With Avaya Diamond status, full accreditation and more awards than any other Avaya partner, we’re best placed to design, deliver and support Avaya solutions tailored to your organization’s needs.
Want to integrate new technologies alongside your existing Avaya estate? No problem. Need to streamline support for sites in multiple countries? We’ll make it happen.
To discuss your needs, don’t hesitate to arrange a call with us today.
