Multi-Tech FaxFinder® IP Fax Over IP Solution Now Rated “Avaya Compliant”

MINNEAPOLIS, MN — Multi-Tech Systems, a leading global manufacturer of Unified Communications and device networking products for M2M (machine-to-machine) communications, today announced that its FaxFinder® IP fax server is compliant with key solutions from Avaya, a global provider of enterprise communications systems, software and services.

Combining quality hardware and industry-leading software to deliver exceptional value in fax server solutions, the FaxFinder IP allows companies to send and receive faxes using existing email and network resources, and ultimately reduce costs while enhancing productivity. The FaxFinder IP fax server now is compliance-tested by Avaya for compatibility with Avaya IP Office 7.0, Avaya Aura Communication Manager 6.0.1 and Avaya Aura Session Manager 6.1.

“Expanding the functionality of the existing FaxFinder product line to include an IP model gives resellers the opportunity to reach out to existing customers who are looking to reduce the costs of their current fax solution,” said David Tincher, senior product manager, Multi-Tech Systems. “Resellers can also begin including the FaxFinder IP with each Avaya system they quote with the confidence that results from the successful completion of Avaya compliance testing.”

Where the need for fax support is critical, including healthcare or human services, legal, accounting, education, law offices and real estate, the FaxFinder features allow companies to experience significant cost-savings with increased employee productivity, often achieving return on investment in weeks and saving thousands of dollars each year in comparison to web-based subscription fax services. Businesses can estimate their return on investment with an ROI calculator available at www.multitech.com/faxfinder.

One of the companies benefiting from the interoperability of Multi-Tech and Avaya solutions is KAISERComm, a business that specializes in communications solutions for healthcare, non-profits, financial services and manufacturing clients.

“The documentation that comes with the completion of testing takes the headache out of the installation process,” says Chris Skordahl, sales engineer for KAISERComm. “Everything we need is laid out step-by-step, so it’s easy to follow and enables us to get the system up and working quickly.”

Multi-Tech Systems is a member of the Avaya DevConnect program—an initiative to develop, market and sell innovative third-party products that interoperate with Avaya technology and extend the value of a company’s investment in its network.

As a Gold member of the program, Multi-Tech is eligible to submit products for compatibility testing by the Avaya Solution Interoperability and Test Lab. There, a team of Avaya engineers develops a comprehensive test plan for each application to verify whether it is Avaya compliant. Doing so ensures businesses can confidently add best-in-class capabilities to their network without having to replace their existing infrastructure—speeding deployment of new applications and reducing both network complexity and implementation costs.

“DevConnect partners like Multi-Tech deliver quality products that are cost-effective and easily integrate with Avaya solutions,” said Eric Rossman, vice president, developer relations, Avaya. “This provides tremendous value to small and mid-sized customers, enabling them access to the latest technologies and the benefits of improved productivity and a rapid return on investment.”

Genesis Systems Corp. Selected for Membership in Avaya DevConnect Program

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Genesis Systems Corp., a communications management software developer, today announced it has been selected by Avaya, a global provider of business collaboration systems, software and services, for membership in the Avaya DevConnect program.

Genesis Systems is the developer of Genesis Enterprise Manager, an application/application family that allows comprehensive, multi-dimensional management of Avaya phone systems. As a result, companies can effectively manage their entire communications environment, regardless of their platform or total number of PBXs, from a single interface.

The Avaya DevConnect program promotes the development, compliance-testing and co-marketing of innovative third-party products that are compatible with standards-based Avaya solutions. Member organizations have expertise in a broad range of technologies – including IP telephony, contact centers and mobility applications – helping companies extend the value of multivendor networks and transform voice into an intelligent business application that delivers true value to the bottom line.

"Membership in Avaya's developer community will help us build our business by developing products to serve customers more efficiently and effectively," said Randy Mennear, CEO of Genesis Systems Corp. "Building on Avaya resources and working more closely with the company to deliver compliance-tested solutions to the market, we are able to reduce the time to deployment dramatically so businesses can quickly realize the convenience and cost saving benefits."

The Avaya DevConnect program currently includes thousands of software and hardware developer companies, integrators, service providers and customers. Members have created a broad array of innovative solutions tested for Avaya compliance, including natural language speech recognition applications, wireless services, specialized computer telephony integration and reporting capabilities, and applications tailored for specific vertical industries.

Through the DevConnect program, Avaya provides a number of platforms and interfaces for member companies to develop with and enhance.

"Development partners like Genesis Systems are helping Avaya users optimize their communications investment, especially users migrating from legacy platforms," said Eric Rossman, vice president, developer relations, Avaya. "Genesis provides existing Avaya users with unified products that allow them to effectively manage their PBX platforms in their current state and throughout their migration process.

As a member of the DevConnect program, companies have access to a wide range of support from Avaya, including technical resources and training. There are three levels of membership – Registered, Gold and Platinum – each entailing progressive levels of marketing and sales involvement. Free Registered membership is available to anyone interested in designing Avaya-compatible solutions. Gold-level members and Platinum members must meet rigorous Avaya criteria for customer satisfaction, product support, business operations, marketing and sales. Genesis Systems is a Gold member of the Avaya DevConnect program.

Membership information and a listing of solutions developed and tested under the DevConnect program are available at www.avaya.com/devconnect.

Contact Centers Finally Moving Beyond Voice?

By Eric Krapf, Editor | Jul 19, 2011

True or false: Voice is about to be equaled and possibly even eclipsed as the preferred method for customers to reach contact centers.
That's true, according to a survey done at the start of this year by Callcentres.net, sponsored by Avaya. We're always rightfully wary of vendor-sponsored research, but this particular set of questions and responses seems pretty general to me, not skewed toward any Avaya-specific approach. At least in the results that Avaya shared with me, it's pretty straightforward questions asked of consumers: What would you rather do?

So what's about to surpass voice as the preferred contact medium? I'll give you hint: It's another supposedly-dying medium.

It's email.

The survey found that worldwide, 70% of respondents had used voice most often to reach a contact center in the past 3 months. In the U.S., this figure was 76%. The next-highest response was email at 15% globally and 13% in the U.S.

But when the survey asked, "Which of the following contact methods do you think you will use regularly to contact companies' customer service centers in the next 1-2 years?, 56% worldwide mentioned voice, and 55% mentioned email. In the U.S., 56% mentioned email and just 50% mentioned voice.

The contact channels that we tend to think of as more cutting-edge did show strong new interest: Web self service was mentioned by 38% and web chat was mentioned by 18% worldwide; in the U.S. it was 36% and 28% respectively. The number saying they'd already used these channels in the last 3 months was below 10% in all cases.

What does this tell us? For one thing, it tells us that contact centers are going to face continuing challenges in staffing and organizing their operations. When I talked to Jorge Blanco of Avaya recently, in the context of the company's latest contact center release, he mentioned the fact that contact centers still tend to assign their agents to specific media—agents who take phone calls tend not to deal with email, for example. If we go from a world that's dominated by voice contacts--with the other channels representing niches--into a world where each of the media has about equal weight, that suggests there are major retraining and/or hiring issues ahead for contact center operations. It also suggests that agent cross-training may become more common.

From a communications perspective, the evolution suggests that vendors who can offer the more flexible contact center software, in terms of contact routing as well as interaction functionality, will be the ones who produce the best results for their enterprise customers. Most of the vendors in this market will tell you that's exactly what they’re doing with their flagship systems, so the winner(s) will presumably be those who do the best job of executing on this vision most cost-effectively.

The contact center has always been on the cutting edge of communications technology, because it's often been the only place within the enterprise that can show a hard-dollar payback for investments in advanced functionality--it's the only place that ever adopted CTI in any volume. Now it's poised to demand the kinds of next-gen advanced functionality that all-IP communications systems can provide; and it looks like investments in this area may once again pay dividends. The contact center may be able to prove in a lot of functionality enabled by SIP--showing the value of presence, mid-session addition of media and participants, and communications-enabled business processes.

The next step will then be making the business case for pushing these capabilities beyond the contact center.

Avaya's New Social Media Manager Integrates Facebook and Twitter

Earlier this week Avaya announced new contact center products that integrate with social media. Avaya, one of the descendants from Ma Bell, supplies telephony hardware and software to some of the largest enterprises and telecommunications companies in the world, and they are getting seriously Facebook'd.

It isn't all that surprising, really. Avaya isn't some old fuddy-duddy phone company. It has been a huge user of social media for its own purposes for quite some time.

The company has a dozen very active Tweeters who post several times a day, and another 100 that are less active. There are 24 branded Avaya Twitter accounts, many for different geographic regions and native language support of their respective countries. They have more than 40 Facebook groups and five different fan pages and 12 LinkedIn groups too. They leverage SocialCast as their internal microblogging platform after starting with Yammer. And their external corporate blog has more than a dozen different regular authors, complemented by more than a dozen internal blogs and a corporate wiki.

The announcement concerns the new version of Aura Contact Center v6.2, which is used by call center agents, and integration with its Social Media Manager add-on module. You can see a cute demo here, although the example of a customer refinancing their mortgage is somewhat unrealistic (who can these days).

When a customer calls to resolve something, the agent can search on particular experts and see if they are available to enter the call. Agents can also search and respond to Facebook and Twitter messages. Agents can set up monitors of particular keywords so they only see the relevant messages that need replies. Tweets can also be scored on particular metrics to identify real-time trends, and the system even provides suggested responses that can be personalized.

Besides Facebook and Twitter, which Avaya can access directly using each API, Avaya can pull in RSS feeds produced by blogs and other sources such as YouTube and LinkedIn and third-party "listening engines," if a customer already has something scouring the social Internet postings.

You can filter and classify these results by actionable categories as well, such as new sales or customer inquiries. The software will show a customer's last ten Tweets for example, for further guidance. What Avaya is trying to do is put together a powerful tool that can pull as much information as possible from all kinds of sources -- besides social media, the corporate CRM system and other internal customer-oriented databases -- so the call agent can act accordingly in real time with the customer on the phone.

Avaya Helps Businesses Enhance Customer Service in a Multimedia World

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. — Avaya, a global provider of business communications and collaboration solutions and services, today announced new contact center products that address the challenges businesses face in delivering superior customer sales and service in a multimedia world. The new products help improve both agent-assisted and automated service to drive more personalized and seamless customer experiences across today's growing array of media channels.

Forty percent of consumers prefer alternate methods of contact (i.e. e-mail, chat, text) for customer service.(1) Avaya's new contact center applications address this trend by enhancing service across many communications modes. They assemble customer context (history, account number, etc.) and match it to the right agent in a real-time collaborative session. This reduces a customers' need to repeat information and increases first contact resolution, which can improve customer satisfaction and revenue, and drive competitively-differentiated service. Products joining the Avaya Aura® Contact Center Suite are:

Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2: This multimedia assisted care application enables businesses to solve customer issues by bringing all key parties—agent, expert and customer—along with customer information, into a session. New capabilities include:
Collaboration with experts is simplified through integration with Avaya Session Manager. When a customer arrives, the agent's portal displays the appropriate experts to handle the query, and the experts' availability via presence. Managers can create custom views or large groups of experts based on available times and skills.
Social media can be integrated into the agent desktop, making it easier for agents to communicate with customers by automatically capturing and responding to relevant tweets and Facebook updates. This can be achieved through customer integration of Avaya Social Media Manager. A separate press release on Avaya's social media advancements in customer service is here.
Scalability improves with support of up to 90,000 agents in a single virtual network, due to new integration with Avaya Aura Communication Manager.
Avaya Aura Experience Portal: Avaya optimizes its automated services platform for inbound and outbound multimedia interactions, enabling more efficient use of self-service to enhance customer experiences. New capabilities include:
Improved customer experiences can be achieved through integration with Avaya Aura Contact Center. This enables seamless hand-offs of customers and their context from self-service sessions to live or automated agents, helping to eliminate the frustration of customers repeating data already captured in self-service.
More cost-effective self-service through Experience Portal's ability to now be deployed in a virtualized environment, which converts a single server into multiple virtual servers. This reduces a business' hardware footprint, lowering the capital and operational expenses of self-service.
Faster application development for self-service is driven by the new Avaya Orchestration Designer, which enables the creation of multimedia self service applications using existing Web applications. It includes new development tools to address hand-offs from automated to agent-assisted care—a critical element for maintaining positive customer experiences.
Both products also improve investment protection. Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2's multimedia capabilities are now unified with Avaya's automatic call distribution application, Avaya Aura Call Center Elite, enabling unified desktop, reporting and administration. Avaya Experience Portal software and tools unify migration of standards-based applications from Avaya Interactive Response, Avaya Media Processing Server(2) and prior releases of Avaya Voice Portal.

Quotes:
Mike Taylor, Chief Technology Officer, SPS
"One of our goals as a technology solutions provider is to help clients find the most productive way to deliver customer service. This means serving customers through a range of multimedia channels, including web chat, e-mail and now, social media. In the past, this could be costly and require lots of customization. Now, Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2 makes multimedia service simple and cost-effective by bringing many capabilities, like web chat and reporting, into a single solution. We offer it to our clients—and use it in our own customer service strategy.

"We also like that the new Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2 release seamlessly integrates with our existing Avaya Aura Call Center Elite voice solution, enabling us to layer multimedia right into our voice infrastructure. This preserves our investments, even as we evolve our customer service capabilities."

Onkar Birk, general manager, Avaya Contact Center Division
"Today's consumers use many more modes of communications—e-mail, text, video and social media. As these multimedia requirements evolve into 'transmedia' needs—characterized by the seamless transfer of information across all kinds of communications—companies must effectively integrate all of these modes for consistency. Avaya addresses this with products driving high-quality customer experiences across various media, turning those experiences into competitive assets."

Drew Kraus, research vice president, Gartner
"Ensuring quality customer service across multimedia channels increasingly means the creation of sessions that not only bring together customers, agents and experts in a fast, efficient way, but also retain a customer's context. The use of this approach to serve the heightened expectations of consumers is a differentiator for leading businesses."

Other Information and Facts
Avaya Online Event Information: Today, Avaya is holding an online customer event at 11 am EST to discuss key elements of today's launch, along with strategies for customer service success. To register, visit here.

Art: A photo of Avaya Aura Contact Center is available here.

Facts: 55% of consumers said that in 1 to 2 years, email is what they will use regularly to reach customer service centers—compared to 15% who said email is their most often used method today.18% said web chat will be their preferred regularly-used contact method in 1 to 2 years, vs. 2 percent today. For more findings, visit press release here.

Silver Peak and Avaya Integrate WAN Optimization on Branch Routers to Optimize Voice, Video and Data to Remote Offices

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Silver Peak Systems, the leader in data center class wide area network (WAN) optimization, and Avaya, a global provider of business communications and collaboration solutions and services, today announced the availability of Silver Peak's VX family of virtual WAN optimization appliances on the Avaya Secure Router (SR) 4134. The integrated solution optimizes the performance of enterprise voice, video, and unified communications (UC), and ensures that remote users have fast and reliable access to all centralized applications. It will allow customers to reduce IT complexity by simplifying equipment needs in their branch and remote offices, and help them improve employee productivity by enhancing the performance of enterprise-wide business applications.

The Avaya SR 4134 is a modular, multiservice platform that integrates WAN routing, stateful firewall, VPN, VoIP gateway, and Ethernet switching into a single highly-reliable device. A dedicated high-performance server module provides the Avaya SR 4134 with the ability to host virtual appliances and third party applications, such as the Silver Peak VX-series virtual WAN optimization appliance. The server module supports dedicated CPU, memory, and storage, allowing the Silver Peak virtual WAN optimization appliance to operate independently of the Avaya SR 4134 routing platform. The result is an integrated branch office solution which addresses the complete communications and wide area networking requirements of enterprise branch offices.

"The Avaya Secure Router 4134 with Silver Peak WAN optimization enables LAN-like performance for unified communications, video, and a multitude of centralized applications at the branch," said Bill Seifert, CTO, Data Solutions, Avaya. "Silver Peak's virtual WAN optimization solution is the perfect complement to our Avaya Secure Router because it provides the highest capacity of any virtual WAN optimization product and support for key applications and IP traffic in and out of the branch."

The Silver Peak VX-series virtual WAN optimization appliances are easily deployed and managed on the Avaya Secure Router 4134 Server Module. The Silver Peak virtual appliances overcome WAN bandwidth challenges while at the same time improving remote office user experiences with other applications running over a shared WAN. These applications can include video, voice/VoIP, VDI, and other cloud-based applications. By accelerating branch traffic at the IP layer, Silver Peak can help distributed enterprises optimize all applications running over the WAN.

The VX family of virtual WAN optimization appliances support Silver Peak's Network Memory™ technology to significantly reduce the amount of data traversing the WAN and ensure LAN-like application performance. Network Acceleration™ techniques allow VX-series appliance customers to overcome WAN latency and safely extend the distance of networks, while Network Integrity™ features mitigate the effects of packet loss across the WAN, enabling customers to leverage existing MPLS or IP/VPN WAN connections at the branch at a fraction of the cost of dedicated WANs and without sacrificing quality. The virtual appliances also use state-of-the-art header and cross-flow payload compression for immediate first-pass gains. Silver Peak's Global Management System (GMS) provides simplified management, monitoring, and alerting, enabling customers to quickly diagnose and resolve any application-layer throughput issues as a result of WAN conditions.

"Maximizing WAN connectivity to the branch is critical when enabling bandwidth-intensive applications such as voice, video, and unified communications," said Marc Trimuschat, vice president of business development and alliances for Silver Peak. "Silver Peak's virtual WAN optimization easily integrates with the Avaya Secure Router architecture to allow customers to integrate our leading WAN acceleration technology rather than accepting less-capable or hardware-based solutions from an entrenched network supplier."

Silver Peak is a member of the Avaya DevConnect program—an initiative to develop, market and sell innovative third-party products that interoperate with Avaya technology and extend the value of a company’s investment in its network.

Avaya Delivers Social Media Solutions to Drive Superior Customer Experiences

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. — Avaya, a global provider of business communications and collaboration solutions and services, today introduced new services and capabilities to help businesses more effectively incorporate social media into their customer sales and service strategy. This announcement is part of Avaya's launch of new contact center solutions to help businesses drive competitively differentiated customer experiences across an array of multimedia channels, including social media.

Avaya's latest social media developments are driven by Avaya Social Media Manager, an integrated solution that allows businesses to scan social media content (such as tweets and Facebook updates) in an automated fashion; analyzes the content for relevance; and then enables customer service agents to take action(1). It can be used to enhance agent and customer experiences, improve branding and increase revenue streams via social media-driven customer service. A user of Avaya Social Media Manager is San Diego, CA.-based Motiva, a 450-agent provider of customer service solutions with contact center operations in Mexico (see quote below).

Social Media Enhancements for Customer Service:
Providing better customer service is the number one benefit that businesses seek to gain from social media customer support, followed by driving more sales(2). Tracking with this demand, Avaya today announces:
Social Media Consulting Services: These new Avaya consulting services help businesses integrate a social media channel into their customer sales and service strategy. The services follow a consistent methodology—which includes a Social Assessment, Strategy Development, Roadmap Creation, and Adoption Plan—tailored according to a business' specific requirements and that guide the company through a customer service evolution using social media.
Integration of Social Media in Agent Desktops: Avaya Social Media Manager can easily integrate with Avaya Aura® Contact Center 6.2, the new version of Avaya's agent-assisted experience solution announced today. This enables a company to incorporate social media into the single view that agents use for managing multimedia customer interactions. The result is a simpler, more productive way for workers to receive relevant social media messages, along with available customer history, and respond to it in a customer session. This differs from other solutions that require a separate interface for customer interaction via social media.
More Details on Avaya Social Media Manager:
Avaya Social Media Manager enables companies to bring social media into an agent desktop—like any other multimedia channel—to more effectively use the large amounts of content found in social media forums. Key capabilities include:
Automatic monitoring of customer feedback using key words or phrases set by a business. This helps agents avoid a ‘tweet deluge’ so they only receive the most relevant social media messages requiring attention.
Sentiment tracking by assigning a score to social media communications such as tweets (i.e. higher positive number = more positive sentiment). This can identify trends in real-time, and the users driving them, to enable fast, relevant responses.
Suggested responses can be provided to employees handling social media-driven customer inquiries, taking topic and customer history into account, while still enabling agents to personalize interactions with customers over social media.
Customer Quote:
Higinio Sanchez, Chief Executive Officer, Motiva
"There is a new generation of customers and agents that are very comfortable with social media, so having the right tools and services to maximize it are essential. Avaya enables us to effectively use social media as a service for our clients, who count on us to ensure their customers receive superior and satisfying experiences on a daily basis.

"Avaya Aura® Contact Center with Social Media Manager enables us to integrate social media right into an agent's desktop, which puts a customer's phone calls, emails, chats and social media messages all in the same view—something that not all agent desktops can effectively do. This, along with Avaya’s new social media consulting for contact centers, enables us to bring our customer service to a whole new level."

Tags: Contact center, call center, customer service, unified communications, CRM, Avaya Aura, social media

About Avaya
Avaya is a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, providing unified communications, contact centers, data solutions and related services to companies of all sizes around the world. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.

(1) Customers will need to comply with all applicable laws and third party social media terms of use.

(2) Frost & Sullivan report, 2011 Planning Considerations – Multi-Channel Contact Centers, January 2011. 75% cite 'provide better customer service' as top benefit of social media customer interactions; 58% cite 'drive more sales'

Avaya Positioned as a Leader in Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure Worldwide

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. - Avaya, a global provider of business communications and collaboration systems and services, today announced that the company was positioned as a Leader in the recently published 2011 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure, Worldwide.(1)

In the annual report, Avaya was cited as a contact center infrastructure leader based on two key criteria: 'ability to execute' and 'completeness of vision.' Gartner defines contact center infrastructure as "the products (equipment, software and services) needed to operate call centers for basic telephony support and contact centers for multichannel support. This type of infrastructure is used by customer and employee service and support centers, inbound and outbound telemarketing services, help-desk services, government-operated support centers and other types of structured communication operations."

Avaya offers a range of contact center solutions, including Avaya Aura® Contact Center, which enables businesses to deliver high-quality agent-assisted experiences across multimedia channels, and Avaya Aura® Call Center Elite, the company’s powerful voice-based customer routing solution. Both integrate with Avaya Aura®, which provides Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based communication services that enable unified communications and contact center solutions to be deployed to connected endpoints, regardless of the infrastructure the endpoints reside on.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant observed a variety of broad global trends influencing the planning of enterprise contact center infrastructure for 2011. They include:

"Momentum for multichannel routing, including email response management, web chat and customer collaboration solutions."
"Once almost solely limited to point-solution providers, many contact center infrastructure suites or portfolios include some level of contact center workforce optimization functionality."
"Increasing awareness of social media influences and the potential impact on contact center exists, although actual adoption of social CRM solutions in contact centers remains primarily limited to companies that take a more aggressive approach to technology adoption."
Quote
Onkar Birk, General Manager, Contact Center Solutions, Avaya
"Our core strategy in contact centers is to continue to help businesses deliver competitively-differentiated customer sales and service," said Onkar Birk, general manager, Avaya Contact Center division. "This means redefining customer experiences for a multimedia world now characterized by many different modes of real-time communications. To be successful in helping businesses turn customer experiences into competitive assets, businesses must be able to retain customer context as it travels across a range of media channels, yet do so in a streamlined, cost-effective way."