Avaya will be further integrating with Google Cloud Contact Centre artificial intelligence in a bid to deliver improved customer experience and a more efficient workforce, taking full advantage of the powerful artificial intelligence capabilities of both companies.

This includes embedding Google’s machine learning within Avaya conversation services powering the contact centre, enabling smooth integration of AI capabilities regardless of channel.

Avaya bills its IX Contact Centre as an AI-enhanced, omnichannel service featuring voice, email, chat and mobile communications as part of a push to make customer engagement a competitive advantage to drive growth and brand preference.

Avaya said the companies were innovating in a number of key areas, including:

·       Virtual Agents – Human-like automated Bots which seamlessly interact with customers, offloading the live agents’ utilisation until the optimal time and then transferring all context gathered to the agent. Now customers can decide when and how to engage bots throughout the interaction. And the Avaya platform captures the intent, actions and ultimate disposition of each interaction in real-time. Through this rich data, Avaya AI can be applied to decide the next best action in future customer engagement.

·       Agent Assist – Provides superior customer experience by continuously delivering contextually relevant knowledge base to agents based on real time conversational analysis–for BOTH voice and text-based interactions. Avaya AI algorithms can be applied to Google Contact Centre AI to determine the next best action by the agent, delivering the right information and reducing customer friction – while increasing agent satisfaction and contact centre efficiency.

·       Conversational Topic Modelling – An unsupervised learning tool designed to uncover key topic areas that customers have been contacting the contact centre about, and abstracting relevant information relating to how topics are articulated. Google Topic Modelling combined with Avaya AI enables agents to leverage real-time visibility of topics with each conversation turn. Through this valuable insight, recommended responses and best actions can be uniquely tailored to each part of the conversation to drive desired outcomes.

Avaya is enhancing the customer experience by strengthening these areas through integration of Google Cloud APIs with key elements of Avaya’s contact centre infrastructure. Additionally, Avaya’s browser-based desktop is designed to easily connect with applications and Google Contact Centre AI is seamlessly incorporated in the agent user experience.

“Partnering with Avaya helps us deliver on our goal to make the contact centre experience easier and more efficient,” said Rajen Sheth, Director of Product Management at Google Cloud. “We’re excited to work with Avaya so enterprises can keep customers happy with faster call resolution, and we look forward to building on this partnership as technology and customer’s expectations evolve.”

Avaya and Google’s unique collaboration offers a differentiated contact centre solution with a simpler, but more efficient and architecturally superior approach via native gRPC integration for voice. This will enable Avaya IX Contact Centre customers to easily integrate AI providers like Google Cloud and infuse AI capabilities regardless of channel, for consistent omnichannel experiences. Avaya IX Contact Centre solutions are capable of maintaining an awareness of all events, including the sentiment, suggestions and resolution, creating a data lake source for future machine learning processing that generates increasingly impactful results.

“We continue to expand our AI-enabled solutions as well as our cloud offerings for customers ranging from small-medium business to the largest global enterprises, and further collaboration with Google is providing additional capabilities to augment the innovation,” said Chris McGugan, Avaya Senior Vice President, Solutions & Technology. “By bringing these innovations to market for Avaya customers and partners, we enable them to make every customer interaction more meaningful and insightful, and more productive for their businesses.”