Building a true omnichannel contact center
Julian explains: "In our invitation to tender we were crystal clear about our requirements and pain points. When we looked at the options available, we felt that Avaya understood the contact centre environment better than its competitors. Their offering builds on the best of its legacy products, adds new capabilities and a clear roadmap.”
Key capabilities included support for UC, presence and web services integration. The fact that the Avaya solution offered a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) toolkit was a major benefit for Julian. “It means we can do more with web services in-house as our needs change. We can configure the extra features we want, and integrate with different applications, without needing to pay for expensive development.”
The choice of partner was also critical:
"We wanted someone innovative and nimble, and of an appropriate organisational size that meant we mattered to them.
With Maintel we got exactly that: they gave us the confidence that they could handle our fundamental requirements smoothly, and their knowledge of the Avaya portfolio was clear.
They gave us relevant advice on how we could best use different Avaya solutions to meet our requirements. They’ve been excellent.”
Those requirements included a number of features to enhance the customer experience from the moment the contact centre agent answers a call. For example, Hillarys runs a broad range of marketing campaigns, each of which has a different contact number to facilitate reporting and campaign analysis. With the previous solution agents literally had to move desks to be in the right place to answer incoming calls on different numbers; with Avaya Aura Contact Center agents stay where they are, with the relevant campaign information is visible on their computer screen.
The new solution also integrates with the CRM database using the SOA Toolkit. That means, among other things, that customers calling to enquire about an open service ticket can be routed through, wherever possible, to the agent they previously spoke to – improving their experience. At the same time, resources are better used in the contact centre, with reduced call transfer.
For Julian, some of the most important enhancements are around the service provided to advisors. “Our field sales advisors are customers too, and we knew that the old solution sometimes didn’t help them. In particular, they were fed up with the level of ‘telephone tag’; they’d log a query, the centre would call them back but because they were with a customer, their phone was off.
That’s why we want to use presence: so that our agents can see when advisors are available on the phone, and so advisors can see when they might be able to get through to an expert on a particular issue – which in turn can help them answer a customer query on the spot.”
However, this created a challenge. Advisors in the field are not technically on the Hillarys Blinds network, so the solution needs to deliver federated presence – more complex technically, and potentially far more expensive. “Maintel is helping us establish the best way to do that using the Avaya UC portfolio. They understand licensing issues and are working out how we can get the functionality we want affordably.”