Enterprise software giant Avaya believes it is offering a glimpse of the future with its latest contact centre offering.
Responding to what it views as the unfulfilled promise of next generation, multi-channel engagement solutions, the Californian developer has come up with Oceana – an omni-channel platform designed to integrate and personalise every step of the customer journey.
Oceana is a new solution built on top of Avaya’s workflow automation engine, Breeze. Breeze is a middleware layer which allows businesses to design and manage workflow systems easily and intuitively using snap in modules.
Oceana applies the same engine to customer journey mapping. Using the Oceana Workspaces drag and drop interface, it can build contact systems which tie together web, phone, social, SMS and live messaging.
Next Generation
Laura Bassett, director of product marketing at Avaya, said:
“For years, businesses have been trying to deliver an omni-channel experience, but have delivered disconnected solutions, leading to a disconnected consumer experience.
“Oceana provides next generation multi-touch applications in a single engagement, which are all connected on the customer experience end, and on the agent experience end as well. We want it to be as easy for the agent to deliver the experience as it is for the customer to enjoy it.”
One of the key advantages in practice is how the integrated contact system collects and shares data across all channels. So the next time a customer logs on to a client’s website on mobile, for example, Oceana feeds back information from the last time they browsed on their desktop. This means preferences can be stored and the customer experience personalised. And that applies to every contact channel.
More Than a Contact Centre
Furthermore, because Oceana is built on Breeze, the data available is not restricted to customer contacts alone. Clients can apply data from across their business to achieve a fully 360o view of their customer engagement processes.
To support the handling of these data streams, Oceana is accompanied by Oceanalytics, a complimentary Big Data tool.
“Because Oceana is enterprise-wide, and not just a contact centre, it can bring in an enormous number of other data centre platforms as well,” Bassett said. “While Oceana tracks the customer journey for an agent, the analytics processes the next step for the agent.”
Avaya has developed Oceana to be interoperable with other vendor’s platforms as well as its own systems. The common client SDK used to programme the software will be made available to all clients partners.
Bassett added: ““You can take the experiences we have developed, use them as is, modify them, or embed them into third party clients. We give them these same tools to drive market driven innovation. Others have said they are open, but we really deliver open, and the tools to support that.”
