Built on top of the Avaya Breeze engagement platform, Oceana is designed to deliver on industry promises of next-gen customer engagement, and while it is much more of an enterprise play than mid-market, should be a useful tool for partners who play in the enterprise space.
Avaya Oceana Workspaces
Today at the International Avaya Users Group (IAUG) Engage event in Orlando, Avaya announced Avaya Oceana, a new solution for its Breeze platform, designed to deliver a next-generation customer engagement experience with true omni-channel capabilities.
“For years, businesses have been trying to deliver an omni-channel experience, but have delivered disconnected solutions, leading to a disconnected consumer experience,” said Laura Bassett, Director of Product Marketing at Avaya. “This has kept businesses from being able to keep up with the expectations consumers have, based on their experience with consumer solutions.” That has been the case even though most enterprises are actively focused on digital transformation efforts and improving customer experience.
Breeze, formerly Avaya’s Engagement Development Platform before the rebranding to a catchier name in March, is a workflow automation engine, a middleware layer which enables applications. It is augmented by snap-in modules which provide customization for specific use cases and customer needs.
“Breeze is the platform, which enables technological adoption at a more rapid pace, and it has available different snap-ins,” Bassett said. “Oceana brings all those together, as well as additional development work which is in the background, in a fully functional package that rides on Breeze. It’s the first solution Avaya has built for Breeze, and was built from the ground up. In terms of functionality, it’s like being able to bring a portal into the solution. It could have all been put together before, but this integrates it all as a package. It provides all the channel capabilities and has been tested from a scale perspective. All the customer has to do is implement business strategy on it.”
Avaya Oceana uses simple drag and drop visual workflow capabilities to create and manage multi-touch customer journeys, creating visual workflow automation for customer journey mapping. The voice and digital channels supported include text chat (automated and assisted), SMS, web, social, voice, video, and co-browsing. In addition to working with Avaya’s own systems, it is customizable and interoperable with other vendor platforms.
“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.
Oceana is complemented by Avaya Oceanalytics, a modular and extensible analytics and reporting platform that provides a single, comprehensive view of customer events across all sources, including Avaya and non-Avaya systems.
“While Oceana tracks the customer journey for an agent, the analytics processes the next step for the agent,” Bassett stated
Oceana is also designed to be easy for the agents working the system as well as the customer, with making the agent’s ideal path with the customer clearer being only one part of the process.
“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,” Bassett said. “We want it to be as easy for the agent to deliver the experience as it is for the customer to enjoy it.”
Avaya Vantage
To that end, the announcement also includes Avaya Oceana Workspaces and Avaya Vantage. Avaya Oceana Workspaces are new roles-based desktops that give agents and supervisors one workspace for all customer touch points including chat (automated bot and assisted), email, SMS, social, voice, video and co-browse. Avaya Vantage is an all-glass, touch screen desktop device with hands-free Bluetooth, with optional handset specifically developed to customize for vertical applications.
“Both Vantage and Oceana Workspaces are built on a common client SDK, and that SDK becomes available to our partners and customers as well,” Bassett said. “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”
Avaya Oceana is targeted at the Aura market, rather than the IP Office market, but Bassett said it should be a good offering for partners who sell into that space .
“We do have partners who address the enterprise as well as those in the midmarket, and more of our revenue in the enterprise comes from channel partners than from Avaya direct. Both Oceana and Breeze are very simple to deploy, and that’s always a strong channel feature.
Avaya Oceana will be available in Q4 this year. The initial phase of Avaya Oceanalytics, which will have Collector Snap-ins for Avaya Elite, Experience Portal and Avaya Aura Contact Center and Proactive Contact will be available in Q3.
