This extension of the Avaya-Salesforce relationship provides a complete omni-channel integration between the customer engagement and CRM platforms. The companies plan to develop the relationship further, into areas like the Internet of Things.
Avaya has announced CRM Connector 2.0, a new integration with Salesforce, between the Avaya Oceana customer engagement solution and the Salesforce Service Cloud.
“We started our strategic alliance with Salesforce about a year ago,” said Jean Turgeon, VP & Chief Technologist, Software Defined Architecture, at Avaya. “We have implemented it in a series of phases. Now it has evolved into a complete omni-channel integration with the latest Salesforce Lightning Service Console.”
Oceana, a solution for the Avaya Breeze engagement development platform, was introduced last year to deliver a next-generation customer engagement experience with true omni-channel capabilities.
Jean Turgeon, VP & Chief Technologist, Software Defined Architecture, at Avaya
“We originally developed this integration because some customers asked us for it, because while they used Oceana, they were standardizing strategically on Salesforce,” Turgeon said. “The integration gives them the flexibility to use either Oceana or Salesforce Lightning as the interface.”
Before the integration, customers who used both the Avaya communications platform and the Salesforce CRM platform would have to toggle between two separate applications.
“They would have two completely separate interfaces and the log-ons were not integrated,” Turgeon said. “It makes things much smoother now for the customer because it greatly simplifies the experience for the agent. The integration gives the customer the ability to pick and choose what interface to use, and allows them to use both our bots and Salesforce Einstein. You can also have some agents on the Oceana interface and others on Lightning. It’s a very smooth integration that gives the customers what they want, and provides the users with a much more pleasant experience.”
Salesforce has many such strategic integrations with other vendors, but this one is unique for Avaya, because it is the first such integration for Oceana.
“We have an open architecture, which allows this, but this is the first such integration for us,” Turgeon said. “Strategically, joining forces with them is very good for us, because they have such a huge market share. We have a lot of common customers who in the past, were forced to choose between the two interfaces, or else create more complexity for their agents. This is a great opportunity for both of us.”
The plan is to extend the integration further in the next calendar year.
“We have been having executive meetings to discuss how we will push it further,” Turgeon said. This will better facilitate the integration of the Avaya blended digital and voice routing and contextual based workflow within the Salesforce Lightning user experience.
“We will also expand it into Internet of Things use cases, and more fully leverage Salesforce Einstein for Oceana where it makes sense,” Turgeon said.
