No-code Avaya Virtual Agents make it easy for organizations to both acquire and deploy virtual agents, which improve the customer user experience, something which grades out poorly in customer surveys.
Laura Faughtenberry, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager at Avaya
Unified communications and collaboration provider Avaya has announced Avaya Virtual Agent, a configurable service that uses bots to provide virtual, AI-based communication experiences to businesses, and elevate their omnichannel customer experience. It also does this without the need for coding, making it possible to create virtual agents in minutes as compared to weeks, Avaya Virtual Agent also leverages the capabilities of the Avaya OneCloud Experience platform to provide better voice telephony and speech recognition, improving the customer experience.
“Avaya Virtual Agent is a self service cloud-based virtual agent,” said Laura Faughtenberry, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager at Avaya. “It allows customers to incorporate a virtual agent without having to create something from scratch. If they incorporate a virtual agent, they let humans work on more important tasks.”
There are plenty of commercial virtual agents but Faughtenberry said they are not particularly successful. Recent Avaya research with Ipsos indicates that based on their last interaction with a virtual agent, only one in three customers would recommend that business to others. This is because only 50% of them had their issue or concern resolved. This lack of success is due in part to the historical complexity of developing and delivering effective virtual agent solutions.
“Virtual agents aren’t a new thing, but what we have here is an easy no code option,” Faughtenberry said. It leverages the Avaya OneCloud Experience Platform, which reimagines communications composability by making it easy to build relatively simple applications using Google DialogFlow.
“It is designed to assist the call center agent with simple tasks, “Faughtenberry said. “You can still complete a lot of complex offerings if you do it yourself directly on Google DialogFlow. This is meant to be a simple way to incorporate a virtual agent.”
The improvement in customer experience comes from the ability to quickly design bots to assist the needs of customers. The service can do in minutes what it has historically taken companies weeks to develop through normal processes. It manages all the voice, telephony and speech recognition and orchestrates all the essential processes to make it easy to create natural voice, SMS or AI experiences, using Natural Language Speech recognition and Event detection
The service’s impact will immediately reduce call volumes to live agents, decrease average call wait times, and increasing agent productivity and efficiency, all improving the customer experience to make their brands more engaging.
“There are a lot of ways to acquire a virtual agent, but this really makes it so anyone can have one,” Faughtenberry said, “It makes it an easy upsell to customers using a contact centre.” The system is also highly scalable and has no usage limit.
Out of the gate, Avaya Agent comes in 20 languages, and is available in 11 countries: the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Portugal
“This offer is available for purchase for a monthly fee that is based on consumption,” Faughtenberry said.
