The contact center today is so much more than pressing 1, 2 or 3 in an IVR. There are endless ways to add value, for customers and businesses to optimize resources, reduce costs, and create new streams of revenue. But this can’t be done through one contact center vendor alone. Dozens of companies exist that specialize in different technologies: AI, security, workforce optimization, omnichannel, compliance. The right partner ecosystem allows you to seamlessly incorporate cloud-based solutions from these different specialists to level-up your contact center, regardless of what platform you currently use. 

A partner ecosystem is a coalition of industry-leading vendors offered through a leading contact center vendor that companies can leverage to address business challenges and meet customers’ expectations for end-to-end, integrated, tailored experiences. It starts with the end-customer (organization) having a need and wanting to enable a specific use case or outcome. In a partner ecosystem, partners work alone or with each other to provide complimentary, value-added services on top of the core offering from the customer’s main contact center vendor (these solutions can be deployed on top of both premises-based contact centers and CCaaS platforms). The vendor’s core offering meets part of this need, and the need is fulfilled by the specialties of one or more partners. 

Avaya has partners that can help meet specific use cases. Here are three examples of how Canadian enterprises have solved business challenges and improved their contact center experiences using our partner alliances:

A large Canadian service provider wanted to apply speech analytics to the 80M+ calls they received each year to obtain deeper insights around their customer experiences. 

In the throes of the global pandemic, the reasons why customers were calling had changed and getting fresh insights to improve experiences was more important than ever. The client knew a solution deployed on-premises would be time consuming and cost prohibitive. By leveraging the cloud, they were able to start analyzing a very high volume of calls in a very short period of time without having to worry about hosting the computing power that would have been required for a similar solution deployed on-premises.

To accomplish this, the customer partnered with Avaya and Google. Cloud-based media processing, unique to Avaya OneCloud™, and Google’s powerful multi-lingual speech recognition and Natural Language Understanding was key to delivering a successful end-to-end solution for this customer that is now helping inform continuous customer experience improvements.

Canada’s largest propane supplier since 1951, Superior Propane, wanted to improve customer retention and reduce average handle times (AHT).

To accomplish this, the customer leveraged Calabrio’s desktop and speech analytics capabilities to get an in-depth understanding of current processes and how they were impacting the customer experience. First, to help improve their retention rate, they identified the key terms used by customers on day-to-day basis (i.e., “I’m switching suppliers,” “propane prices”). They then grouped the terms and identified ways they could take the customer experience from good to great. Calabrio’s desktop analytics revealed several areas for improvement, from labor-intensive after-call work to outdated systems and tools. Driven by these insights, Avaya helped the company was able to reduce its AHT by 30 seconds per call (allowing for 150 more customer inquiries daily without having to scale its team) while improving its customer experiences. 

A global human capital management company was looking for ways to optimize the productivity of over 800 frontline sales and services staff using Salesforce Today.

This customer wanted to improve handle times by allowing agents to limit the number of screens they needed to operate in. The company also wanted to reduce friction by providing a screen pop on inbound calls, automating the ability to log calls to Salesforce as well as automate and attach interaction to opportunities and cases in Salesforce. To accomplish this, the customer used Tenfold’s CTI connector to begin immediately improving agent handle time, reduce after-call work, and make the experience of sales and service agents better by eliminating the manual effort of logging calls in Salesforce.  

A partner ecosystem is the ultimate win, giving companies more choices of providers to turn their contact center into a smart, customer-centric, revenue-generating hub. By 2025, Gartner predicts the average contact center will be exploiting the benefits of this ecosystem approach to improve operations and deliver cutting-edge experiences.  

Learn more about Avaya’s partner alliances.