Today’s contact center offers options far exceeding the familiar prompts to press X, Y, or Z for assistance. Incredible digital technologies can now enable organizations to do amazing things. You can use 3D face mapping to securely authenticate a caller’s identity while keeping their data private, creating better experiences while saving as much as $3 a call. You can apply desktop analytics to better understand your agents’ experiences (one of our clients was able to reduce Average Handle Time by 30 seconds, to support hundreds more calls daily without needing to scale their team).

The modern contact center contains a trove of information, intelligence and opportunities just waiting to be discovered — all with the potential move your business forward. The challenge is determining the best ways to start unlocking this potential for serious contact center optimization. It’s not a journey you want to undertake on your own; it really does take a village.  Fortunately, the Avaya partner ecosystem brings together a broad range of capabilities and features some of the strongest alliance partners on the market.

If you’re not sure what partner alliances are, first read this article. Having access to a coordinated set of technology partners can help you create specific experiences and solve for specific use cases. Here’s our point of view and what our team brings to the table…

When considering the value of partner alliances, it comes down to the age-old question of best-of-breed versus best-of-suite. The reality is that no one vendor can do it all. Those that claim to usually end up not doing any one thing particularly well. With demands and opportunities rapidly changing and growing, you can’t risk putting all your eggs in one basket.

Avaya has approached this dilemma by creating a best-of-suite platform for contact centers that is built on open standards. This allows us — and most importantly, our customers — to plug in best-of-breed solutions from high-value strategic alliance partners to customize complete solutions that meet their specific needs. This approach also prevents vendor lock in, which is crucial.

Each Avaya alliance partner brings deep expertise in specific areas and use cases, giving you access to broader range and quality of capabilities than Avaya could deliver on its own. Again, because each customer’s business needs are different, each can tailor a solution that is right for them.

Avaya has cultivated strategic partnerships with some of the world’s top technology brands, including Google, Microsoft/Nuance, Salesforce, and Verint. As mentioned, these partners have deep expertise in specific areas and use cases (i.e., Google leading in contact center AI, Verint leading in workforce optimization). If you’re looking to create a specific experience or solve for a specific use case, you can easily integrate these partner solutions with your existing Avaya solutions to get the job done. These solutions can be deployed on top of both premises-based contact centers and Avaya OneCloud^TM CCaaS solutions.

Here is a quick sampling of Avaya alliance partners and the accompanying value that they offer. These partner solutions provide our customers with infinite potential to increase their customer loyalty and revenue, while at the same time reducing operational costs:

• eGain: Create smart, easy, connected experiences across self-service and the contact center with eGain’s rich set of cloud-based AI, knowledge, messaging, and analytics products that enhance the Avaya OneCloud Experience platform. Learn more here.
• Aceyus: Take advantage of several over-the-top integrations with Avaya to take your contact center to the next level, from cradle-to-grave analytics that provide a 360-degree view of the customer journey to dashboard visualizations and reporting capabilities that empower agents to better serve customers and supervisors to manage more effectively. Learn more here.
• Journey: Create trusted digital relationships with your customers using an award-winning approach to establish identity with a high degree of accuracy in mere seconds. Journey, a leader in identity-centered security, can be integrated on top of Avaya’s solutions to reduce friction in your customer experience without jeopardizing security. Learn more here.

If you need additional support, Avaya Experience Builders is the answer. This is an ecosystem of Avaya customers, partners, developers, and other experts that brings together every resource, skill set, and technology possibility to help craft solutions for all types of problems, from simple to complex. It’s everything you need, all in one place. Here’s an example of how a North American university used Avaya Experience Builders to create a competitive experiential learning platform.

Many Canadian organizations take advantage of our partner alliances, from service providers using Google with Avaya for AI-powered analytics to financial services leaders integrating Avaya with Nuance for speech-enabled IVR. If you want to learn more about how you can benefit from Avaya’s Partner Alliances, please reach out to us directly. If you’re a channel partner who wants to know more, contact Avaya channels team to learn more about potential opportunities.