Avaya has launched IP Office Contact Center, giving smaller customers, or those with five to 100 agents, access to Avaya IP Office features such as email, chat, and voice.
Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, says that adding a contact center solution to IP Office is a great move.
"IP Office is a communications platform that is on the upswing. [It] has been doing very well for Avaya and hasn't really had a corresponding contact center solution," McGee-Smith says.
There has also been an issue in the industry in finding contact center solutions that are a fit for smaller organizations, Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, says. "In the past two years, there have been a lot of opportunities in going to the cloud because there aren't highly effective, well tuned, functionally rich small contact center solutions."
Avaya Contact Center features include:
- Support for multichannel inbound and outbound contacts (voice, email, chat)
- An agent interface to rapidly access customer information
- Call recording for every agent and flexible reporting
- Flexible deployment options: a dedicated server or in a virtualized environment
- Highly competitive pricing suited for midsize businesses
- Deployment in hours, with fewer steps than competitive solutions
- Easy maintenance and management
- IP Office Software Support
"IP Office has been moving upmarket, filling the needs of larger and larger companies for the last few years," McGee-Smith says. "As of 2013, it now scales up to 2,000 enterprise users. Once you start scaling that large, the need for contact center increases and not having an 'an-in skin' [in the same equipment rack] contact center solution was suboptimal."
The offering, McGee-Smith says, makes a multichannel solution much more approachable.
"What Avaya is doing with this particular contact center offering is bringing multichannel contact center customer service at an affordable price point in a simple-to-deploy application. It's bringing it further down market, which is good for the SMB [small to middle business] space."
Adds Fluss, "IP Office has been extremely well received on the business side, so now Avaya is adding in the contact center capabilities and, very importantly, they're doing it smartly with some different features and at the right price. With this [solution], Avaya is filling a void in their portfolio and giving end users and small organizations a cost-effective contact center solution.”
Avaya IP Office Contact Center will be available in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and India on February 28.