Avaya and Afiniti, a provider of artificial intelligence-based behavioral pairing solutions, today announced a strategic partnership to improve enterprise customer experience and contact center performance through a unique integration of artificial intelligence into contact center routing technology.
This collaboration will natively integrate Afiniti Enterprise Behavioral Pairing with the Avaya Contact Center platform. The two companies will deliver an AI edition of Avaya Aura Call Center Elite in the third quarter this year, enabling companies to benefit from behavioral pairing for both on-premises and cloud deployments. Following this will be integration with Avaya Proactive Outreach Manager and Avaya Oceana.
Afiniti Enterprise Behavioral Pairing discovers and predicts patterns of interpersonal behavior to pair customers with agents. Afiniti's technology examines data and commercially available information tied to customer identity to determine patterns of successful behavioral interactions and applies these patterns in real time.
"Every enterprise is looking to get more out of their contact center, and AI is the next major shift in the way contact centers operate," said Jim Chirico, Avaya's president and CEO, in a statement. "Working with Afiniti provides a unique, proven AI offering and is another example of Avaya investing in transformative technologies to deliver unparalleled contact center performance to companies around the world."
"This partnership highlights the shift in the communications and collaboration marketplaces towards artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies as a transformational tool for large enterprises," said Zia Chishti, Afiniti's CEO and founder, in a statement. "Today, Afiniti's AI is helping to save lives and delivering billions of dollars in profitability to our global clients. Our new partnership and native integration with Avaya will accelerate the pace at which our joint clients will drive precisely measurable value to their shareholders and customers."
Afiniti continues to be a charter member of the A.I.Connect, an Avaya-led initiative that brings together an ecosystem of vendors and developers taking an active part in building AI-driven solutions.
Avaya also partnered with technology services distributor Intelisys through the Avaya Master Agent program. Intelisys sales partners will help to accelerate sales of Avaya Cloud to small and mid-market businesses, and Intelisys will connect potential customers with Avaya through its nationwide network of sales partners.
"The breadth and depth of Intelisys' network of sales partners will facilitate and enhance the delivery of Avaya's hosted cloud offerings to end-user customers," said Gary Levy, vice president of U.S. channels at Avaya, in a statement. "Together we plan to provide unified communication services to meet growing market demands while simplifying the process of onboarding, deploying, and managing the technology and customer relationship. The Master Agent program is another proof point of our commitment to make it easier to do business with Avaya."
Intelisys independent sales partners can now offer the following solutions to their customers, either on premises, in the cloud, or as a hybrid of the two:
- Unified communications services, fully hosted by Avaya;
- Bundled carrier services;
- Desktop options;
- Delivery, management and support, and
- Monthly, subscription-based billing.
"We have great respect for the longstanding relationship between Avaya and ScanSource [Intelisys' parent company] and are incredibly pleased to add Avaya cloud solutions," said Jay Bradley, president of Intelisys, in a statement. "We have the unique privilege of being able to now collectively offer our sales partners a holistic and complete solution to their customers or any individual Avaya solution components they see as a fit. We see tremendous opportunity for our sales partners to leverage Avaya's cloud services together with a full bundled solution."