Avaya and Afiniti Expand Partnership

Avaya and Afiniti, a provider of artificial intelligence-based behavioral pairing technology, have teamed up to create Avaya AI Routing with Afiniti AiRo as part of the Avaya IX Contact Center portfolio.

Avaya AI Routing with Afiniti AiRo identifies subtle patterns in human interactions to pair customers and the optimal agents to drive better outcomes from resulting conversations. With it, companies can add their own data sources, select the key metrics for which to optimize, and view the AI model performance using a detailed portal. Users can also track the real-time incremental value delivered to their businesses.

"Avaya's vision is to help organizations provide exceptional experiences for their customers and their employees through advanced AI and machine learning technologies natively integrated with Avaya IX Contact Center solutions," said Jim Chirico, Avaya's president and CEO, in a statement. "Organizations that are using AI in their contact centers have seen greater efficiency in service delivery, including 53 percent greater agent productivity, 61 percent higher first-contact resolution rates, and a 48 percent increase in the average revenue per customer contact. With Avaya AI Routing with Afiniti AiRo, AI in the contact center goes mainstream to dramatically enhance customer experience, create a more engaged, customer-facing workforce, and drive increased revenue."

"Avaya AI Routing with Afiniti AiRo is poised to transform how small and medium businesses use artificial intelligence to optimize customer interactions," said Zia Chishti, chairman and CEO of Afiniti, in a statement. "For the first time, clients' in-house data teams can take control of Afiniti's award-winning AI using an interactive dashboard, and in real time forecast and measure the benefit our technology generates. While our core Afiniti platform will continue to address the large enterprise market, AiRo massively extends our technology to enable businesses with contact centers under 1,000 agents to better pair their customers with their agents."

The integration between Afiniti behavioral pairing and Avaya IX Contact Center lets companies do the following:

  • Track the impact on contact center operations, including incremental revenue generated, customer retention, first-contact resolution, and average handle time metrics.
  • Control all features with one dashboard powered by AI-driven recommendations and constant access to product support teams.
  • Connect CRM, call outcome, and telephony data, and test the data integrity before AI models run. Users can purchase industry-specific third-party data enhancements to further power the model.
  • View contact center environments, including real-time call flows, characteristics like call volume and pairing choice, as well as results.
  • Optimize operational metrics free of charge and upgrade to advanced metrics for a usage-based price.

"This new joint development between Afiniti and Avaya has two main advantages for customers," said Sheila McGee-Smith, founder and principal analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics. "It will aid in driving broader adoption of AI routing as customers will be able to choose the optimization metric that best suits their business and it can be deployed in contact centers with as few as 30 agents in a queue."

Also available is Afiniti's Enterprise Behavioral Pairing (EBP) product integrated into Avaya IX Contact Center.