If the classic movie The Graduate were remade today, Mr. McGuire's career advice to new college graduate Benjamin Braddock wouldn’t be “plastics.” It would be two words: “artificial intelligence.” Avaya and some of its partners clearly agree with the value of that advice.
Avaya made several announcements this week at GITEX GLOBAL 2024 in Dubai, all centered around AI delivered with a growing ecosystem of partners.
Virtual Operations Manager
Avaya announced its Virtual Operations Manager. Calling it the company’s "vision for a future of customer experience orchestrated by AI," the concept demonstrates how human and artificial intelligence can collaborate to change how contact centers manage the customer experience.
Avaya built the showcase on its Avaya Experience Platform, which integrates contact center data and operations to provide centralized insights and boost performance. An avatar-based, virtual contact center operations manager advises and acts on behalf of contact center leaders.
The use of AI in the contact center has primarily been directed toward the agent, but this solution is aimed at helping the operations manager.
At the Avaya stand, I talked with Giselle Bou Ghanem, VP of Product Marketing at Avaya, and she told me:
With contact centers, operation managers can get overwhelmed with data. We use orchestration APIs to unify and analyze data across the business ecosystem, giving contact center managers the information to perform complex workforce orchestration.
AXP was built to be open to support a broad ecosystem. The analytics is done using Microsoft PowerBI with Co-Pilot while the customer can choose the avatar solution of their choice.
Real-Time Translation for Customer Service
Avaya also announced it is partnering with Transcom, a global customer service provider, and Sabio Group, an international expert in CX transformation, to create "an AI-powered, real-time translation solution that can enable contact center agents from anywhere in the world to converse with customers in over 100 languages."
Avaya bills the solution as "a significant step forward" for the business process outsourcing industry. It will enable Transcom to recruit agents based on what they know, not which languages they speak.
Jakob Westgren, SVP and Head of IT Products and Partners for Transcom, said it can be “challenging to recruit enough agents to support all our global markets.” He said collaborating with Avaya and Sabio will empower global agents to "offer high-quality customer service in every required language for our clients."
Per the announcement, the offering integrates "real-time translation and conversational AI tools with an Avaya Experience Platform contact center core. Speech-to-text and text-to-speech AI technology are paired with multiple translation engines and custom dictionaries to create real-time voice translation, eliminating language barriers between agents and customers."