Rapid changes in technology have left many businesses in a state of flux when it comes to their IT infrastructure. So common is this experience that it has even gained its own name - Digital Transformation (DX).
Digital transformation describes the transition companies go through when adopting any of the technologies associated with fourth generation networking and business intelligence - the Cloud, mobile, Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT). According to digital think tank Prophet, as many as nine in 10 companies are undertaking digital transformation right now.
The concern is, for all the promise of more efficient, flexible, productive working practices these technologies offer, a vital part of the business jigsaw is in danger of being overlooked - the customer. Three quarters of companies recognise customer experience as their most important performance measure, while better than 80 per cent view it as a key point of difference from competitors.
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Avaya Oceana is a multi-touch contact centre solution which allows businesses the freedom to shape customer journeys from the ground up.[/caption]
And yet, according to Californian comms giant Avaya, too many businesses are launching into digital transformation without due attention to the customer experience. In the contact centre, operators are switching to cloud-based, omni-channel solutions, expecting the change will bring a more responsive, flexible, integrated level of service which will help to build satisfaction and loyalty among customers.
But, asks Avaya, how can this be achieved without taking appropriate steps to really understand the customer journey at an individual level? Especially in a multi-channel, distributed contact centre environment, with so many more touch points and a much more complex architecture, without thorough, robust mapping of customer experience, contact can actually become more confusing and disjointed than in a straightforward, voice-based call centre setting.
Avaya’s point is that this need not be the case. Through its Oceana platform, Avaya claims it has achieved a complete integration of the three pillars of the modern digital contact centre solution - the Cloud, omni-channel and Big Data analytics - to deliver a fully context-driven contact experience. Indeed, beyond simply being a contact solution, Oceana is positioned as a customer experience solution, enabling businesses to optimise journeys through every channel, at every point of contact.
What can it do?
Avaya Oceana is a suite of contact centre solutions built on top of Avaya Breeze, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) development space. Evolving out of previous projects to make Avaya APIs and SDKs as freely available as possible to the developer community, Breeze takes an open, modular, extensible approach, adding a user-friendly drag and drop interface to help with the design of advanced applications and workflow automation in the workplace.
Oceana takes this engine and applies it to the mapping of customer contact journeys. In that sense, the approach it takes to creating a contact centre solution feels quite different to most other products available. To put it simply, the flexibility and development control the Breeze platform provides means that entire solutions can be built from the ground up according to the requirements of the customer journey.
The Avaya Oceana suite has three main components:
- Oceana: The main contact engine, which provides flexible multi-touch capabilities to shape the contact solution to suit the customer journey
- Oceanalytics: Providing the intelligence to inform the tailored contact solutions, Oceanalytics is a Big Data reporting tool which combines collection, processing and analysis of customer journey data with rich visualisation to aid real-time decision making
- Oceana Workspaces: The browser-based GUI combines full 360 degree oversight of relevant data and contact history across all touch points with a user friendly drag and drop interface. This not only allows agents to easily handle multiple channels at once and personalise service based on a broad overview of the individual customer journey, it also allows system managers and developers to redesign and tweak contact workflows as and when required
The key to these three different components is that they all work together to provide an adaptable, personalised, context-rich and intelligence-based customer contact platform. As a modular solution built on an open architecture, Oceana supports any and all contact channels - phone, SMS, email, IM, web and mobile. Whichever channels and devices a customer uses, including if they use more than one channel in one engagement, the system captures data at each point, processing it into a live and historic map of that customer’s journey.