Avaya might be mainly known for its enterprise telephony and UC solutions, but it has always had an eye for the bigger picture in enterprise communications and indeed software solutions.
Building on its experience delivering integrated contact centre platforms as part of its IP Office and Aura products, Oceana sees the Californian giant take a big step into the world of customer relationship management (CRM) software.
But like most things Avaya does, Oceana, it claims, is not just any old CRM product. According to Avaya’s marketing materials, Oceana is an omnichannel customer experience solution, a platform which offers contextual awareness and analytics across all customer touchpoints.
In this review, we will be unpicking this to find out what Oceana has got that other CRM platforms have not. As ever, this review is completely independent and based purely on our own opinions. UC Today does not endorse or support any brand or product, and our reviews are intended solely to inform our readers and help them with their purchasing decisions.
How Does It Look?
The main Oceana dashboard is built around managing customer interactions as they are in progress. At the top panel of the screen, live interactions are tracked with a series of boxes. So if a customer is on the phone, this will appear as a call box, if a colleague is added to the call, a new box will appear and so on.
Underneath, the main window has a sidebar menu with key functions an agent can use - start a web chat, send an email, look at customer details and so on. Each prompts different content to appear in the main window. An important option is the customer journey view, which shows a timeline of the customer’s contacts so far - whether they have emailed, had a previous web chat, interacted with a chatbot and so on. Clicking on these symbols brings up key information from each touchpoint.
Everything is very visual and intuitive, making use of simple, clear symbols and differentiated colours. It has the look and feel of a mobile first interface, with very little clutter, well thought out navigation options and use of hidden objects / pop outs to organise details.
What Can It Do?
Oceana has two core functions. Firstly, it offers companies a means to design and create their own customer contact and interaction workflows. Built on the Avaya Breeze client, users get access to ready made modular APIs and the superbly straightforward drag and drop Engagement Design platform. So if you want, say, to create an action which triggers a chatbot when customer does x on your website, you simply click and drag the relevant APIs in the right order, and voila, you are ready to go.
This workflow design element is very powerful because it empowers businesses to put their customer contact solutions into action easily and efficiently. It also makes Oceana an incredibly flexible tool, allowing businesses to customise their CRM system completely to suit their needs.
Secondly, Oceana is a live contact tool. Its main dashboard gives an agent a whole range of communications options at the touch of a button. On a call, other agents can be added to a call at a single click. Similarly, emails and SMS can be sent mid conversation, for example to send a link confirming a transaction or inviting the customer to rejoin the call at a more convenient time.
What makes this dashboard particularly useful - and where Avaya get that term ‘contextual awareness’ from - is the way it makes available information from all previous touchpoints. In the customer journey view, agents can see very clearly exactly when the customer has had contact with the company before, how this contact took place, and main outcomes from it. This allows agents to very quickly pick up the thread on calls or in live web chats, offering a more responsive, personalized service. It also helps them make decisions about preferred communication methods when planning follow ups.