On April 4, Avaya held a press conference at hotel InterContinental Seoul COEX, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, and announced a new contact center architecture solution, Avaya Oceana, for the latest customer experience trends and effective customer experience management in the contact center. Avaya emphasized that the contact center must be able to provide customer service without interruption or duplication.

As customer needs and communication channels become more diverse, contact center is emphasized its aspect of contribution to achieving company’s business goals by more effectively managing customer experience. Moreover, in order to offer a satisfactory experience to customers, contact center is required to be capable of providing services requested by customers in real time without interruption or duplication by utilizing all of various communication channels. Accordingly, based on customer data, the company needs to identify the characteristics, sets up the most appropriate method of counseling, considers persons in charge of various channels about inquiries at the same time, and delivers the information the customers want in the way they want.

Avaya's contact center architecture solution 'Avaya Oceana' uses attribute-based matching functions to quickly connect the right people to the right channel among various channels, continually collect customer inquiries across all channels, and provide customized services throughout the whole customer inquiry process based on the analyzed data. Oceana is based on Avaya’s application development platform ‘Breeze’. And, the contact center can develop or buy applications needed for business based on this platform to apply and use them to Oceana.


Martin Porges, Avaya Strategic Consulting Director, stated that today's customers have more power than before such as learning information and handling their assignments more easily. As a result, operation types of the contact center is also changing. The number of consultations has decreased, but the processing time per case has been increasing. This is because the existing process is not smooth and disconnections occur, as well as the process content becoming more difficult.

The role of contact center is changing, but still a response from 'human' is needed. Moreover, there are changes in the method of the human respond. In addition to the voice-based phone response, text-based methods such as chatting are also being actively used, especially in case of young people, methods like chatting are more preferred. While there are many questions about what form of text-based response like chatting would be effective to provide, providing through web, app, or SNS channel is picked as the available methods.

Experienced from projects in the Philippines, Avaya introduced that customers prefer interacting with companies through applications like SNS that they use daily, rather than using new means. Especially, customers prefer mobile environment to browser. Mobile is now an important and powerful connectivity channel, and most of the inquiries coming to the contact center seemed to start from mobile devices.

Moreover, ‘authentication’ is picked as a difficulty when progressing consultation through SNS platform. Compared to independent banking applications, SNS is ‘non-authentication’ space, and it should be able to be handed over quickly and smoothly to ‘authenticated’ space. In this case, the client authentication method can be considered in various ways, and the most effective method is to utilize biometric information recognition in mobile devices, etc. In addition, it is important to easily authenticate customers who they are, and make seamless connections between each channel in interaction with customers.


When using 'chat,' nowadays, 'live chat' type that is supported by counselors is common, but recently interest in 'chatbot' technology is increasing with the development of AI technology. In the light of various cases related to chatbot, Avaya pointed out that the key to the success of the project is that even if you start with the chatbots for the initial response, you should be able to switch smoothly to a counselor at the point of need. So far, less than 20% of the total can be completed using the chatbot, while more than 80% needs connection to a counselor at the right time when a chatbot cannot respond.

Meanwhile, it is introduced that the text-based chat can also be used to convey personalized interaction outside the company. In aspect of message processing to the outside as well as big data analysis, it is possible to create a smaller segment and perform specific targeting. In addition, SNS can be effectively used for bidirectional interaction. Also, in designing and implementing customer experience of omni-channel, there is a need to enable customers to move several channels variously and to create a design that takes ‘entire journey’ of customers into consideration rather than the specific implementation limited to each channel.

'Customer Journey Mapping' for customer experience design of omni-channel is started from classifying customer types, and all the organizations of a company have to participate and support customers' responses at all levels. On top of that, through progressing specific workshops, the company will analyze the various stages that customers will go through and find out their journey and specific plan for improvement. At this point, it is more important to understand the current situation than to find a point to improve. It is also pointed out that in order to avoid being buried in the process during transformation, the direction of the case that was first defined must be continuously checked.



Kim Kwon-yong, a manager of Avaya Korea, introduced about 'Oceana,' which is Avaya's contact center architecture solution. He firstly pointed out that the existing 'multi-channel' had a consistency problem of customer experience for each channel, and 'omni-channel' is a link between various channels that gives a feeling of communication with one company without disconnection. At this point, Oceana enables manager to perform integrated routing and reporting, and counselors to manage all the channels and figure out what customer experience they have experienced.

One of the most common problems in the existing multi-channel is disconnection of the user's counseling experience due to having different responsibilities depending on channels and the lack of information sharing among the counselors. Hence, it is emphasized that ‘sharing customer journey’ is important to provide all the channels available through one solution and let counselors check counseling history at the channels. At this time, through browser-based ‘Workspace,’ Oceana enables delivering the information that customers want to the appropriate channel in time by checking customer journey at the same time without integrated DB configuration and suggesting seamless collaboration environment such as connecting to another counselor.

By using attribute-based matching function, Avaya Oceana quickly connects a counselor of the most appropriate channel among various channels such as voice, SMS, e-mail, WebRTC, and chatbot that matches the customer's situation. It also enables counselors to check customer journey in real time and to deliver the information that they want to the appropriate channel. Moreover, Oceanalytics, which is a data statistics tool, analyzes collected customer data and business process record of the contact center, and makes them into statistics to find ways to increase productivity and customer service levels of the contact center.

Meanwhile, it is introduced that Avaya offers automatic chatting function that can connect to various channels and seamless counselor connection function. It also has a voice search and a function that automatically search necessary information during counselling. What's more, Oceana can be provided as AWS-based cloud service, and developed based on Avaya's application development platform 'Breeze,' so that is is possible to develop or buy applications needed for 'Breeze'-based business to apply and utilize.

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