Avaya IX Contact Center integrated with Google Cloud Contact Center AI now is available for Avaya customers globally.

Avaya IX contact center is an AI-enhanced solution including voice, email, chat and mobile communications, and the Google integration aims to provide a better experience for clients throughout a customer’s interaction with the contact center.

Avaya’s Chris McGugan

Chris McGugan, Avaya‘s senior vice president of solutions and technology, tells Channel Partners the availability means partners can offer their customers new ways to extend their Avaya Experience Portal investment.

“Avaya’s collaboration with Google allows us to seamlessly blend automated and assisted experiences throughout the interaction,” he said. “Avaya experience portal brings many enterprise interactive voice response (IVR) features to [Google’s CC AI] Dialogflow that customers value, including capabilities like barge-in, local dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) detection, playing local prompt, comfort noise and error handling.”

Virtual agents interact with customers, offloading the live agents’ utilization until the optimal time and then transferring all context gathered to the agent.

Avaya and Google are working together to extend their integration to additional capabilities, including: Agent Assist, in which Avaya AI algorithms can be applied to Google CC AI to determine the next best action by the agent; and Conversational Topic Modeling, in which Google Topic Modeling combined with Avaya AI enables agents to leverage real-time visibility of topics with each conversation turn.

Avaya expects both Agent Assist and Conversational Topic Modeling to be available for global customers in the first half of 2020.

“We are a customer-and market-driven organization, whereby we are constantly listening to and taking the pulse of the market to ensure alignment,” McGugan said.

“When properly designed, intelligent virtual agents for self-service customer engagement can improve the customer experience while decreasing contact center costs and increasing net promoter score,” said E. Brent Kelly, principal analyst and consultant at KelCor.