BASKING RIDGE, NJ--(Marketwire - Sep 27, 2012) -
- Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative improves productivity and responsiveness to clients by adding powerful new capabilities to its Avaya Aura® infrastructure.
- New Avaya Aura Workforce Optimization and Management tools enable optimal staffing and simpler scheduling.
Today Avaya announced that Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative (SMECO) is using Avaya Customer Experience Interaction Management solutions to help the company deliver outstanding customer service over multiple communication channels.
A regional, member-owned utility serving more than 150,000 Maryland customers, SMECO has connected four district contact centers into a single, consolidated organization for which a redundant architecture and backup servers help ensure seamless, uninterrupted service. With the recent addition of new Avaya multimedia capabilities and workforce optimization tools, SMECO marked the following improvements:
- Achieved service level targets 94% of the time -- up from 85% two years ago.
- Increased efficiency in serving customers through use of integrated screen pops from customer care and billing applications.
- Improved agent productivity with automated responses to customer email interactions.
- Reduced the amount of time needed for staff scheduling by more than 90 percent.
- Improved staff skills and service quality through on-screen monitoring and audio recording.
The Avaya Solutions Used by SMECO
Several new applications were added to SMECO's existing Avaya Aura® Call Center Elite foundation to exhance the company's capabilities, including:
- Avaya Aura Contact Center for multimedia interaction, which allowed SMECO to replace the cumbersome, manual processes it once used to manage customer email. New capabilities allow better tracking and management of the process and pre-approved scripted messages speed responses.
- Avaya Aura Workforce Optimization and Management tools provide voice recording, quality monitoring and advanced scorecard tools, staff forecasting and scheduling. The tools have had a particularly significant impact on SMECO's complex contact center scheduling, reducing what previously took managers two hours or more each week to just minutes. Managers also have new insights into optimum staffing levels by using historical reports to determine how many people they will need during holidays, disruptive weather events or other peak periods.
The Avaya Customer Experience Interaction Management solution for SMECO was designed and deployed by Strategic Products and Services (SPS), an Avaya Connect Platinum Partner.
This announcement highlights Avaya's commitment to bringing The Power of We™ to every Avaya customer to help drive faster collaboration, smarter decisions and better business results.
Quote
"We've seen a huge change in what customers tell us on surveys. We used to get very satisfactory ratings, but now, more and more, we are seeing many absolutely over-the-top comments from customers about the courtesy and caring they experience with our staff. We believe this is a direct result of our having the Avaya solutions in place to help us guide everyone in doing their jobs better.
"The time we save on scheduling enables us to devote more time to training, coaching, mentoring and improving our processes. These are key functions that contribute to our service levels.
"We saw demos by several vendors, and then decided Avaya offered best-of-breed solutions in the areas where we wanted to drive improvement. We were able to deploy Avaya's latest contact center technologies with the platform we had already been using. This demonstrates Avaya's ability to provide true investment protection."
--SYLVIA WELCH, MANAGER, IT APPLICATIONS,
SOUTHERN MARYLAND ELECTRIC COOPERATIVE
Additional Resources
- Case Study: Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative
- Learn more about Avaya contact center solutions.
- Learn more about Avaya Aura Experience Portal.
- Learn more about Avaya Aura Workforce Optimization.
Tags
Avaya, Aura, customer service, call center, call routing, contact center, mobile customer service, self-service, speech applications, customer experience, workforce optimization.
About Avaya
Avaya is a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, providing unified communications, contact centers, data solutions and related services to companies of all sizes around the world. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.
Certain statements contained in this press release are forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "might," "plan," "potential," "predict," "should" or "will" or other similar terminology. We have based these forward-looking statements on our current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While we believe these expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections are reasonable, such forward-looking statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. These and other important factors may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. For a list and description of such risks and uncertainties, please refer to Avaya's filings with the SEC that are available at www.sec.gov/. Avaya disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
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Contact Information:
Media Inquiries:
Deb Kline
908-953-6179
klineD@avaya.com