Avaya Delivers Social Media Solutions to Drive Superior Customer Experiences

BASKING RIDGE, NJ--(Marketwire - Jul 12, 2011) -

• Avaya Social Media Manager can be integrated into Avaya's latest agent desktop application

• Contact center outsourcer Motiva selects Avaya Social Media Manager to help agents improve responsiveness to customers via social media channel

Avaya, a global provider of business communications and collaboration solutions and services, today introduced new services and capabilities to help businesses more effectively incorporate social media into their customer sales and service strategy. This announcement is part of Avaya's launch of new contact center solutions to help businesses drive competitively differentiated customer experiences across an array of multimedia channels, including social media.

Avaya's latest social media developments are driven by Avaya Social Media Manager, an integrated solution that allows businesses to scan social media content (such as tweets and Facebook updates) in an automated fashion; analyzes the content for relevance; and then enables customer service agents to take action⁽¹⁾. It can be used to enhance agent and customer experiences, improve branding and increase revenue streams via social media-driven customer service. A user of Avaya Social Media Manager is San Diego, CA.-based Motiva, a 450-agent provider of customer service solutions with contact center operations in Mexico (see quote below).

Social Media Enhancements for Customer Service:
Providing better customer service is the number one benefit that businesses seek to gain from social media customer support, followed by driving more sales⁽²⁾. Tracking with this demand, Avaya today announces:

• Social Media Consulting Services: These new Avaya consulting services help businesses integrate a social media channel into their customer sales and service strategy. The services follow a consistent methodology -- which includes a Social Assessment, Strategy Development, Roadmap Creation, and Adoption Plan -- tailored according to a business' specific requirements and that guide the company through a customer service evolution using social media.

• Integration of Social Media in Agent Desktops: Avaya Social Media Manager can easily integrate with Avaya Aura® Contact Center 6.2, the new version of Avaya's agent-assisted experience solution announced today. This enables a company to incorporate social media into the single view that agents use for managing multimedia customer interactions. The result is a simpler, more productive way for workers to receive relevant social media messages, along with available customer history, and respond to it in a customer session. This differs from other solutions that require a separate interface for customer interaction via social media.

More Details on Avaya Social Media Manager:
Avaya Social Media Manager enables companies to bring social media into an agent desktop -- like any other multimedia channel -- to more effectively use the large amounts of content found in social media forums. Key capabilities include:

• Automatic monitoring of customer feedback using key words or phrases set by a business. This helps agents avoid a 'tweet deluge' so they only receive the most relevant social media messages requiring attention.
• Sentiment tracking by assigning a score to social media communications such as tweets (i.e. higher positive number = more positive sentiment). This can identify trends in real-time, and the users driving them, to enable fast, relevant responses.
• Suggested responses can be provided to employees handling social media-driven customer inquiries, taking topic and customer history into account, while still enabling agents to personalize interactions with customers over social media.

Customer Quote:
Higinio Sanchez, Chief Executive Officer, Motiva
"There is a new generation of customers and agents that are very comfortable with social media, so having the right tools and services to maximize it are essential. Avaya enables us to effectively use social media as a service for our clients, who count on us to ensure their customers receive superior and satisfying experiences on a daily basis.

"Avaya Aura® Contact Center with Social Media Manager enables us to integrate social media right into an agent's desktop, which puts a customer's phone calls, emails, chats and social media messages all in the same view -- something that not all agent desktops can effectively do. This, along with Avaya's new social media consulting for contact centers, enables us to bring our customer service to a whole new level."

Tags: Contact center, call center, customer service, unified communications, CRM, Avaya Aura, social media

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.

⁽¹⁾ Customers will need to comply with all applicable laws and third party social media terms of use.

⁽²⁾ Frost & Sullivan report, 2011 Planning Considerations - Multi-Channel Contact Centers, January 2011. 75% cite 'provide better customer service' as top benefit of social media customer interactions; 58% cite 'drive more sales'

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