Source: Avaya

Avaya and International Avaya Users Group Announce Winners of the 2015 Customer Innovation Awards

DENVER, CO--(Marketwired - Jun 17, 2015) - IAUG Converge 2015 -- 

  • Five Visionary Companies Cited for Creative Use of Unified Communications, Contact Center and/or Data Solutions and Commitment to Excellence

Avaya and the International Avaya User Group (IAUG) today announced the winners of the 2015 Customer Innovation Awards, which highlight companies that transformed its businesses and organizations through innovative use of business communications and collaboration technologies.

The following award winners were announced during the IAUG Global Conference 2015 in Denver:

Business Transformation Award: Bankers Life (U.S.) -- Bankers Life, a national life and health insurance brand of CNO Financial Group, contracts more than 5,000 licensed agents at more than 300 offices across the country. When it comes to mobile technologies, Bankers Life is focused on using software that enhances agent service and customer experience and provides greater business efficiency. Avaya Communicator software -- being deployed this year -- is expected to deliver capabilities that will enable agents to interact with the quickly growing customer base at Bankers Life and give them the freedom to connect to the network from anywhere using mobile phones, tablets and computers. For customers, this translates to seamless communication with their agents, and for Bankers Life, it will reduce annual expenses and transform customer interactions.

Midmarket Innovation Award: City Beach (Australia) -- As a privately owned business specializing in youth lifestyle fashion, City Beach needed a robust voice platform to take its ongoing business systems transformation to the next level. With 66 locations that had been on a variety of platforms, the Avaya IP Office solution was the perfect match for the growing and changing communication requirements of City Beach. The centralized server solution consolidates services and eliminates redundancy, enabling City Beach to experience a number of benefits including reductions of up to $10,000 per month in telephony costs.

Customer Engagement Award: T-Mobile (U.S.) -- As America's Un-carrier™, T-Mobile is redefining the way consumers and businesses buy wireless services through leading product and service innovation. A big part of T-Mobile's focus on the customer is making the customer experience as easy as possible. In 2013, T-Mobile deployed the Avaya Aura Experience Portal to decrease complexity in the customer experience and simplify operational support. With T-Mobile's IT and Customer Care leadership, Avaya and its channel partner, NACR, helped to ensure a successful deployment to meet T-Mobile's goal of transforming the customer's self-service experience. T-Mobile's customer-first approach, along with the support of Avaya's automated service customer engagement applications and the Nuance Natural Language Speech recognition technology, has helped contribute to the company's improved customer service.

Team Engagement Award: BBVA Bancomer (Mexico) -- Two years ago, BBVA Bancomer initiated its strategic plan to open new locations in Mexico City with a clear vision that required a new solution for the iconic headquarters. The vision focused more on team engagement than ever before, allowing mobile users to communicate and collaborate virtually anywhere within and outside of the bank locations, including internationally. BBVA Bancomer selected Avaya Aura for its new locations -- the Finance and Operations Centers -- which supports more than 9,500 users. The company had a smooth migration from its existing telephony solution to the new Avaya unified communications and customer experience management platforms, providing new features to end users while keeping costs down. BBVA Bancomer's new mobile strategy encompasses 60% of the employees at the new sites, transforming its business and operations into "New Ways to Work" with mobile and virtual office solutions.

Technology Breakthrough Award: MGM Resorts International (U.S.) -- In December 2014, MGM Resorts began rolling out a new Avaya Aura communications infrastructure across its properties. Part of the overall project involved migrating properties from a traditional PBX infrastructure to a virtualized, private cloud solution with minimal hardware on the premises (i.e. phones and gateways). The virtualized model allows MGM Resorts to deliver unified communications services from a private cloud, the same way MGM Resorts' other IT applications are deployed and delivered. Through this transformation, MGM Resorts is realizing higher operational efficiencies including optimizing usage of compute and storage resources in the data center, streamlining engineering and maintenance of hardware resources, simplifying life cycle management, and shortening the time to deploy new applications.

Quotes

"This year's Customer Innovation award winners are great examples of businesses that have successfully made the transition to a Digital Enterprise with demonstrable ROI along the way. We are proud to honor these companies this week at IAUG Converge 2015." 
--Brenda Emerson, president, IAUG

"As more businesses compete on customer service and productivity, Avaya is providing the services and solutions that make customer and team engagement a sustainable competitive advantage. The organizations recognized with the 2015 Customer Innovation Awards exemplify what's possible when taking advantage of Avaya's solutions. Congratulations to all the winners."
--Laurent Philonenko, senior vice president of Corporate Strategy & Development and CTO, Avaya

About Avaya:
Avaya is a leading provider of solutions that enable customer and team engagement across multiple channels and devices for better customer experience, increased productivity and enhanced financial performance. Its world-class contact center and unified communications technologies and services are available in a wide variety of flexible on-premises and cloud deployment options that seamlessly integrate with non-Avaya applications. The Avaya Engagement Environment enables third parties to create and customize business applications for competitive advantage. Avaya's fabric-based networking solutions help simplify and accelerate the deployment of business critical applications and services. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.

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