All In: The Art of Experience.

Geomant Product Manager, Ákos Máté had the opportunity to attend the Avaya ENGAGE event between 12th - 14th November 2019 in Dubai. He tells us of his experience in this insightful blog.

Before we jump in, let's give you some background. This exciting event is hosted every year by Avaya International, an organisation who is known by many as the largest unified communication and contact centre company in the world. Avaya International has over two hundred and twenty thousand customers and seventeen million individual users.

Avaya ENGAGE is the premier event in the business communication industry focusing on unified communications and contact centres; as such, hundreds of industry experts and leaders are present every year, happy to share their knowledge and experience. It is an excellent venue for connecting with others from various regions and is the perfect place to share ideas, and experience first-hand innovations in the field of business communication.

The event was held at Atlantis, The Palm, which is an impressive size giving room to the largest open-air marine aquarium in the world, it is one of the most exclusive locations in Dubai. The hotel is located on the outer crest of Palm Jumeirah, an artificial island, built entirely from sand and rocks, in the form of a palm tree, topped by a crescent.

To get a feeling about how big this island is, here are some numbers:

• From the mainland to the top of the crescent is about 4.8 km, there is a monorail that runs through the spine and up the trunk of the “palm".
• The crescent which can be reached from the trunk via a tunnel is 200m wide and 17 km long, it is divided into three sections that are connected via a bridge; the Palm has an area of 5.72 km2 which is more than twice the size of Monaco.

Geomant Product Manager, Ákos Máté explains how the entire event was focused around providing an effortless customer engagement journey on any channel. He tells us how the event slogan “Art of Experience” reflects this with Avaya being “All In” for its customers.

Ákos continues to describe the event: 

"During the three days, there were dedicated slots for partners, customers and industry awards. Many new Avaya product features were revealed too, starting from the new Proactive Outreach Manager to Avaya Oceana with slick features like: video call, co-browse, visual IVR, natural language understanding, WebRTC support and overall views of customer history". 

Ákos explains how he could address each feature but it would be a long discussion, so he decides to focus in one two topic areas instead: Service availability and digital channels:

Service Availability

"Avaya revealed that services can be deployed and/or consumed in anyway according to need, be that on-premises (Hybrid), private cloud (ReadyNow) or via public cloud service – this shows that even though the market has shifted towards cloud solutions, there is still strong demand for non-cloud services where customers can have control over all aspects of their software and hardware". 

Digital Channels

"Avaya talked about how important it is to allow customers to reach you on any channel. I agree that it is a 'must' in today's interconnected and hyper fast world. Customers need to be able to transition from voice, webchat and email towards all digital channels including, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Viber, WeChat, etc. supporting chat, persistent chat, self-service & video". 

With Geomant having been an Avaya technology partner for over 20 years, it made sense for us to attend as a sponsor. Ákos explains how it was the perfect opportunity for us to talk to the community about how our solutions complement the Avaya portfolio. He says:

"Mainly, we emphasized how customers can use Geomant technology to add digital channels to their existing infrastructure - without the need to upgrade core systems. We also spoke about how to get maximum value from the contact centre by integrating with customer relationship management platforms. We demonstrated our Buzzeasy and Desktop Connect solutions by showing people what it's like to route a customer from WhatsApp or Facebook to an agent via blending with voice. We demonstrated the solutions 'agent side' so that everyone could see how the unified desktop worked in action - providing a complete view for the agent which improves service levels and productivity". 

We asked Ákos to tell us what else he found interesting about the event, he replied: 

"On the last day, Avaya in association with the Dubai Police hosted the International Call Center Awards, nominees were chosen from the public and private sector, with the winners being the Singapore Police Force - congrats to Dnata and Etisalat! What was interesting, was along with the well-established KPI’s like time to answer, customer satisfaction and net promoter score, we saw a new indicator: “happiness". The happiness indicator has been brought about to measure how happy both the customer and agent are. I truly believe that this new KPI will bring a whole new view on how communication impacts our everyday life." 

Geomant continues to develop Avaya-complementary solutions, and would be happy to discuss developments with anyone who wants more information - simply drop us a message to find out more.