Vonage Customer Service Selects Avaya IP Telephony Contact Center Solutions

Vonage announced its sales and service subsidiary, Vonage America, has chosen Avaya's SIP-based telephony and contact center solutions to expand its call center capacity and productivity.  Vonage turned to Avaya Inc. to expand its customer service capabilities and increase the number of callers the company handles daily.  

"Our vision is to provide world-class customer service," said Dan Bemis, senior vice president of customer operations of Vonage America. "To do that, we needed to make a number of changes - starting with an intelligent communications solution that would help us maximize the customer experience."  

Building from the company's existing call center, Vonage and Avaya Global Services collaborated on a design that would expand capacity and enable it to serve as the core platform for its worldwide customer service operations. Essential elements of the technology strategy included a SIP-based platform that could integrate with Vonage's own SIP-based, IP phone service and existing network. SIP is a protocol that enables interoperability among various media, including audio, video, instant messaging and presence.

"We see a dynamically scalable customer care organization that enables us to leverage resources from any location, whenever and wherever they're most needed," said Bemis. "With Avaya's real-time, right-time communications approach, we will be able to 'think globally and act locally' from a customer service perspective."

Based on Avaya Customer Interaction Suite and powered by Avaya Communication Manager IP Telephony software, the main contact center will serve as a hub for other customer care centers as they open around the world. The integration of SIP into Avaya solutions increases interoperability with other Vonage applications and networks. Additionally, new SIP-based capabilities in Avaya's Customer Interaction Suite can enable Vonage agents to establish lists of fellow agents or experts located anywhere in the business who could be tapped through presence and instant messaging while a customer is on the line.

"It was important to us that Avaya's portfolio of business communications applications supported standards like SIP - the technology core of Vonage's service offering - that will easily integrate with other business applications and which create value on top of the network," said Bemis.     
 
For Vonage, the contact center upgrade has simultaneously improved customer satisfaction and agent productivity. "Since implementing the new solutions, we handle more calls, wait times are significantly down and agent productivity is up," said Bemis.

Avaya partnered with Witness Systems, an Avaya DeveloperConnection member. Vonage invested in contact center workforce management solutions, which can help it forecast, schedule and plan around future call volumes and staffing needs to enhance service and more strategically deploy its workforce.

Avaya Customer Interaction Suite is a component of Avaya MultiVantage™ Communications Applications, a suite of business communications applications that includes IP telephony, contact center, messaging, conferencing and speech access solutions.  Avaya Global Services provided professional consultative, design, implementation, managed, monitoring and maintenance services.  

Avaya DeveloperConnection is Avaya's independent software developer program which promotes the development, compliance testing and co-marketing of third-party applications that interoperate with Avaya solutions.