Automation, Personalization and Experience Building; Concepts that Dominated During Experience Avaya Latam

Avaya shared highlights of the virtual event Experience Avaya Latam held today through the Avaya Spaces solution, which hosted more than 500 attendees from across the Latin American region.

The event was hosted online by Galib Karim, vice president of Avaya Latin America, who welcomed all attendees and special guests and presented the agenda of the conferences and LIVE panels to enjoy during the day.

At the opening conference of the event “Avaya Experience Builders, Reimagining the Experience Development Process”, Manuel Torres, Sales Engineering and Advanced Architecture Director for Avaya Caribbean and Latin America conveyed the message that we live in the experience economy and all those who are dedicated to customer service should provide excellent experiences, and those who do not differentiate themselves with it will end up competing on costs, which is not profitable. But, creating these experiences is not an easy task because it involves multiple work teams; also because what was valuable yesterday will not necessarily be valuable tomorrow, and because the customer evolves and changes constantly.

“Avaya develops technology that helps companies create these experiences in a simple way. We have been doing this for many years and we consolidate it in our Avaya Experience Builders strategy through which we facilitate the creation of experiences that matter to our customers, business partners and our own employees,” Torres concluded.

Juan Pablo Gómez, Corporate Consultant for Avaya Latin America, continued the talk by stating that Contact Centers must reinvent themselves through process automation to find the perfect balance between the use of technologies, the creation of tailored experiences for each of their customers and the definition of indicators for data-driven decision making.

“An important message we want to share with our customers across all industries is that with Avaya Experience Builders you don’t need to be a developer or programming expert to generate memorable experiences, but rather our solutions are what is known in the industry as Low-Code / No-Code tools where anyone involved can design and execute a strategy with simple, graphical processes,” concluded Gomez.

The event’s agenda went on with the participation of the first special guest, María Eugenia García Aguirre, General Director of the Mexican Teleservices Institute, who through her presentation “Latin America: Trends and Challenges of CX & Contact Centers”, explained that after overcoming a complicated 2020 and having achieved stability, the focus is now on the customer experience, but also on the employee’s experience. Regarding the Contact Center sector, she stated that as it is transversal, in all organizations it has increased its volume of operation, also boosted by the boom of e-commerce -because it is the one who provides support-, which has placed it in a position of greater relevance at a corporate level as a strategic area.

She also mentioned that, in Latin America, the sector has experienced a growth of 6 to 14 percent, not so much in installed capacity but in remote work, which has grown exponentially, and that today they are focused on talent professionalization, in addition to working more on achieving gender equity and diverse teams.

In terms of digital transformation, the Contact Center industry continues to work on channel integration and making omnichannel a reality, as well as migration to the Cloud where she emphasized that three out of four Contact Centers have migrated part of their operations to the Cloud and one out of four fully migrate to the Cloud.

As challenges, María Eugenia mentioned that Contact Centers seek to increase their participation in the face of increasing competition; automation, talent attraction and retention, compliance with regulations and legislation and telework management; cybersecurity, process optimization and AI technology integration, analytics and omni-channeling.

In his speech, Juan Pablo Tricarico, president of the Latin American Alliance of Organizations for Customer Interaction (ALOIC), shared the scenario of best practices in Contact Centers and Customer Experience in the Region with the important figure of 249 success stories winners of the Awards of the countries represented in the Alliance and the Latam Award granted by ALOIC; This demonstrates the quality and depth of the best practices represented in hundreds of millions of interactions per year, which make use of the excellent human talent component, the access to the necessary support technologies and the strategic leadership that is present in Latin America, both in national, multi-Latin and international companies; companies of all business verticals together with the prominence of Contact Centers and BPO’s of different origins and sizes, in addition to the growing commitment to honor and comply with the rules of compliance present in the Region.

Juan Manuel Gonzalez, Director of Digital Transformation at Frost & Sullivan, started his talk “CX in Latin America: What you must know to succeed in 2022” sharing the keys to the evolution of Customer Experience, such as: proactive, asynchronous and persistent customers; intuitive and easy-to-use self-service tools; technologies such as AI, analytics and the Cloud as the key to improve customer experience; the importance of the agent experience and their productivity; and the assertion that “digital is the new normal and customization the true differentiator”.

On the other hand, he shared the new thinking that will dominate the post-pandemic era focused on responding to short-term challenges; innovating business models considering the new consumer needs; placing the health of those involved first; and achieving greater agility and innovation in customer relations.

Juan Manuel concluded his speech by providing attendees with four winning recommendations for the era of the enhanced Customer Experience: the optimization of self-service; the empowerment of Contact Center agents; the digitization of CX by specialized providers; and, finally, a focus on customer and employee experience.

During the “Strategic Alliances Panel” integrated by Alejandro Crivelli, Sales Director at Verint Latin America; Martín Cabrera, Customer Engineering Leader at Google Cloud Chile, and Christian Moreno, Biometrics and Fraud Specialist for Latin America at Nuance Communications, Juan Pablo Stamati, Director of Alliances at Avaya Caribbean and Latin America, commented that “the management and continuous improvement of the customer experience is taking an increasingly relevant role in the evolution of the companies; it is a key piece of business to retain customers and make them happier. Within this scenario, Avaya’s alliances with leading companies in the market such as Verint, Nuance and Google are a fundamental piece that provides innovation and specialization in new areas of contact centers”.

Furthermore, during the talk they discussed success stories of joint work, such as the case with Verint of Atento Mexico, an example on how to manage the Contact Center operation efficiently, following the capacity to the demand, rescheduling shifts of agents in pandemic, working from home, through the use of the Workforce Management solution, e-learning and coaching, as well as the efficient management of the Virtual Office with the Desktop Analytics. “What is interesting is the continuous improvement in the pursuit of efficiency and, at the same time, improving the customer experience through the use of automatic Quality management solutions and Speech Analytics.”

Finally, there was discussion on what’s next in terms of innovation, such as voice and text analytics combined with surveys and behavior on websites to analyze customer satisfaction as a whole and predict future actions; as well as the use of biometrics through digital channels for customer authentication with minimal effort.

To continue with the day of the event, there was the “Panel: The Voice of the Customer” moderated by David Arconada, director of CX at BBVA and president of AMEC where they shared lessons learned, plans and changes that are here to stay in this post pandemic scenario. In this sense, Alba Duque, Self Service Manager at Claro Colombia, stated that teleworking is here to stay and there are technological capabilities to support it, such as Artificial Intelligence to achieve greater personalization with customers. Rubén Rivera, Commercial and Marketing Director at Atento Mexico, emphasized that it is necessary to be disruptive and continue innovating, because if we position ourselves as consumers we are always looking for someone to surprise us in the service we receive.

Along the same lines, Marcelo Caiafa, head of UC, Technology and Systems at Banco Galicia, shared that the need to equip the digital channel for self-management, the possibility of having that correlation of events along the customer journey to learn, improve and optimize processes and achieve operational efficiency is what we seek as a goal, in addition to excellence in customer service quality; And last but not least, Carlos Perez, Vice President of Operations at RCI, concluded that there is a great demand for flexibility from customers but that these customers are willing to pay for it. Another aspect that is here to stay is a good corporate communication strategy to be close to our associates or collaborators.

To conclude the event, Mario Cruz, leader of OneCloud Solutions in Avaya Latin America and the Caribbean, shared, through his conference “Avaya OneCloud: CX and The Cloud, a customized path” that companies in search of greater efficiency and business growth should focus on improving the Customer Experience, which requires adapting a Total Experience strategy that involves all employees within an organization. This customer-focused Total Experience must contemplate the evolution of “Composability” architectures and services offered in the Cloud. It should be noted that this Cloud alone is not the destination but the path and each company will have to determine, according to its business, a customized path that will allow it to establish that differentiator, create loyalty and capture new business.

“With Avaya OneCloud our customers can have a multi-cloud composite ecosystem supporting private, public and hybrid options, along with our technology allies such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and IBM, to drive intelligent automation to accelerate and reduce the cost of business workflows,” concluded Cruz.

This 2022 experts recognize the power of Avaya’s Contact Center and Customer Experience solutions, such as:

– Ventana Research Value Index for Agent Management – “Exemplary Vendor and Leader in the 2022 Agent Management Value Index.”

– 2022 The Cloud Awards – “Best use of Telephony / Unified Communications in Cloud Computing”.

– CX Innovation Awads – “Best Technology Partner of 2022: OneCloud Subscription Program”.

– Conarec Awards – “Relational Intelligence and Engagement Among Customer Care Market Players”.

1. Voice Biometrics

2. Automatic Call Distributor (ACD)

3. IP Telephony / VOIP Services

4. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)