Avaya Innovation on Display at GITEX 2018Avaya Innovation on Display at GITEX 2018

GITEX Technology Week 2018 is taking place this week in Dubai. This is the region's largest tech show, featuring almost 5,000 exhibitors and a whopping 150,000 attendees, so if you're not familiar with GITEX, you should be. As it has been in years past, Avaya is a major sponsor, using the event to highlight a bunch of newly released technology.

The product highlights span different product portfolios and use cases. Here's a look at some of what Avaya is showcasing at GITEX.

Contact Center Updates
The contact center enhancements are the centerpiece of the Avaya booth. In addition to new features, Avaya is showing how integration between UC and contact center provides the ability to transition seamlessly from one to the other. A number of use cases show how a contact center interaction could start with a call initiated from a request made via an Amazon Alexa command, SMS, or chat. Once these conversations start, the agent can seamlessly bring in other experts and flow from one medium to the other. The backend is now a single, unified communications platform.

Avaya also is demonstrating real-time translation between an agent and a customer. One of the challenges for businesses that serve people in different languages is being able to find someone who understands the local language. With this new capability, Avaya will enable on-the-fly translations so agents and customers of different languages can communicate. The only thing better would be the Star Trek universal translator.

Another interesting feature is sentiment-based routing, which Avaya says results in higher first call resolution. Avaya's Oceana software listens in conversations for negative comments from customers. When it hears something negative, it sends an alert to a manager or other person who can address the situation. In one example, a consumer applying for a car loan complains about the interest rate. Without any action from the contact center agent, Oceana flags the negative sentiment for a manager to see. Based on credit history, the bank approves a lower rate and notifies the agent with a pop-up -- and the customer is offered a lower rate almost instantly.

To show advanced biometric capabilities, Avaya set up a mock remote bank machine at its booth that allowed a customers to sign in using facial recognition and fingerprinting. Once authenticated, a remote teller could approve a credit card, which the machine would then actually print.

Digital Workspace
Using its Breeze software developer's kit, Avaya has created a customized worker dashboard it calls Digital Workspace. The Web-based portal aggregates email, a social media stream, CRM records, upcoming meetings and appointments, contacts, chat, and call logs, as well a button for engaging with Eva, Avaya's AI assistant.

At first I was a bit skeptical that people would use this sort of dashboard, but then I saw a demo of what happens when an employee initiates a calling via speech command. Once the call begins, the information on the dashboard changes to reflect actions between the employee and the called party. So if asked Eva to "call Dave Michels," the display would change to show me Dave's last dozen or so Tweets, any emails between us, CRM records, past meetings, and other information specific to him.

I believe this could be game-changing technology that fuels contextual conversations. With all the email, meetings, and other activity we have today, it's impossible to recall everything and this sort of digital workspace would make that easier. Avaya told me it could bring anything with an API into the dashboard, including Slack, Salesforce, or vertical applications.

Social Platform for Chatbots
Since the movie "First Man" just came out, I'll paraphrase my thoughts on this by saying this has the potential to be "one small step for bots but one giant leap for customer self-service." Chatbots, though widely used today, have drawbacks. Most notably, they're highly domain specific and customer queries can quickly extend beyond their scope of knowledge. Many consumers don't realize they're interacting with bots (which should be the goal), so they can get frustrated when the bot doesn't know how to answer their questions.

The Avaya social platform enables chatbots from different domains and industries to collaborate and exchange information. Via the platform, different enterprises can link their chatbots and significantly expand the efficacy and expertise of a single bot. This, in turn, leads to improved customer service.

At GITEX, Avaya demonstrated how enterprises can register their chatbots with a unique social provider and "friend" other member bots from different domain and industries. It also showed how chatbots rate each other and store confidence metrics based on the quality of information received, and feedback from end customers, leading to constant improvements in each bot's quality and speed of customer service.

Avaya Vantage Use Cases
When I first saw the Vantage phone, I was skeptical. Why would anybody need a phone that's basically a Google tablet with a handset and quality audio? But Avaya made its case at GITEX, demonstrating how Vantage could be used in both healthcare and hospitality.

For hotels, Avaya had a mockup of a Vantage phone used as a wall plate outside a room. The display showed the room number, a do-not-disturb indicator, and information on whether the room was to be made up or not. This is all basic stuff, but more interestingly, the guest could place a call from the phone -- say to the front desk if his room key wasn't working. A hotel could customize the display to show relevant information, such as where the conference rooms are for the event the guest is attending, or even post a personalized greeting.

Inside the room, the Vantage would be the control point from which a guest could do things like review menus and place room service orders, change the temperature, and set the do-not-disturb indicator -- which, in turn, would update the display on the Vantage outside the room. For the lazy guest who calls room service without bothering to first find the menu, the agent can push the menu directly to Vantage. If the guest were to ask, "what kind of sandwiches do you have," he'd just receive the sandwich menu. The omnichannel capabilities create the platform for highly personalized guest services.

In healthcare, Vantage could be used at a nurse's station and show the status of all the patients on the floor. By tapping a room, the clinician would be able to drill down on a specific patient to find out who the responsible doctor is or find out more information. Also, using a Vantage device, each nurse could receive only the information he or she requires while streamlining reminders, messages, and calls into their workflows. The communications-enabled application on the device makes it simple to easily alert the right person in the case of an emergency, provide relevant patient records, schedule doctor's appointments, and more.

One final note on Vantage. Avaya has many use cases for Vantage that span different verticals. It provides an "always on" screen for people to display whatever information is most important to them. A marketing person could show Facebook and a Twitter feed whereas a construction foreman could show a video feed from a site being worked on. I understand a computer or tablet could be used but Vantage is always there and always on, which isn't the case for a personal computing device.

Avaya has done an excellent job thinking up many of these use cases, but it now needs to productize them. It should turning these ad-hoc ideas into offerings such as "Smart Hospitality," enabling hotels to change guest interaction via Vantage and pulling through contact center and unified communications. Now that Vantage is available, the ability to productize the use cases will play a big role in how successful Avaya is in selling it. Vantage itself isn't game-changing, but the whole Avaya experience is.

Road Ahead
It's been about a year since Avaya came out of bankruptcy, and its good to see the company has done what CEO Jim Chirico promised, which is to put the pedal down and ramp up innovation. There's still work to be done in the area of marketing and productization, as I point out in a previous No Jitter post, but the company did have an impressive set of demonstrations at GITEX that included contact center, unified communications, cloud, artificial intelligence, mobility, and IoT.

One year post bankruptcy, revenues are up and the innovation train is running. So far, so good.