How Contact Centers Can Innovate Without Disruption

How have contact centers evolved in the past few years?

During the pandemic there was a need for secure systems that met government regulations and enabled contact center agents to work from home. Employee satisfaction improved dramatically, and agencies have capitalized on that. Making that work hinges upon partners who can meet agencies’ technology requirements in this new environment.

How can AI and other technologies improve the customer experience?

The public sector wants to give constituents the best possible experience. But there’s a huge variance in how people want to interact. Some people want a phone conversation; others want to get everything online. New digital technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) allow agencies to broaden the experience they offer to the public, letting them engage how they want, when they want.

Agencies use AI to assist residents in finding faster, more accurate answers through chatbots and other interfaces. But it’s also important to maintain a proven, dependable security profile. AI can recognize alarming patterns that signal malicious intent in a vast sea of data and interactions. AI identifies those and notifies the appropriate people to contain the threat.

Many government customers want to transition to secure, cost-effective cloud technologies, but they might not be able to make that leap all at once. They want innovation without disruption, to be able to go as fast or slow as they need to. Avaya’s FedRAMP-certified solutions enable agencies, at their own pace, to integrate new technologies into their existing contact center model via the cloud.

What’s a real-world example of innovation without disruption?

One of our large partners was converting more than 4,000 offices to the cloud. That’s quite a stretch! In partnership with the customer, Avaya developed an implementation plan to connect the customer’s on-premises solution to our FedRAMP cloud environment, which allowed them to move as many offices at a time — at their speed — with zero disruption. There was no rip and replace because their new solution allowed them to leverage their existing investment. The conversion took about six months, and as of today they have transitioned 100 percent to the FedRAMP-certified cloud environment.