Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 31 | Page 34

EDITOR’S QUESTION HOW CAN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BECOME AN EFFECTIVE TRANSFORMATIONAL TOOL FOR ENTERPRISES? ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// A vaya Holdings Corp, a provider of contact centre solutions, and Afiniti, a provider of AI-based behavioural pairing solutions, have announced a strategic partnership to improve enterprise customer experience and contact centre performance through an integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into contact centre routing technology. This first-of-its-kind collaboration will natively integrate Afiniti Enterprise Behavioural Pairing with Avaya Contact Center platform on which enterprise customers depend for reliability at scale. Afiniti Enterprise Behavioural Pairing discovers and predicts patterns of interpersonal behaviour to optimally pair customers with agents. With over 90 patents, Afiniti’s technology examines data and commercially available information tied to customer identity to determine patterns of successful behavioural interactions and applies these patterns in real time to drive improvements in health, enterprise profitability and customer satisfaction. “Every enterprise is looking to get more out of their contact centre, and AI is the next major shift in the way contact centres operate,” said Jim Chirico, Avaya President and CEO. “Working with Afiniti 34 INTELLIGENTCIO provides a unique, proven AI offering, and is another example of Avaya investing in transformative technologies to deliver unparalleled contact centre performance to companies around the world.” “This partnership highlights the shift in the communications and collaboration market places towards AI and machine learning technologies as a transformational tool for large enterprises,” said Zia Chishti, Afiniti CEO and Founder. “Afiniti’s AI is helping save lives and delivering billions of dollars in profitability to our global clients. Our new partnership and native integration with Avaya will accelerate the pace at which our joint clients will drive precisely measurable value to their shareholders and customers.” Optimising interactions between customers and agents leads to greater satisfaction and loyalty, improved quality of life and enhanced revenue and profitability. IDC estimates that the worldwide value of revenue and cost transactions flowing through the contact centre in 2018 will be approximately US$5 trillion, reflecting opportunities in healthcare, telecommunications, travel, hospitality, utility, insurance, banking, among other industries with large, consumer-facing operations. Avaya and Afiniti are partnering to optimise this market opportunity. “The native integration between Avaya and Afiniti will enable contact centre customers to easily deploy artificial intelligence technology to achieve measurably better business results,” said Dr E Brent Kelly, Principal Analyst, KelCor Inc. “This solution can be applied to numerous contact centre business metrics including improving sales, decreasing costs and increasing customer satisfaction and is especially attractive as Afiniti reduces customer risk by using an outcome based pricing model.” Integrating the Afiniti Enterprise Behavioural Pairing technology into Avaya’s market- leading outbound and inbound voice routing solutions, Avaya Aura Contact Center Elite, Avaya Proactive Outreach Manager and Avaya Oceana, extends the value of customers’ existing Avaya investment while adding highly impactful AI capabilities. This partnership will deliver an AI edition of Avaya Aura Call Center Elite in the third quarter this year, enabling companies to benefit from behavioural pairing for both on-premises and cloud deployments. Following this will be integration with Avaya Proactive Outreach Manager and Avaya Oceana. www.intelligentcio.com