Avaya Holdings Corp, the provider of contact centre solutions, and Afiniti, the provider of AI-based behavioural pairing solutions, announced a strategic partnership to improve enterprise customer experience and contact centre performance through a unique integration of artificial intelligence into contact centre routing technology.
This first-of-its-kind collaboration will natively integrate Afiniti Enterprise Behavioural Pairing™ with the market-leading, Avaya Contact Centre platform on which enterprise customers around the world 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 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 marketplaces towards artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies as a transformational tool for large enterprise,” said Zia Chishti, Afiniti CEO and founder. “Today, 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 $5 trillion (€4.10 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 Centre 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 Centre 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.
Afiniti continues to be a charter member of the A.I.Connect, an Avaya-led initiative that brings together an ecosystem of vendors and developers taking an active part in building AI-driven solutions. A.I.Connect is accelerating the adoption of AI solutions in contact centre and unified communications solutions.