Avatel Technologies receives Avaya’s ‘Partner in Customer Excellence’ designation

Tampa FL – February 19, 2013 Avaya has awarded Avatel Technologies with the “Partner in Customer Excellence” designation. The prestigious "Partner in Customer Excellence" designation from Avaya identifies and rewards Avaya channel partners who achieve significantly higher scores in their customer satisfaction surveys. With an expansive network of Avaya channel partners, customer satisfaction is a critical element in determining partner level status for Avaya, and recognizes those that go above and beyond.

“Partner in Customer Excellence” is awarded to an Avaya Business Partner for achieving superior customer satisfaction over the past 12 months including both sales and support services to Avaya customers and only a select group of Avaya Business Partners have attained the “Partner in Customer Excellence” designation. The survey is part of a channel initiative conducted on behalf of Avaya by Walker, global experts in customer service consulting. The “Partner in Customer Excellence” Avaya Connect program was introduced by Avaya in 2011, to recognize excellence in customer service. It focuses on all aspects of service and support provided by Avaya’s partners. Walker’s quantitative research asked Avatel’s clients to rate different elements of the service and support they received from remote and on-site engineers and our client service technical representatives. Responses were graded from 1 (Poor) to 5 (Excellent). Avatel achieved an exceptionally high averaged score of 4.67.

Jamie Wood, Executive Vice President for Avatel said, “This certification honors both Avatel’s high level of customer satisfaction and technical expertise. This designation is truly a reflection of our entire corporate focus on customer service. Achieving consistently high levels of customer satisfaction is one of the best ways for Avatel to compete effectively, grow our customer base and increase profit. Customer satisfaction is essential to the survival of our businesses and is a key performance indicator within our business”.

Avaya has been a strong proponent of Customer Satisfaction as a key driver of repeat business and growth. Securing the “Partner in Customer Excellence” status further strengthens Avatel’s relationship with Avaya.” In addition to the “Partner in Customer Excellence” designation, Avatel holds both Avaya Silver Partner and SME Expert designations.

About Avatel

Avatel Technologies a premier Avaya Business Partner offers a full suite of solutions to help businesses operate more effectively and efficiently with a range of solutions including IP Telephony, Data Infrastructure, UC, Video, IVR, Wireless and much more. Avatel maintains a clear vision through a single core business philosophy: helping customers find smarter telecom and networking solutions. www.avatel.us.

Avatel Technologies to offer Avaya’s Radvision Scopia video solutions

Tampa, FL -- 12/10/12 – Avatel Technologies, a leading communications solution provider, announced today they are authorized to sell Avaya's Radvision Scopia video solutions to their clients as a partner in the Avaya Connect Channel program – an Avaya reseller community encompassing approximately 10,000 companies around the globe.

This expands Avatel’s unified communications portfolio with the capabilities and competencies driven by the Scopia line of innovative video communications solutions. Jamie Wood, Avatel’s EVP says “Avatel is happy to join the ranks of highly-competent Radvision channel partners authorized to sell Radvision Scopia® video solutions as part of our unified communications offerings”. Avatel was one of 50 hand-picked specialist partners to adopt video via a fast-track authorization scheme, ahead of the authorization program being made available to all Avaya Connect partners in January 2013. Avatel was required to meet all training requirements, invest in demo equipment and complete all services assessments.

This enables Avatel to expand their capabilities and competencies with a new generation of feature-rich, interoperable and user-friendly video solutions for real-time collaboration. Avatel will receive top-tier levels of technical support, services integration, and training for incorporating enhanced video into a communications solution.

Avaya acquired Radvision earlier this year, bringing innovative Scopia video products and technologies into Avaya’s portfolio of UC solutions. Avaya since the acquisition's close has been able to offer interoperability between Radvision Scopia, Avaya Aura, Avaya Flare Experience, Avaya 1000 series and one-X Communicator products, with integration for IP Office soon to follow. Avaya is also in the process of tying Radvision and Avaya hardware and software MCUs together and finishing broader interoperability between Radvision Scopia products and Avaya wares like session border controllers and other functions on its Aura platform.

This will bring more affordable real-time collaboration video to more businesses, simplifying the ability to communicate anywhere, on any device and on any network.

For more information contact:
Jamie Wood
813-314-2116

Contact Center Association is dedicated to providing resources, information, education and professional networking opportunities to the global contact center community. Supervisors, workforce managers, directors, VP’s and executives turn to CCA as the go-to resource for contact center tools and techniques, problem solving methods, business skills, career development and more.

Contact Center Association is dedicated to providing the contact center industry with a foundation designed to encourage creativity while providing a framework for validation of activities happening within our industry.  CCA provides a place where professionals can gather to share, learn, build relationships, contribute knowledge, and validate the industry's direction with the goal of improving the careers of the individuals. 

Avatel is very excited to announce participation at the Contact Center Conference in Miami, Florida on October 9th-12th. Colin Jeffs, Avatel’s Enterprise Director was selected out of hundreds of applicants to speak at the event.  Colin is also a featured writer in the newsletter.

Colin Jeffs Enterprise Sales Director, Avatel Technologies Inc. - Colin Jeffs has over 30 years designing and managing contact centers across Europe and the United States including Ford in Europe.

Come see Colin at the Contact Center Conference and Expo in Miami from October 9-12, Friday, 11:45am - 12:45pm. Colin will lead session 1001: Why Workforce Management and Analytics? , part of the Workforce Optimization track.

 Track: Workforce Optimization

The session will start with a general overview of WFM & Analytics, explaining the various features/modules available and their functionality. There will be interaction with the audience to gauge their depth of knowledge. During the sixty minutes we will cover the following:

• What size of contact center benefits from WFM & Analytics.
• What challenges WFM can/cannot solve.
• When not to implement WFM & Analytics
• How to successfully implement WFM
• The Human side of why contact centers deploy WFMand why others don’t.
• The advantages/ challenges of Analytics and how to implement it successfully
• How Analytics ties into a good social media strategy
• The difference between embedded solutions vs bolt on third party solutions
• Examples of companies that have put WFM & Analytics to good use
• Overall advantage of workforce management and analytics

One of the biggest challenges in the contact center is getting useful and accurate reporting and feedback. In fact, I don't believe there has been any real way of knowing if the feedback you are getting is good until you make adjustments in a trial and error manner. Contact centers for many years have had to rely on manager's hands on, gut instincts. Historically, it has been impossible to listen and grade ALL customer conversations, leaving quality management teams and center managers to make decisions on just a small percentage of calls, typically no more than 3-5 % of calls. But this all changes with the introduction of speech analytics.

For those who don't know, speech analytics works by converting your recorded conversations into text and then analyzing the text for patterns. (Given that multimedia in a contact center is already in a text format such as email or chat, Analytics can be applied to these text conversations also). A good speech analytics solution can check for, not just words, but combinations of words such as "I hate your service" or "I love your new product". It can also detect voice inflection such as someone who is frustrated may talk louder, shout or talk faster or slower. By combining the words said and how they are said along with the ability to analyze ALL your recordings, speech analytics can provide far more accurate reporting and depth of knowledge. Incidentally, speech analytics has been around in the government space for a quite a while which means big brother is watching AND listening!

So, what are the challenges with speech analytics? The most common objections I experience when consulting to contact center management is a combination of resistance to change and doubt about the ability of the solution. Often, when new technology is deployed in a contact center, staff reductions follow. Speech analytics could easily reduce the number of staff needed in your quality management department and deploying and developing such a solution requires changes which often, people tend to resist. Like Social Media in contact centers, speech analytics is still very new and it is not always easy to find good examples of speech analytics working particularly when the government market is highly classified. Combine this with an uncertain market and companies are hesitant to spend until they are very confident of a positive result and a short return on investment. The companies that are deploying speech analytics today are generally the more forward thinking and larger contact centers where the cost of such a solution is generally a smaller part of the overall contact center budget.

What are the advantages of speech analytics? One of the most powerful advantages of speech analytics is the ability to be proactive and react faster. It allows you to quickly detect patterns and therefore take action from reports and not gut instinct. For example, your company launches a new product and you have just shipped the first batch last week using a new carrier. Unfortunately the packaging is poor and some of the products are arriving to customers broken. Although your agents may give you some feedback about customers calling to complain, an individual agent cannot see what is happening across all agents. With speech analytics the solution can mark all the calls that have this issue and then can alert you. You can then cross reference the calls with information you have in your database such as the geographic location of the complaints and which carrier is being used. With this information you can confidently report these problems and stop future shipments until packaging is corrected or carriers are changed.

Another good use of speech analytics is when a customer complains to an agent but the agent cannot efficiently capture the complaint. Speech Analytics can detect generic phrases such a customer saying to an agent "I am very unhappy" or "I wish to speak to a supervisor". These calls can then be grouped and analyzed by your quality management team for action. Often companies use speech analytics for compliance. For example if it is compulsory for an agent to say certain words a speech analytics solution can red flag the conversations that don't contain the specific words. Often when a new agent comes out of training speech analytics can help grade the agent by detecting keywords and phrases that an agent should say such as "is there anything else I can help you with today". The more keywords the agent says, the higher they score. These are just a few examples of speech analytics in use and I am sure you can think of other examples in your contact center.

In today's high demand for better customer service speech analytics is a very effective way to literally listen to every customer and collate that information for effective use. I wouldn't be surprised if speech analytics becomes a "must have" feature for all future contact centers.

Contact Colin Jeffs at Avatel for more information at 813.347.4600

Avatel Technologies announces the 2^nd Quarter recipient in the Avatel 2012 Giving Back program

Tampa, Florida – June 26, 2012- Avatel Technologies, a communications solution provider and Premier Avaya Business Partner, announced its 2^nd Quarter recipient of the Avaya IP Office phone system for their “2012 Giving Back” Program.

Avatel’s 2^nd Quarter non-profit recipient is the Florida Council on Economic Education. Based in Tampa, the FCEE educates Florida’s students, from kindergarten through high school in economics, personal finance, entrepreneurship and our free enterprise system. 

Jamie Wood, Avatel Executive Vice President says “As successful members of the community, we have a responsibility to support our community. We understand the value of charitable giving and have a strong commitment to making a difference in the communities in which we reside. We believe that communication is critical to the successful operation of any nonprofit and this includes an effective phone system that meets the organization’s needs”.

Robin Warren, FCEE Executive Director says “Since the day that the Florida Council opened its doors it has always been a small team working on a huge endeavor. We are constantly trying to find ways to keep our costs low and so our phone system was put on a back burner. Thankfully through the kindness of Avatel’s 2012 Giving Back Program we are finally able to jump into the 21st century! Long gone will be the days of board meetings gone awry and missed opportunities because of a faulty answering machine. These phones will give us the freedom to feel comfortable asking donors to leave messages and the voicemail to email function has the whole team buzzing! Having a large company like Avatel take notice of our needs and make this generous donation has truly been an incredible experience.”

“We are honored to play a role in supporting the FCEE and we understand the importance of educating students on personal finance to ensure tomorrow’s consumers avoid the mistakes of today”, says Wood.  

About Florida Council on Economic Education

The Florida Council on Economic Education has been empowering tomorrow’s leaders through economic understanding for over 35 years. Currently the Council has various programs geared at educating Florida’s youth on topics such as, the stock market, ethics, and fiscal responsibility. The FCEE is affiliated with four Centers for Economic Education on university campuses across the state where teachers are educated on the fundamentals of free enterprise and financial literacy ultimately creating an enormous multiplier effect.

The mission of the Florida Council on Economic Education is to prepare Florida’s young people for personal and financial success through educational programs in economics, the free enterprise system and personal financial literacy so that they become productive members of the workforce, responsible consumers and wise investors. To learn more about the Florida Council on Economic Education and how you can help us achieve our mission, please call 813-289-8489 or visit us at www.fcee.org.

Avatel Technologies announces its 2012 Giving Back Program

Tampa, Florida - December 19, 2011- Avatel Technologies, a communications solution provider and Premier Avaya Business Partner, announces its 2012 “Giving Back” Program. The company will donate Avaya phone systems to worthy non-profit organizations in the local area.

Jamie Wood, Avatel Executive Vice President says “Non-profits are a vital and important fiber in the fabric of our communities. In this economy, many nonprofits are coping with a significant reduction in funding, forcing them to count every penny.  Communication is critical to the successful operation of any nonprofit and this includes an effective phone system that meets the organization’s needs”.

Avatel will donate one Avaya IP Office phone system each quarter in 2012, including project management, implementation and training to a non-profit or charitable institution.  Avatel employees will vote on and select the recipients of the “2012 Avatel Giving Back” program.

“Our team is very involved with community support and makes it a standard part of both their personal and professional responsibilities.  We want them personally involved in our 2012 Giving Back program.  By having their voices heard, they are able to make a personal connection to those in need and see the genuine impact on the local community by their choices. We look forward to giving back to those worthy non-profits and charitable organizations throughout the year and ultimately providing meaningful support to those who need it most” said Wood.