Let's start with a truism: Customers have always chosen how they want to interact with your company. While these interactions have historically centered on voice, today's customer demands more ways to interact with your company including email, live chat, SMS, and video. Integrating and supporting all these technologies in the contact center is today's challenge.

Avaya Interaction Center simplifies management of customer service. This helps businesses better manage service levels and exceed customer expectations during each and every interaction. This is possible via an open standards-based architecture that simplifies design, deployment, and management. Businesses now have the ability to leverage integration with enterprise data, third-party enterprise applications and multi-vendor switching systems.

Easing Enterprise Integration
Avaya Interaction Center (IC) allows all of an enterprise's customer contact information to reside within a single application—not only for voice calls but web chat, faxes and emails as well. In order to fully extend these benefits to the business, Avaya Interaction Center allows for easy integration with enterprise applications and the aggregation of services using standards-based APIs. Avaya IC provides security, flexibility and reliability while simplifying deployment, maintenance, and support for the development and IT staff.

The back end of other business applications can be integrated with the contact center via web services. This can be used to provide web alerts or business process integration to drive both inbound and outbound agent activities for customer service. As a result the contact center can become a fully-integrated part of the enterprise's business process infrastructure.

For example, in a financial services firm a change in the share price of a key stock could result in an application automatically using a web service to initiate outbound calls by contact center agents handling stock sales transactions. Such proactive outreach can demonstrate to customers that their trading firm is fully-engaged and attentive to both the market and their clients. In a truly competitive market such "high-touch" engagement with customers, facilitated by intelligent business processes, can differentiate an enterprise from its competitors in the same industry.

Getting to Know Avaya Interaction Center's Web Services Capabilities
In order to enable the contact center to become a true part of a service-oriented architecture, Avaya Interaction Center includes a number of web services APIs that allow other applications to access IC in order to achieve enhanced functionality. Agent administration, database connectivity and the initiation of workflows are all available through these APIs.

These Avaya IC web services are beneficial to customer service organizations, and can actually extend customer services and employee productivity far beyond that of other applications.

Agent Administration
The Avaya Agent Administration web service provides a standard interface to Avaya IC that you can use to add, delete, and modify a single agent or multiple agents from another application. This service allows you to work with agent records outside of Avaya IC Manager so that you can perform such tasks as importing agents from an external system or integrating Avaya IC with a third-party customer administration tool. This can be beneficial in automated provisioning, modification and removal of agent accounts. As enterprises begin to look at universal employee directories that manage domain, communications and other user accounts, the ability to create/modify/delete an agent from an external application can be very valuable.

For example, the departure of an employee from a company typically triggers a series of manual tasks whereby the administrators of various services remove the former employee's accounts from applications like email, telephony, voicemail and contact center systems. Many solutions are now entering the market that allow automated processes using things like centralized LDAP databases to handle these tasks. The Agent Administration web service makes it possible for just such applications to perform this function on IC.

An agent account in Avaya Interaction Center typically belongs to a customer service representative. However, the account can also be used for any object that can receive tasks, have contacts routed to it, or administer the system. For example, in addition to belonging to a live individual, an agent account on Avaya IC can be an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) entry point, a call queue, or an Auto Response facility such as an IM Bot or email redirector. Allowing these other entities to be represented as agents facilitates transfers and conferences over Avaya IC.

A custom data structure is used by all functions in the Agent Administration web service to exchange data with the Avaya IC database. This custom data structure contains the agent login ID and links to several data sub-structures that provide a complete representation of an Avaya IC agent's profile. It is used for creating, updating, or retrieving an Avaya IC agent record.

Within toolbars at the actual agent desktop, communication controls and informational displays like contact history can be designed and embedded within existing enterprise applications using the IC Client SDK. Standalone, web-based, or client-server clients can be deployed in any language, even alongside existing Avaya Agent clients, to conform to specialized agent desktop needs or work with other applications used by agent such as CRM desktop portals.