Avaya's Ten Communications Trends for 2010

In the past decade, a sea change has taken place in how voice and data communications are structured, delivered and used by businesses.  Here are the top 10 areas Avaya expects to see action in 2010:

Regulatory mandated proactive communications. In an era of increasing regulation, proactive communications applications will automatically initiate contact with customers and guide interactions, in compliance with regulatory requirements.  Under the Homeowner Modification Program in 2009, for example, Congress mandates that mortgage companies increase their proactive communications with borrowers. Communications monitoring of employees across devices. Businesses, while still respecting privacy standards, will increasingly track phone calls, instant messages and emails of their employees to better predict work needs and behaviors. The communications industry will provide much more consistency across multimodal interfaces, whether through iPhones, standard telephones or the Web. Social media and contact centers. Customers will initiate more company interactions via social media tools like Facebook. Basically any consumer with a laptop, desktop or Web-phone will have richer multimedia experiences with contact center reps. Conversely, more businesses will embrace mining of the social network, capturing new opportunities to provide service, address issues and promote sales.  Taming mobile phone spend. SIP-enabled environments will control mobile phone expenses by consolidating trunk lines and using the corporate IP network to route long-distance and international cell calls at the cost of local calls. Analytics and contact center process reengineering. Contact centers will track customer interactions across a range of media, both to analyze the interaction and then make real-time decisions in adapting solutions to trends. They’ll be able to react to customer and call center interactions in real-time with both dialogue in the self-service applications and instantaneous coaching of call center agents. CEBP will no longer be a four-letter word. The Communication Enabled Business Process concept will finally come into its own as a workflow tool that’s easy to deploy. Imagine an insurance company responding to hundreds of agents in the field who are working with insured victims of a hurricane. The latest communications workflow tools will help coordinate the efforts between the field and claims agents, automating processes associated with collecting data, filing the claims and confirming acceptance of the settlement. Similar examples of CEBP will emerge in financial services, health care and retail. Unified Communications and the 3-click experience. UC has labored under a variety of models, which has made led to slower than expected adoption. In the coming year, with SIP and session management, companies will build, deploy and support applications much more easily. Workers will operate under a three-click paradigm – in three seconds or less and three clicks, they’ll have access to many more resources and applications regardless of the device they’re using. The rise of true multivendor networks. With increased consolidation of key industries, more and more businesses will have increasingly complex communications infrastructures and applications from a wide variety of vendors. SIP-enabled environments will help companies blend these disparate products so they work together and truly become brand-agnostic. Overcoming communications overload.  At a time when many businesses are struggling with the volume and breadth of communications systems that need to be managed, new technologies will help reign-in the complexities to bring greater levels of operational and cost control. Making every on-hold second count. Businesses will aggressively find ways to make every aspect of their clients’ interaction more productive in the call center environment. Richer on-hold experiences will become the norm, where customers have multiple options for how they use on-hold time, including ways to move forward with a transaction even before the call center rep arrives on the call. The result will be greater call center productivity and improved customer satisfaction.