FRAMINGHAM, Mass.-- Avaya Inc. is betting businesses want to respond as quickly as possible to attacks and criticisms launched from
Twitter,
Facebook and blogs in order to minimize the negative impact they have.
The communications equipment maker is offering software and services that automate the notification of appropriate parties when information scraped from
social media sites indicates a company is getting knocked around by commentary from dissatisfied customers.
Avaya Social Media Manager, in combination with Social Media Consulting services, enable quicker response to potential image problems than manual alternatives, the company says.
So if a company scrapes and identifies data from social sites that mentions the company and its products, Avaya's software can put the problem in front of the appropriate employee who can deal with the problem.
The data is gathered by other vendors' products, but the Avaya software determines whether it requires action and routes a notification to an employee trained to resolve the issue. It passes along relevant data such as the number of followers a person generating negative tweets has to give context about how big an influence the comments might have.
The software can also marry a tweet to a customer identity so the person handling the problem knows whether the customer now tweeting attempted to resolve the problem directly.
Social Media Manager has to work in conjunction with an Avaya unified communications infrastructure. Avaya recommends that customers hire its consulting services to configure the software. It can look for different types of comments, such as those indicating unhappy customers and those indicating interest of potential customers.
Events that get flagged are evaluated and forwarded to Avaya Contact Center software as alerts for particular agents to handle.
Avaya is also announcing an upgrade to its Experience Portal, its automated customer self-service platform. It now supports better handoffs to Avaya Contact Center so when a call escalates from self-service to an interaction with a live attendant, data already gathered from the self-service session is carried along to the agent session. As a result, customers don't have to repeat information at each step.
The portal can now be deployed on virtual machines, and Avaya is releasing a new Avaya Orchestration Designer, software for creating self-service applications out of existing Web applications.