Avaya and Afiniti Partner to Bring Unique and Proven, AI-Driven Behavioral Pairing to the Contact Center

WASHINGTON, April 24, 2018 (Newswire.com) - Avaya Holdings Corp (NYSE: AVYA), the world’s leading provider of contact center solutions, and Afiniti, the world’s leading provider of AI-based behavioral pairing solutions, today announced a strategic partnership to improve enterprise customer experience and contact center performance through a unique integration of artificial intelligence into contact center routing technology.

This first-of-its-kind collaboration will natively integrate Afiniti Enterprise Behavioral Pairing™ with the market-leading, Avaya Contact Center platform on which enterprise customers around the world depend for reliability at scale.

"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. Today, Afiniti's AI is helping to save lives and is 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."

Zia Chishti, CEO, Afiniti

Afiniti Enterprise Behavioral Pairing discovers and predicts patterns of interpersonal behavior to optimally pair customers with agents. With over 90 patents, Afiniti’s technology examines enterprise data to determine patterns of successful behavioral interactions and applies these patterns in real time to drive improvements in enterprise profitability, customer satisfaction, and consumer health.

“Every enterprise is looking to get more out of their contact center, and AI is the next major shift in the way contact centers 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 center 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 to save lives and is 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.”

Watch the video of Jim Chirico, Avaya and Zia Chishti, Afiniti here.

Optimizing 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 center in 2018 will be approximately $5 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 optimize this market opportunity.*

“The native integration between Avaya and Afiniti will enable contact center 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 center 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 Behavioral Pairing technology into Avaya’s market-leading outbound and inbound voice routing solutions, Avaya Aura® Contact Center 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 Center Elite in the third quarter this year, enabling companies to benefit from Behavioral 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 center and unified communications solutions.

*IDC research commissioned by Afiniti, and Afiniti analysis

About Avaya

Avaya is a global leader in digital communications software, services and devices for businesses of all sizes. Our open, intelligent and customizable solutions for contact centers and unified communications offer the flexibility of Cloud, on-premises and hybrid deployments. Avaya shapes intelligent connections and creates seamless communication experiences for our customers, and their customers. Our professional planning, support and management services teams help optimize solutions, for highly reliable and efficient deployments. Avaya Holdings Corp. is traded on the NYSE under the ticker AVYA. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com

About Afiniti

Afiniti Enterprise Behavioral Pairing™ uses artificial intelligence to identify subtle and valuable patterns of human interaction in order to pair individuals on the basis of behavior, leading to more successful interactions and measurable increases in enterprise profitability. Afiniti operates throughout the world, and has measurably driven billions of dollars in incremental value to its clients.

Afiniti has over 150 deployments in major enterprises across a range of sectors, including telecommunications, insurance, financial services, hospitality and healthcare, and has optimized more than 600,000 agents and 700 million customers. Afiniti’s technology continually learns and improves, analyzing 1.3 million interactions every day to refine its pairings. For more information, please visit http://www.afiniti.com

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Source: Afiniti Newsroom