By Glen Taylor
If your organization uses Avaya Proactive Contact (PC) for outbound notifications, you may be wondering what to do when the software goes end-of-support this year. An obvious replacement candidate is the Avaya Proactive Outreach Manager (POM) platform. Avaya POM is a powerful asset that can bring any organization’s outbound strategy into the twenty-first century, helping to synthesize a complex mix of customer relationship goals. Still, you may have some questions:
- Can POM handle my demanding predictive dialing requirements?
- What does POM have to offer?
- What issues will I face making the move to POM?
Is POM as capable at predictive dialing?
Avaya Proactive Contact (PC) earned a reputation decades ago for having extremely accurate call classification and very effective predictive dialing algorithms.
The good news: the call classification capabilities of the underlying Avaya Experience Portal (EP) and the predictive dialing algorithms that POM relies on were taken directly from PC and produce almost identical results for equivalent calls.
Why make the switch to Avaya POM?
Since POM’s introduction in 2010, Avaya has worked steadily to incorporate all of the key PC features into POM while also introducing and maintaining features unique to POM.
The result: POM is now a mature platform that far exceeds PC in its capabilities, and provides significant financial advantages for PC owners because of Avaya credits for existing licenses.
As one pundit stated, “POM is not so much a ‘dialer’ as a ‘dialer tool chest’.” In addition to doing agent-based campaigns with manual, preview, progressive, and predictive dialing, POM is an excellent automated outreach tool for voice, email, and SMS channels, providing the perfect platform for omnichannel campaigns. Since POM resides atop the market-leading Avaya EP inbound customer experience platform, the combination provides a vehicle that can effectively handle any mix of inbound and outbound applications. POM also allows for creative use of its various outdialing capabilities and modalities in a single campaign.
Investing in this powerful Avaya infrastructure opens a broad range of individual and integrated solutions that an enterprise can deploy without investing in multiple platforms. POM benefits from its tight integration with the Avaya Communication Manager (CM). Rather than administering agents, agent information, and the skills assigned to them in POM, these are passed directly from CM.
What issues can I expect during migration?
Enterprises using Avaya PC can expect a learning curve moving to POM and understanding the expansive features of this new dialer platform.
Fear not: INI has helped many PC customers make very successful transitions to POM.
By approaching existing PC campaigns with a fresh eye and determining how they can best take advantage of POM, INI can help enterprise customers fully maximize their outbound practice on this new platform. Frequently, immediate benefit can be derived from some of the automated campaign features of POM that were not previously available in PC. One best practice is to implement POM in parallel with the existing PC platform and use both platforms during the migration period. This allows the opportunity for organizations to really learn and appreciate the new POM platform.
In most cases, it is possible to convert PC campaigns directly to POM campaigns while maintaining contact lists, completion codes, etc. However, a direct like-for-like transition misses out on really using POM to best advantage. POM’s service-oriented architecture allows for much deeper integration into the business’ operations via web services. For example, contacts can now be inserted real-time via web service calls instead of being batched and loaded into the dialer, a feature that INI outbound experts can help organizations implement.
What next?
Since you already have a well-established dialer practice, you’re ahead of the game: you know where your contact lists come from, what attributes you need in your contact records, what dispositions you need your agents to make, and perhaps most importantly, you have practices and policies in place to address the regulatory and compliance rules that affect your business.
If you are considering replacing your current dialer or migrating to a new platform, Avaya POM is the obvious choice. It is a multifunctional platform that fully integrates with existing Avaya platforms and infrastructure and will allow your organization to expand the set of campaign types that you are currently deploying. Since it is powered by the Avaya EP platform, it can provide valuable inbound IVR capabilities as well.
If you need help in assessing whether POM would fit your specific situation or want more detailed information about your unique requirements for POM, schedule a consultation with one of our INI outbound specialists who can assist with your solution.