Avaya Experience Platform vs. Cisco Unified Contact Center

The Avaya Experience Platform is well suited to allow remote working for call center agents. Staff can log in and work from anywhere using Chrome and their user credentials. The technical issues and lack of some features have caused some frustration for our staff and made it difficult to get buy-in for this product across all call center groups. This is difficult because a solution like this is intended to make their work more efficient as opposed to causing frustration.

Incentivized

I would recommend it to other people in my contact and business circle, but if I recommend it to someone who has certain difficulties in accessing some tools within Cisco, he may have great difficulty in getting help because of the support that is lacking in most of the times.

Incentivized

• The app and the ability to use the "office" phone while on the road.
• There's an easy implementation and training process to get everyone on board quickly.
• Flexibility of transferring calls to different mediums - I can switch a phone call to a conference or patch in other parties with ease.

Incentivized

• Provides you with a solid routing engine that was built to handle Service Provider level throughput - if you need stability and a work horse this is the platform for you.
• The core features on the whole are good, but where UCCE is very good is the eco-system of Solutions Plus partner integrations that expand on the core capabilities with the market leaders in areas such as WFO, Campaign Management, Biometrics and Natural Language.
• The investment Cisco makes in the CC space means they are always improving the platform features, scale and reliability.

Incentivized

• One are for improvement for Avaya is the ability to operate behind the VPN. For the virtual employee, this is an issue as we are unable to use it behind the VPN and it must be launched from the remote desktop.
• The color scheme could definitely use some updating. The charcoal gray background of Avaya's windows, coupled with the black font is not very contrasting. I have used Avaya for years and would love to see an update as to its color scheme to better fit the virtual employee.
• Avaya could also improve the way an employee moves within the program by titling the icons seen or expanding the Avaya window to allow for a better understanding of what each con does. For example, the Work History window would go unnoticed, had I not been playing with the software one day. These little items are unknown to many professionals in my industry as they sit in the window with no explanation.

Incentivized

• After 25+ years, the product still requires experienced and highly skilled engineers to deploy the product properly per Cisco Best Practice guidelines.
• Third-party integrations are also very cumbersome and require highly skilled and experienced engineers and significant time and financial investment to deploy.
• Upgrading the product is cumbersome and requires Cisco ATP or Cisco AS which is time consuming and very expensive.

Incentivized

I have always found Avaya's technology and support to be the best in the industry. Even as they worked out financial difficulties and continue to fend off competitors they have adopted and incorporated new technologies. They have done so in a logical and supportive manner and offered all these benefits as they went along. I haven't seen any of their competitors do any of this.

Incentivized

if it is up to me I would maintain its use. I was not able to make those decisions previously.

Incentivized

I find Avaya easy to use but I am not a beginner. I think it is much more difficult for beginners unless the administrator has some basic programming skills. The system is getting more difficult to use but I enjoy learning and haven't found myself stumped yet.

Incentivized

To be honest, there are tools better than Cisco Unified Contact Center
because it largely depends on third party integrations with better
alternatives available now a days. However, Cisco Unified Contact Center has its own standards in terms of user experience and client satisfactions which serves every customers with a flawless experience.

Incentivized

I give it this rating because the support services of Avaya have proven to be reliable when needed. Great feedback for our queries has always been received from the support agents. 24/7 availability of support, which is very essential as our Call Center department also functions this way, therefore, the knowledge and technical support we require is always available to us.

Cisco Unified Contact center is a very smart & reliable solution to go for. Its active-active sight base architecture and [customizable] features really help to deliver efficient customer service, enhanced next-gen experience, and uninterrupted operations. I believe every [organization] should opt for it if required.

Incentivized

No, everything was implemented by Avaya Support

Incentivized

Switched from Polycom to Avaya, although polycom worked well there were too many reoccuring connectivity issues and the turn around time for solving them was also too long. Avaya has fewer connectivity problems and their support is much better too. Pricing wise they were similar so we didn't have much to lose.

Incentivized

Similar I guess, however, I feel like Avaya was more suited for a contact center and allowed for all information to be in one place. The QA Forms were more flexible and easy to review. Predicative analysis was available to assist with scheduling and staffing. It was easier to manipulate and implement- I didn't need to go through 3 different parties to make a simply modification.

Incentivized

Licenses are very expensive. The customer has to buy IP telephony or Unified Communication and Collaboration Licenses and for Contact Center Solution licenses separately. There must be a price tone down as the competition is really high. New customers are willing to go for cloud-based solutions [that] are cheaper and easy to deploy.

Incentivized

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Incentivized

• It does what we need it to do, so we don't heavily invest in this technology but rather into the manufacturing end of our business.
• We believe we have more than achieved the return on our investment for the Avaya phone system and associated equipment.

Incentivized

• A smoother route to helping end users with critical needs
• With quick assist while on hold, less calls come into the pool while agents have the ability to assist more critical needs
• The ability to work remotely during an extreme event assisting end users

Incentivized