Transforming the Customer Experience HidekiWachi, Managing Director, Avaya Japan, discusses how Avaya is working with partners in Japan to integrate social media and omnichannel offerings to deliver personalized customer experiences.

What did Avaya see in Japan in 2016?

2016 was the year the year of true transformation for Japan’s largest contact centers. With the

rise of mobile penetration, and increasing social media-driven communication, BPO customers

are driving an incredible demand for advanced applications and analytics capabilities, as their

own customers look for ways to digitize their customer experience and bring omnichannel

capabilities into the mix.

In 2016, major contact center operators that have international footprints have kicked off

investment in technologies that allows them to quickly offer those capabilities, and to be able to

experiment with technology to differentiate themselves quickly and offer more customized

services to their customers. The business outcomes of this transformation into the customer

experience in Japan will kick off into 2017, as experiences transform, CSAT increases and

therefore, revenues climb.

What’s the highlight of Avaya Japan in 2016?

Our focus this year has been to drive adoption of platforms that enable our customers to bring

added value into their mix of services in the large outsourcing business. At the same time, we

worked creatively to build the ecosystem that allows even more creative applications integration

into the CC environment. Working with software vendors on one side and social software

providers on the other have been the key highlights of this year and packaging those alliances as

a services offering to our largest Contact Center customer base in Japan has been key.

One of the outcomes we are most proud of is our partnership with messaging app LINE, the most

popular messaging app in Japan, Thailand and Taiwan, with around 218 million monthly active

users, similar to WeChat and WhatsApp in the rest of the world. We worked with LINE to bring

social media integration to the front end, advanced analytics to the back end, and a much more

intelligent and mobile first experience into the contact center.

Because of this partnership, Japan’s contact center operators are now able to add the LINE chat

capability as a channel for customer inquiries and to centrally manage communications. With the

wide penetration of smartphones, mobile devices, web, and the Internet in recent years, inquiries

from customers to businesses use multiple channels including email, chat, and website

interaction, as well as voice. While businesses pursue an omnichannel contact center strategy

that provides a seamless experience regardless of the channels used, from a system perspective

the reality is that real-time coordination is difficult because customer histories and agents are still

typically separated by channel.

What are our expectations in 2017?

The LINE partnership as well as others demonstrate the trust that the industry has in Avaya, and

the value that social software providers and operators see in building alliances with us, and

working together to advance the business of our customers. This is something that we will

continue doing in 2017 as we work with the ecosystem and our customers to discover and apply

innovative ways of advancing the digital customer experience.