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In a move designed to quickly expand its call center capacity and productivity, Vonage today announced its sales and service subsidiary, Vonage America, has chosen Avaya's SIP-based telephony and contact center solutions.
Vonage, a provider of broadband telephony in North America, hopes the move will continue its growth by emphasizing customer satisfaction as the market for broadband telephony becomes increasingly competitive.
Maximizing the Customer Experience
"Our vision is to provide world-class customer service," Dan Bemis, senior vice president of Customer Operations of Vonage America, said in a statement. "To do that, we needed to make a number of changes -- starting with an intelligent communications solution that would help us maximize the customer experience."
A little less than a month ago Vonage reportedly signed a deal 
with Synchronoss Technologies for local number portability and e-commerce order management technology. That deal was designed to let Vonage track local numbers using Synchronoss' LNP fallout management system throughout the migration process, thereby allowing subscribers to know when they're ported to the VoIP network.
The fact that Vonage is attempting to improve its customer service is a good sign. The company has been singled out in the past for some customer service deficiencies, and with the latest moves, it seems that they are taking the problem seriously.
Steven Rothberg, president and founder of Minneapolis-based CollegeRecruiter.com, switched to Vonage from Qwest (NYSE: Q) about a year ago. He told CRM Buyer that he almost switched back on several occasions due to inadequate customer service.
"The problems that we had, we believe, were primarily due to Vonage's staffing levels not keeping up to their growth levels," Rothberg said. "The people that we dealt with seemed competent and caring, but there wasn't the follow through that I expect from leading companies."
Global Hub
Based on Avaya Customer Interaction Suite and powered by Avaya Communication Manager IP Telephony software, the main contact center will serve as a hub for other customer care centers as they open around the world.
Avaya's products give Vonage the ability to scale to global proportions and divert calls to other centers worldwide if necessary.
The integration of SIP into Avaya solutions heightens interoperability with other Vonage applications and networks. Additionally, new SIP-based capabilities in Avaya's Customer Interaction Suite can enable Vonage agents to establish buddy lists of fellow agents or experts located anywhere in the business who could be quickly tapped through presence and instant messaging while a customer is on the line.
"It was important to us that Avaya's portfolio of business communications applications supported standards like SIP -- the technology core of Vonage's service offering -- that will easily integrate with other business applications and which create value on top of the network," said Bemis.
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