Connecting Contact Center Workforce Management with Avaya Infinity

I asked how the Avaya integration was going and was told it was done. 

I almost asked my lead engineer to repeat it.

For most of my career, connecting workforce management (WFM) to a contact center platform was a project. An SOW, a services team, a connector built for one customer that nobody could reuse, and a timeline measured in months. The data was in there. The work was getting it out in a shape you could forecast with, and then doing that same work again for the next customer.

Cisne provides workforce management technology for forecasting, scheduling, and real-time adherence across contact center operations. Our initial integration with Avaya Infinity took days, and most of that was extra testing we decided to run ourselves.

Every WFM Problem Starts Upstream

Workforce management lives or dies on data. If your handle time is wrong, your forecast is wrong. If your forecast is wrong, your schedule is wrong. If your schedule is wrong, you are paying for people you do not need, or you are short and watching your service level come apart in real time. Almost every one of those problems starts upstream, with data that did not arrive, arrived late, or arrived in a format nobody could reconcile.

Most ops leaders I talk to have made peace with it. They export from one system, massage it in Excel, and load it into another. They know their adherence numbers are a day behind. They know the back office work never got counted at all. They have built their whole planning cycle around the limits of the plumbing.

When the data comes across clean, that changes. Forecasts run against what happened rather than a sample of it. Schedules get built against real demand across every channel the same agents are working. Adherence is something you can see while the day is still in front of you.

The idea is not new. What is new is how little work it took to get there.

Why validated workforce management integrations matter 

Avaya has no shortage of partners. The Innovation Hub sits outside all of that. It is not a tier of the traditional partner program, and it is not a reseller list. It exists to serve a different purpose.

Avaya's position is that Avaya Infinity is the orchestration layer for the enterprise and that the customer owns their own AI roadmap. But anyone can say that. The Innovation Hub is how they show it. A hand-selected few validated integrations in the categories a customer has to make decisions about—with the work published—so you can check it yourself. Someone who wants a vendor for agent assist in the sales organization, and a different one in service, can do that, and nothing about the platform chooses for them.

Very few companies are on it, and each one had to have a validated integration before it appeared. Cisne is the workforce management one.

The value of validating ahead of time is simple. Someone evaluating options can see the work is already done before they commit to anything. Nobody has to schedule a call to find out whether it is possible.

What the Integration Showed Cisne about Avaya Infinity 

If you have not looked at Avaya in a few years, you are probably still judging the platform you ran in 2015. Reputations in this industry move slowly.

Avaya Infinity is designed to connect customer interactions with enterprise data, AI, and workflows. I did not take anyone’s word for that. Our engineering team integrated Cisne with it, and the speed of that work is the only evidence I needed. 

If you are running Avaya and workforce management is on your list, the integration is not the part you will have to plan around. 

It was finished before I got around to worrying about it.

For a technical look at the data interfaces and testing behind the integration, read What Every Interaction Leaves Behind: Inside Cisne’s WFM Data Integration with Avaya Infinity.