If You're New, A Quick Introduction to Discover
Discover is our real time contact centre wallboard solution for Avaya CMS, Avaya Aura Contact Center (AACC), and Avaya Contact Center Select (ACCS). Built to tackle the pain and limitations we experienced as users, Discover delivers stunning wallboards to teams in the office or at home with fast data refresh, no installs, and no need for users to login.
As a living solution, our users enjoy feature updates every 6 months or so that bring new features and enhancements based, not only our long term vision, but on the suggestions and feedback we receive from users who have become an endless source of inspiration for us and continue to influence the ongoing development of Discover.
So, Let's Talk About Update 2.4
The next update is expected to be in everyone's hands in Q3 this year, and it's a big one. We will talk about some of the other work that's going on as development progresses but today we want to talk about one of the core changes in the upcoming 2.4 release, one that will be experienced by every single user - "the wallboard refactor".
What's Wrong With the Current Wallboards?
Nothing really, however, throughout Discover's Development we have added new wallboards over time to take advantage of, and show off, new features. That's worked very well for us and for our users but, over time, has created a problem - our older wallboards no longer reflect our current design standards, nor do they all make use of the latest and greatest features.
We describe these internally as "Legacy", and while generally our Legacy wallboards are 99% as good as our newer wallboards, we want them to be 100% as good.
Taking Legacy to Gold
"Gold" is how we describe our wallboards using the most up to date design standards and feature set. For us, Gold is a constantly evolving target as it simply defines the latest state of the ever-expanding features and enhancements used in our wallboards...but without an example, "Gold" and "Legacy" are just words, so let's start there.
A Legacy Wallboard
We hope what you see here is a gorgeous contact centre wallboard full of the most mission critical real time KPIs and packing some "extra mile" features in for good measure.
You'd be absolutely right. However, as good as this wallboard looks, it's no longer compatible with some of Discover's newest features and lacks the design refinements we have introduced since its inception, and this is where Gold comes in.
A Gold Wallboard Concept
This wallboard may not appear as though it's doing anything radically different but there are a mountain of subtle, and not so subtle, things going on that together create a fundamentally better experience for our users:
A lot of the changes are going on under the hood but, thankfully, there are a few things we can see:
A Better Range of Contact Centre KPIs
More Detailed Contact Centre KPIs
The Inclusion of Company or Client Image Logos
Customisable Agent Status Groups, Labels, and Formats
Agent Status Icons
Interactive Agent and Queue Lists
A More Refined and Consistent Design Language
Better Space Efficiency
These enhancements in many cases have been inspired through the feedback we not only receive, but encourage from our users. They're trusting us to provide an alternative to the Avaya wallboards included in their contact centre or CCaaS solution which is why it's so important to us that everyone, no matter which wallboards they decide to use, have access to the very best of our wallboard features.
A Step Further, Making Our Avaya Wallboards Even Better
We didn't stop there though; the wallboard refactor has been in the planning phase for months because we see this is an opportunity rather than a necessary evil...
...well, maybe as well as a necessary evil.
This second step was arguably the most important, and that was to do a deep dive into our future aspirations for Discover; short term, long term, small enhancements, and big features, all to figure out what we can now to future proof our wallboards from falling behind and receiving the Legacy moniker.
The output of this (very long) planning phase is enabling us to recreate our wallboards in such a way that planned features can be integrated more quickly and robustly in future and, fingers crossed, we won't require another wallboard refactor any time soon.
What's Next?
Refactoring wallboards is not the most glamorous topic but it's so important for us to build a foundation that allows us to do even more with Discover and continue to turbo charge Avaya real time reporting.
As we continue the process of recreating each of our wallboards, parallel work continues on the other features planned for update 2.4 which are shaping up very nicely indeed, and we'll be back to talk about those a little later.
To stay up to date on what's coming next, you can check out the Discover Feature Release Timeline and if you have any questions or ideas about contact centre wallboards, don't hesitate to get in touch, we'd love to hear from you.
Grey Space Out.