Frederick Sabty | August 8, 2018

Tech fans might have noticed that over the past year something has been happening to the way we look at each other through our screens. The world’s biggest smartphone players, including those from Asia to the United States, released flagship devices with the 18:9 aspect ratio in 2017 (television and regular smartphones are typically 16:9), proving that size does matter. It’s thinner, longer and much easier to hold with one hand. It’s also beautiful to look at and great for watching movies and making video calls.

User Experience is All About the Faces

Such premium devices that offer maximum use of front screen real estate and the thinnest of top and bottom bezels are market trend leaders. Cheaper alternatives are following suit, which tells us that quality visuals are a hot seller. While the race is clearly on to deliver big-screen visual excellence in the consumer segment, it’s happening in the office too.

The Avaya Vantage™ device is a clear front-runner. This desktop device brings the age of the large touchscreen display right into the workplace—it has no visible buttons. Instead, it provides employees with a simple menu interface. It’s also WiFi-ready and cordless. It’s always on and within reach. Like today’s smartphones, video and audio excellence is engineered into Avaya Vantage to provide users and customers with a crystal clear, rich experience.

User Experience Has to Sound Good

Whilst smartphones rely on incredible audio performance to compete in a sector that is all about personal consumption of music and movies, businesses have their own reasons for pursuing amazing audio. The age of artificial intelligence and the demand for rapid turnaround of customer services means that there is enormous, intrinsic value placed on human voice interaction.

User Experience Has to Be Authentic

We expect customer operatives to know us, listen to us, and hear us clearly: customers want authenticity and simplicity. Nobody wants to have to repeat themselves and spell out words.

We are perhaps moving through a strange new, paradoxical age, where customers want to spend less time talking to humans—but when we do, it needs to be perfect. We seem to be happy for robots to learn about us and help us make purchasing decisions—even predict our behaviours—but when we want a human voice, it needs to be crystal clear, authentic and able to deliver. For businesses, that means thinking about visuals as well as audio.

Avaya Vantage Delivers It All

The Avaya Vantage device gives employees the ability to fully engage with customers through sight and sound, with a large all-glass 8-inch display that is engineered for audio and video communications. It also integrates voice, chat and collaboration apps seamlessly. The phone enables businesses to design and embed apps—including Android apps—just like a smart phone, with their own look, feel and functionality. Companies can build apps that focus on their specific industries, so a Vantage phone in a hotel could act completely different than one used in a retail environment, healthcare, or government. Just like any Android device, Vantage offers total freedom to create a desktop phone that is truly unique. Like the phone in your pocket, Vantage is perfectly customizable.

The hotel setting is a great example of how Avaya Vantage can totally transform the customer experience. Guests can use it to control room lighting, change the TV channel, listen to a personal music collection, control the temperature, or order room service face-to-face. This provides hotels and the wider hospitality sector with huge potential to connect and engage with guests and each other in a much more authentic and human way than ever before.

The move towards powerful, rich audio and visual communications tell us that no matter where we are or what we do, when it comes down to it, we need human interaction. For companies, artificial intelligence, big data and the new generation of predictive routing technologies are crucial, but they remain in the background as infrastructure. They are the framework around which our authentic human voices are heard. No matter how smart our computers are or how well they know us, it’s the look, feel and sound that still really matters.