Singapore – Customer experience (CX) in the modern age of technology requires the collaboration between man and machine. AI innovations now enable professionals to work alongside AI agents to optimise and refine every touchpoint of the customer journey.
Avaya, a company specialising in AI-driven CX and contact centre solutions to support businesses in delivering seamless and personalised omnichannel customer interactions, understands the synergy between human teams and autonomous agents. The company’s AI tools emphasise this teamwork to optimise both employee experience (EX) and CX.
EX plays a pivotal role in delivering impactful CX because it not only acknowledges solutions to streamline an employee’s workload, but places value in every task human teams accomplish across an organisation. By allowing employees to recognise the significance of their role and responsibility, this can translate into impactful customer interactions.
David Funck, CTO at Avaya, spoke with UpTech Media, highlighting how the company utilises model context protocol (MCP) for its Avaya Infinity platform, enabling AI agents to analyse and identify a customer’s needs, helping human teams provide personalised experiences.
“MCP is a new, open interoperability standard that fosters the creation of AI assistants by empowering AI LLMs to securely connect with and use external tools, data sources, and real-world context,” David told UpTech Media.
He added, “It replaces a fragmented landscape of custom-coded, brittle API integrations with an open, flexible, and consistent protocol.”
David further explained that the MCP integrated into the company’s platform follows the philosophy of tandem care—a model of service where AI and human agents collaborate in real-time, amplifying each other’s unique strengths to enhance the customer journey.
This enables human teams to easily access a wide range of data points, such as customer profiles and demographics, behavioural data, cultural context, and product and service usage, leaving AI agents to handle mundane tasks while the human teams focus on CX.
“With MCP, AI assistants not only answer questions, but they can also anticipate needs, surface insights, and take action to quietly support the human agent throughout the interaction,” David explained.
“It’s a shift from automation to augmentation, and it’s unlocking a new tier of intelligent, high-touch support, ensuring human empathy in CX.”
Unifying omnichannel CX and placing the customer voice first
Oftentimes, CX is hindered by fragmented and siloed data systems that introduce friction across customer journey touchpoints. Avaya’s proprietary platform is designed to unify fragmented CX ecosystems.
“Avaya Infinity connects every customer touchpoint and leverages AI-driven orchestration to create a single view of the customer journey. Customers and agents can transition intuitively from one channel to another, and from AI empowerment to human empathy without missing a beat,” David commented.
He added, “By breaking down technology silos, we’re able to create seamless, intelligent, and impactful customer connections.”
David also mentioned how the company’s platform ensures that as a customer moves between different channels or AI systems, the full context of each interaction is preserved, enabling human or AI agents to pick up the conversation at any point, creating a seamless CX.
With this focus, Avaya is redefining CX by shifting the measure of success from speed to substance—focusing on how to make every interaction more personal and effective along the customer journey.
“This approach recognises that customers are looking for more than just a quick answer; they want to be heard and understood,” David added.
“It is about building trust and a relationship with the customer by treating them as a person with a history, not just a case number to be closed as quickly as possible.”
Optimising EX to deliver personalised CX and long-term loyalty
Personalised and human-centred customer journeys are only accomplished by establishing a unified and optimised EX. Avaya accomplishes this through the company’s Infinity platform.
“The integration of EX and CX on our platform enables an approach that moves beyond fragmented interactions to create more connected, continuous experiences that can be tracked with concrete business intelligence,” David stated.
On the backend, the platform provides intelligent orchestration for human teams by providing a unified view of the customer journey, consolidating data from different systems to give a ‘big picture’ view of what issues need to be resolved.
Meanwhile, this translates to providing one single seamless conversation for customers, reducing the need to repeat information with the human or AI representative.
Businesses are also able to analyse every single interaction with next-generation reporting through the company’s platform that runs off a modern data lakehouse architecture. This allows for a detailed overview of the contact centre business and customer outcomes to help reduce pain points along the customer journey.
Additionally, the flexibility of Avaya’s Infinity platform allows it to integrate with any business’s existing infrastructure, whether on-premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid of both. This opens a gateway for businesses around the world to refine and optimise both EX and CX.
Human-centred CX is fundamental in an AI-driven world
Whilst AI has taken centre stage across industries around the world, engagement with human teams to deliver empathetic and personalised CX remains a vital part of the customer journey.
“We at Avaya fundamentally believe that human agents will continue to have a central role in the contact centre where generative and agentic AI can also bring meaningful business value,” David commented.
The company’s own MCP-powered platform helps with this by enabling human teams to have a macro view of each customer’s information and interactions to avoid asking repetitive questions and other friction points for every engagement with a customer.
“This makes the customer feel seen, understood, and cared for, and allows the human agent to focus on what people do best: offering empathy, solving complex problems, and building a genuine connection,” David explained.
With this approach, Avaya can maximise the implementation of the company’s AI-driven tools whilst still enabling human teams to engage with customers with an authentic, genuine, and personal CX.
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As the future of CX becomes increasingly populated with agentic and autonomous processes, Avaya manages to retain the significance of human teams and the value of empathy with each customer interaction by using complementary AI-driven solutions.
