Avaya IP Office Video Softphone Crashing Issue

[PayYourTolls]

Hi Everyone,
My company recently implemented Avaya IP Office (9.0.2) with a Vuesion Contact Center (DevConnect Partner) for our 60 agent call center, and while everything has been relatively smooth we have encountered a constant crashing issue with our Avaya IP Office Video Softphone (3.2.3.49, 68975). All our agents use softphones and we experience about 3-6 crashes each day (total, not per agent). This used to be in the 10-20 range until we started tracking which computers were experiencing the crashing and swapped out the PC for newly imaged ones. This has greatly reduced the amount of daily crash occurrences...but it still occurs daily.

This has been a giant headache for us because our call center software still sends calls to an agent even if their softphone is not responding, leading to the call being immediately dropped without any kind of notification to the user or CS managers. Ideally the call center should know when a user's softphone is crashed/not running and not present them with a call, but unfortunately this is not the case.

We have been rattling our brain over this issue for two months now and have come to two conclusions: 1. The softphone is fairly resource intensive and has a higher chance of crashing on older computers and when user's have a lot of applications (webpages) running. 2. The softphone is a very poorly designed piece of software. I have a brand new Core i7 Lenovo laptop with 16GB of RAM and my softphone still crashes from time to time (not to mention it sometimes takes minutes to startup or shutdown). We have also looked into using the Avaya Flare, which is very stable and we have not seen it crash, but it is not supported by our Call Center application.

Anyone have experience with a similar softphone crashing issue or has any recommendations?

Thank you very much in advance!

Eugene V.

 

[intrigrant]

Hi, I have experienced the same issue for three months upgraded from 8.1 to 9.0, IPOSS support investigated and tried everything possible, no improvement.
Now we have removed the softphones and implemented a IP DECT solution and customer is very happy with it.
So no help here but just a advice, give up these softphones, they will not be supported on the next 9.1 release which means development will stop as well.

 

[amriddle01]

They are absolutely not designed for a Call Centre envoironment anyway, deskphones should always be used for best results

 

[PayYourTolls]

So looks like we're not the only people having issues with these softphones. Our vendor keeps on insisting that they've never seen anything like this before and have much larger customers all using softphones without any issues...but I think that's just lip-service.

Are there any other softphone alternatives for IP Office besides the Flare?

Thanks,
Eugene V.

 

[amriddle01]

Nope, just Flare (or Avaya communicator as it will be known going forward), unless you want to use 3rd party clients

 

[PayYourTolls]

I'm open to testing out a third party softphone...it can't get any worse then it is now.
Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Eugene V.

 

[amriddle01]

Counterpath Bria is what Avaya has based video softphone on, so they will recognise the interface, it will probably work better but with much less integration. Plus you will need 3rd part endpoint licences which are mucho deniro

 

[amriddle01]

*party

 

[nothingworks101]

Avaya communicator is for CM, they told me it dosnt work on ipo?? is that true.

we have a client who went from cm to ipo and used it before the switch. the ipo softphone, one x mobile or flare dosnt give you the same features.

 

[amriddle01]

In 9.1 Flare will be rebranded to Avaya Communicator