1. Unified Communications is relatively new approach for the contact center. What has been the market acceptance of the UC approach? What has been the acceptance of your UC solutions?
Our customers recognize the value of Unified Communications. Their key drivers tend to be: business continuity, enhancing the customer experience, supporting a mobile work force, and cost savings. Linking the information worker to the contact center by way of “resident expert” applications is very appealing to customers. Presence is becoming a key enabler. Increasingly, companies are planning to support a mobile work force, whether around the office or campus environment, on the road, in a virtual or home office, or working from a customer or supplier location. Unified Communications increases the probability of a caller connecting to the right person at the right time using the right media.
Market acceptance is growing, assisted by our many integration points. For example, companies who have deployed Microsoft Office Communicator or IBM Lotus Sametime can integrate their Avaya telephony presence and click-to-call into those environments. As companies evolve their voice messaging infrastructure they look for a unified messaging system either using Microsoft Exchange or IBM Lotus Domino as the message store, or using the Avaya Message Storage Server and integrating access through Microsoft Outlook or IBM Lotus Notes.
2. Avaya has a broad range of product solutions. What are your areas of major growth? What areas of focus can we expect from Avaya in the near future?
IP Telephony continues to be an area of focus and growth. While we have seen a significant number of our global clients move to IP over these last years, we believe there is still a significant area of growth as adoption broadens from general enterprise telephony into areas like contact centers.
In the large enterprise space, we are seeing companies look for ways to further simplify their software infrastructures while better leveraging communications integrations with existing enterprise applications through SOA and SIP. They are adding new applications such as speech self service to increase customers’ access to valuable services, 24x7. They are using proactive notification capabilities to reach out to their customers with information they want and need, providing differentiated customer care and increasing customer retention.
In the mid-market space, we see a need for comprehensive contact center software capabilities that are easy to integrate. In January, we began rollout of Avaya Customer Interaction Express, a full-featured multimedia contact center solution that helps midsized business achieve the benefits of Intelligent Communications in customer service.
3. Please provide us with your definitions of mid sized and large sized contact centers. How do your mid sized contact center strategies differ from your large center strategies?
The challenge of the midsize business is that it is often sandwiched between enterprise-sized organizations with vast resources to implement feature-rich services, and small companies with high-touch and agility. Midsize businesses often have fewer resources than large enterprises, and can’t provide the high-touch service to every one of their customers in the way that smaller organizations do. But, what is quickly leveling the playing field and driving competitive advantage is service. No matter how big a business is, quality communications with customers, suppliers, and employees is the key to providing the kind of differentiated service that is needed to leave their competitors behind.
Avaya provides midsize companies with rich communications capabilities, integrated with line-of-business applications at a price point and resource-point that they can afford. Avaya views each business as being unique in its own way, with its own imperatives and success drivers. We approach each new opportunity with a fresh perspective in order to discover what the real needs of the business are, and to determine which of our solutions will provide the best possible results.
Avaya has developed advanced intelligent communications solutions to help our customers meet and exceed their goal of finding a competitive edge through superior customer service - regardless of the size of the business, or the complexity of their needs.
4. Who do you consider your major competitors? How do you differentiate yourselves from these “players”?
As a global leader in contact centers, Avaya competes against a myriad of legacy telephony providers like Nortel as well as relative newcomers such as Cisco. Key to our differentiation is our intense focus and execution on Intelligent Communications that help deliver extraordinary customer service.
Avaya Intelligent Communications solutions enable our client companies to leverage both what they have today in combination with the latest innovations and open standards, to gain sustainable competitive advantage through differentiated customer care strategies. We are first to market in embedding communications capabilities directly into business processes, delivering a proof point of how we are using emerging technologies and SOA to deliver innovative communications solutions.
We were first to market in integrating SIP and presence into the agent desktop, facilitating the agent’s immediate access to an expert anywhere within the enterprise. We continue to expand our SIP technologies to deliver rich media video services, help our customers eliminate costly CTI integrations, and reduce hardware costs.
Enterprise-wide reporting and analytics platforms help managers gain a true real-time picture of the customer experience, driving a competitive advantage. Avaya customers can be assured that we will continue to lead the way in delivering the most innovative, highest quality customer service solutions available.
5. What do you believe are your major challenges/issues over the next twelve months?
Our biggest opportunity/challenge over the next year is not in technology itself, but in helping businesses understand the capabilities that can turn their contact center into an area of growth for their business. We will continue to work with our customers in adapting to the rapid transformation of call center technologies from a cost-saving proposition to business generation, particularly around customer-service applications, and now moving into business transformation and business impact. This is a tremendous opportunity for Avaya to deliver differentiated customer service solutions for our customers that fundamentally change the way they do business.
6. Have user requirements changed over the past twelve months? What issues are of most importance to them?
We are seeing contact center customers explore how they can make use of enabling technologies such as SIP. Our customers have requested end-to-end, scalable SIP customer contact capabilities that truly enable entire enterprises to be at the service of the customer. They are investigating how video capabilities can be used with mobile devices and integrated into customer service delivery. They are also exploring how SOA fits into their contact center. They are looking for intelligent reporting and analytics to provide a unified view of contact center operations, therefore speeding the analysis of customer experiences and improving efficiencies.
Issues that are most important to contact center managers and line of business owners are that of balancing the need to provide an extraordinary customer experience with keeping costs in line. They are seeking to expand outside the traditional boundaries of the contact center to better serve customers – to put the enterprise at the service of the customer.
7. What significant trends in our industry have you noticed? What can we expect in the near future?
We’re seeing a significant increase in the number of companies who are employing work-at-home agents – and many more who are actively planning such programs, or are in the exploration stages. Companies are finding that an at-home agent program enables them to tap into a much broader talent pool, helps to increase employee satisfaction and agent retention, reduces brick-and-mortar costs, and helps to ensure business continuity.
Another trend we are seeing is a focus on optimizing the customer experience. In today’s global economy, companies are realizing that one of the few remaining competitive advantages is that of providing a superior customer experience. Consequently, we are seeing an increased focus on technologies and strategies that can help them better serve their customers, while reducing costs. For example, many of our customers are using the Flatten, Consolidate, and Extend strategy to improve their ability to serve customers. Taking this approach, they can flatten their networks and eliminate network pre-route costs, consolidate applications into a single instance, and cost-effectively extend contact center capabilities throughout their enterprise.
In the near future, I think we can expect to see more enabling technologies that assist in providing a superior customer experience. For example, our customers can now our patent-pending Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) to automatically look for contact center exception conditions and react accordingly. For example, if an unexpected spike in calls is leading to a high abandon rate in long wait times, CEBP can use this information to launch a proactive contact, speech-enabled application to call at-home agents and ask them to log in and help with the overflow. That’s one example of the power of Intelligent Communications.
8. Has the sales cycle changed in the last twelve months? If so, how?
The increasing modularity of the delivered solutions is shortening sales cycles and creating more sales opportunities, as solutions are being delivered more incrementally and can build on previous solutions already in place. The nature of the sale has changed as well - the solutions are becoming more suite-oriented, which encompass more areas of a customer’s business. That has led to a different, broader set of decision makers, and an ROI decision model that reaches across more business units for inputs (and funding).