1. Avaya has expanded its products offerings and is striving to provide a single source for multiple applications. This strategy appears to be somewhat similar to other vendors in your market sector. How does Avaya differentiate itself from its competitors?
Our innovative communications and contact center solutions have helped us to attain worldwide market share leadership in IP Telephony (Synergy Research Group), and to become the leader in contact center market share in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific (Gartner).
Several important differentiators have helped Avaya to achieve this market share leadership. First of all, Avaya provides integrated solutions that serve both business communications and contact center needs simultaneously. This approach delivers efficiencies and cost savings, as well as installation, upgrade and services savings, by delivering call center functionality on a single Avaya communications server. Many other vendors require two or more separate servers, resulting in a higher total cost of ownership.
Additionally, we provide our customers the option of a gradual migration to IP, giving each company maximum flexibility to do what makes sense for their business. And, last but not least, our contact center applications include proven patented technology and predictive algorithms that maximize agent utilization. Since 60-70% of the costs of a contact center are attributed to agent salaries, when you maximize agent utilization you begin to save a significant amount of money immediately.
2. What are the areas of focus for your R&D and product development efforts in the near future?
Our R&D and product development efforts are driven by our customers’ evolving needs. We have a very active and involved international Avaya user’s group, with several thousand members spanning the globe. Regional Avaya user’s groups supplement the annual international conference. Our user’s groups serve several purposes. They give us the opportunity to update our customers about our latest solutions and services. Most sessions are co-presented with one or more of our customers, giving others the opportunity to hear how new solutions and releases are meeting actual business needs. Additionally, discussion groups and future-needs sessions provide an excellent forum for us to hear how our customers’ needs are changing, so that we can evolve our solutions accordingly.
Based upon what our customers are telling us, we continue to increase application integrations, enabling intelligent communications across applications throughout the enterprise. We continue to focus on open, standards-based solutions and providing smooth migration paths for our customers as they evolve to next generation solutions.
One good example is Avaya Voice Portal, a Web Services based platform that brings together the power of Web Services and IP telephony to create more powerful speech and touch tone solution. Voice Portal supports application portability from existing Avaya Interactive Response systems for seamless deployment in the new environment. New applications are easily built via an open standards development environment that integrates with existing Java, Web Services systems to simplify and expedite development of VoiceXML applications and provide an immediate return on investment.
We continue to expand the use of Services Oriented Architectures, to increase scalability and ease of administration, and to integrate presence throughout the enterprise. Our focus is to continue to give businesses the tools to provide a superior interaction experience with their customers, while making it simpler and more cost-effective to do so.
Now, combining these initiatives with our SIP initiatives in the Contact Center, we grow and expand our customer service offerings into the enterprise. In doing this we deliver on our customers’ requests for marrying the traditional call center with expanded customer service by leveraging new and existing resources, technology, and information.
An integrated design environment brings all the power of these applications together for the IT professional. In addition, with our investments in business value reporting, we expand our world renowned expertise in contact center reporting – providing insights on key operational data married with key business performance data.
3. What do you foresee as the next high area of interest for contact centers?
With the largest installed base of contact center and messaging customers worldwide, Avaya is committed to providing investment protection and growth options for our customers to expand and acquire new technologies and innovative customer care technologies. We will continue to build upon today’s leadership in contact centers and messaging, expanding our SIP telephony and presence integration, and adding collaboration tools, communications-enabled business applications, and Web Services.
Contact center consolidation, coupled with enabling technology, is redefining the “physical” call center where agents are designated in common pools. This shift in paradigm allows savvy enterprises to involve employees throughout the enterprise to serve the customer. In this new world, self service applications address customer needs on the front end, and agents are able to access experts from around the globe as needed.
As a result of converging technologies and collaborative software, we see communications converging into a highly productive unified user experience.
4. Avaya has put in a great deal of effort into the marketing of its IP offerings. What unexpected challenges have you encountered? What has been the market’s acceptance of your IP solutions? Have your implementations favored the hybrid or pure IP solution approach?
A widespread adoption of IP in the contact center is underway. VoIP has moved past the “early adopter” category and into the mainstream. Some companies are making the transition to IP end-to-end, while others want to move there gradually. At Avaya, we believe in offering our customers the flexibility to deploy IP according to the needs of their business. Since Avaya contact center applications are infrastructure agnostic, our customers have these choices. Initially, many of our customers implement a hybrid model in a select area of their business, giving themselves the opportunity to identify and rectify any network or other issues prior to enterprise-wide deployment. Others make the transition to pure IP immediately, to gain maximum savings and business benefits. Avaya provides flexible customizable solutions that enable gradual migration to an IP Contact Center strategy as a business grows and evolves. Your path, your pace, your choice.
The impediments our customers have experienced are primarily internal. Sometimes there are challenges in merging staff, combining separate voice and data teams into one IT team. A successful migration necessitates conducting a thorough network evaluation, which is not always done at the detailed, meticulous level that is required. It requires having knowledgeable experts doing this evaluation, and making changes as identified to support the stringent requirements of running voice over a converged infrastructure.
The transition to IP is gaining momentum because of the significant cost savings and business improvements to be gained, as well as improved customer service. Companies are using IP to do things they couldn’t afford to do previously. They are consolidating multiple contact centers into one centralized center, and are using IP to cost-effectively extend the contact center throughout the enterprise. Now the same rich suite of contact center applications is available to small offices, branch offices, and mobile or remote workers, enabling companies to present a consistent brand image to their customers. Some of our customers have experienced noteworthy gains in efficiency with this model by using available employees, regardless of location, during peak call volumes. Conversely, contact center agents are able to help out when branch employees are overloaded.
5. Please comment on your near term expectations for self service applications.
Speech applications play a critical role in providing 24x7, high quality services as part of our overall contact center offering. Historically, costs of the technology and the relative infancy of the technology itself, combined with a lack of available skills, have limited their acceptance.
With the adoption of VoiceXML and a Web-based paradigm, we see the adoption of speech applications rapidly accelerating into not only large enterprises, but into mid-size businesses as well. Speech applications are playing an increasing role in providing consistent service levels at all hours of the day, going beyond the “low cost” or “edge hours” that call centers don’t wish to staff. Businesses are discovering that as intuitive, user-friendly speech-based interfaces are deployed, customers are beginning to gravitate toward self-service options. As this trend continues, not only will costs be lower, but service levels will be enhanced as well.
6. Have there been any significant changes in the sales process over the past year? Have the users’ lists of requirements changed significantly?
Customer requirements are always changing. Avaya is constantly engaging in conversations with customers, partners, developers and market analysts in order to understand and respond to market needs. We have formed customer advisory panels to work along with us as we build new products and new releases, ensuring that our solutions meet our customers’ evolving needs. At Avaya, we make it easy for our customers to grow and add functionality as their businesses expand.
Furthermore customers look for Avaya to be engaged with them at all levels - from executives, to Contact Center managers, into departments responsible for voice and data communications. Consulting activities are becoming more important as customers look for advice on how to take their businesses to the next level by capitalizing on their infrastructure to deliver upon the promise of intelligent communications.
We find that businesses are seeking to enable their applications very easily and quickly, increase employee productivity and reduce costs, all of which help to increase revenue generation and improve customer satisfaction.
7. What are the issues or challenges that user community feels are currently of greatest importance to them?
The nature of how customers interact with Contact Centers is changing. More channels of communication are becoming available. Customers’ expectations are growing – they expect to be able to interact with companies via any method they choose, whether that is via a voice call, a web chat, or a rapid response to an email.
At the same time, the workforce is becoming more mobile and flexible. Contact center managers need the ability to respond rapidly, and to easily deploy mobile agents and home agents. Avaya IP contact centers solutions are focused on creating and leveraging core telephony assets with multiple access points – providing intelligent integrations with mobility applications, voice-enabling web applications.
In addition to a rising demand for mobile worker solutions, businesses are beginning to require that features available in the office are also available on external devices, with seamless interactions for the user. In addition, companies want to be able to send targeted alerts and notifications to their customers wherever they are on whatever device they are using. The benefits of these types of solutions are significant. Not only can they reduce the number information calls into the Contact Centers and the costs associated with those calls, they increase customer satisfaction by proactively providing information their customers need. Avaya continues to deliver integrated solutions that maximize every type of customer interaction.
8. What do you expect to be Avaya’s major areas of growth over the next twelve months?
The call center is evolving from being a separately managed part of the business to becoming an integrated part of the enterprise. As companies begin to reach out and utilize resources outside the call center (for example, branch office employees), we see the call center gain visibility within other parts of the enterprise. The evolution continues when technology "disrupters" such as SIP and presence fully enable "experts" anywhere in the enterprise to work with customers intelligently (communications enabled across media and sites, SIP based CTI to provide data, innovative reporting to capture customer experience, etc.). When this occurs, the numbers of employees actively and proactively engaged in customer service grows and human capital efficiencies are gained.
This movement toward integrated customer service is creating demand for resources outside the traditional contact center. These resources can be occasional or branch agents, non-traditional agents who help during overload conditions. Or, they can be subject matter experts or resident experts, who agents can go to for additional expertise when needed. The end result is faster service to customers and an increase in first-call resolutions.
Also, we expect to see more intelligent communications for business process enablement. This means delivering context-sensitive communications to the right person at the right time, whether that person is an agent in the contact or elsewhere in the enterprise. It means utilizing presence management, and using adjunct applications to manage the delivery, archival, and retrieval of context-relevant information. The bottom line for businesses is that they are able to more intelligently use each and every customer contact to increase their value to their end customers – which is what Avaya is all about.