Avaya is one of the world’s leading technology vendors, known for delivering innovative capabilities and solutions for communication, collaboration, and customer experience.
While the company has faced some disruptions in recent years (like many technology vendors), its ability to understand the needs of its target audience, and adapt accordingly has helped Avaya maintain its position at the head of the CCaaS landscape.
This year, Avaya has demonstrated a clear commitment to addressing some of the most significant challenges its audience faces, from aligning CX and EX strategies, to enabling transformation without disruption. Here, we’re looking at some of the most significant evolutions to the Avaya CCaaS portfolio in the last year, inspired by its focus on empowering every organization.
The New Avaya Mindset: Innovation without Disruption
Companies in every industry are facing increasing pressure to digitally transform in 2024. Improving customer experiences, retaining revenue, and enhancing operational efficiency requires a new approach to implementing communication and customer service technologies.
However, the reality is that not every organization can (or should) take a rip-and-replace approach to cloud migration. Many organizations still have “legacy” and on-premises technologies that are crucial to their operations, and eliminating those in favor of new cloud solutions would incur significant costs, cause disruption, and create customer service inconsistencies.
That’s why Avaya, unlike its competitors, isn’t trying to shift all of its customers into the cloud at once. Instead, the company is championing a focus on “innovation without disruption”, allowing companies to integrate and align technologies with a range of solutions.
Companies can use on-premises (Avaya Aura and Avaya IP), private cloud (Avaya Enterprise Cloud), and public cloud (Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral) solutions to enhance employee experiences, then align these tools with Avaya’s technologies for customer experience.
The Avaya Experience Platform: Unified CX
Avaya’s innovative approach to enabling flexible transformation among contact centers is exemplified by the Avaya Experience Platform (AXP). The single, unified platform encompasses all of Avaya’s solutions for customer experience management, and works seamlessly with Avaya’s collaboration tools. Just like Avaya’s collaboration systems, AXP supports multiple deployment options:
- Avaya Experience Platform On-Prem (Previously Avaya Call Center Elite)
- Avaya Experience Platform Public Cloud (Previously Avaya Experience Platform CCaaS)
- Avaya Experience Platform Private Cloud (Previously Avaya Enterprise Cloud)
Avaya also offers “AXP Private Cloud – Extended Scale”, intended to meet the needs of larger on-premises customers. This solution significantly reduces infrastructure footprints, while ensuring comprehensive 100% call survivability across separated sites.
These solutions are all designed to enable “innovation without disruption”, streamlining the integration of cloud services and enabling customized growth. Companies can tap into new digital channels for customer service, assisted service solutions, customer journey orchestration tools, workforce engagement, and proactive care options, supported by AI.
In the last year, Avaya has continued to build on its AXP portfolio with even more flexible options. Companies can now leverage a “Bring your Own Bots” strategy to bring their favorite IT tools into the system. Alternatively, they can tap into Avaya’s Agent Assist as a packaged solution. They can tap into proactive customer care solutions with Avaya Ada, a virtual assistant powered by generative AI, to refine customer journey orchestration and analytics workflows.
Unlocking New Opportunities with Mergers and Partnerships
One of the key factors that differentiates Avaya’s approach to contact center transformation from other providers, is its focus on forging and nurturing strong relationships with industry partners. In the last year, for instance, Avaya has:
Strengthened its Relationship with RingCentral:
Avaya and RingCentral introduced a new collaborative solution at Avaya Engage 2024, combining RingCentral’s cloud communications technology, with the Avaya on-premises contact center solution. This allows Avaya Cloud Office and Aura customers to work effectively together, and access powerful RingCentral features like video calling, messaging, and RingSense AI.
Built New Opportunities with Zoom
Also at Before Avaya Engage this year, at Enterprise Connect, Avaya announced a new partnership with Zoom’s recently announced AI-powered collaboration platform. The “Zoom Workplace” offering will be integrated with Avaya’s comprehensive communication and collaboration suite.
This will give companies using Avaya’s technologies access to a range of AI-powered tools for whiteboarding, Space management, team chat, meetings, and more. This further demonstrates Avaya’s commitment to allowing companies to build their own best-in-class solution for both employee and customer experience.
Enabled Integration with LivePerson
LivePerson and Avaya announced their partnership this year, intended to integrate the two company’s digital, voice, and AI technologies. The collaboration will allow Avaya’s customers to access LivePerson’s conversational cloud tech in on-premises, cloud, and hybrid contact center environments.
Users will gain access to advanced digital capabilities for channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, with generative AI features and large language models. Plus, companies will gain real-time unified insights into agent and customer experiences across all communication channels, enabling smart business decision making.
Enhanced Employee Experience and Workflow Orchestration
Avaya’s ecosystem now offers various ways to enhance the employee experience through intuitive integrations. Native integration of the Calabrio workforce management solutions into AXP helps streamline resource allocation and business efficiency. Companies can even access Verint bots within AXP for quality assurance, time management, and summarization capabilities.
Plus, Avaya introduced new connected employee experience options for healthcare professionals, through integrations with Epic systems. The company even purchased Edify to introduce new opportunities for evolving companies.
Edify’s no-code engine will allow service leaders to design and orchestrate fully customized contact center journeys, facilitating a gradual transition to the cloud.
A Unique Approach to CX Transformation
Avaya’s evolving CCaaS portfolio and approach to serving customers in today’s world demonstrate the company’s continued commitment to delivering genuine solutions to common transformation problems. The company’s innovative “innovation without disruption” initiative, flexible service offerings, and Avaya Experience Cloud will help businesses of all sizes to step into the future of CX.
What’s more, Avaya continues to offer comprehensive support for every client, with it’s Avaya Customer Experience Services team, offering access to Cloud Readiness Assessments, consultation, and technical migration support.
