Avaya has rebranded its cloud contact centre technology to Experience Platform as its portfolio transformation continues, CEO Alan Masarek has told CX Today.
Avaya exited Chapter 11 earlier this week, giving it a fresh start having spent around two years struggling with its finances.
Describing itself as the “leader in customer experience and cloud solution”, contact centre is at the heart of Avaya’s product portfolio and critical, therefore, to its recovery roadmap.
Masarek said: “We have rebranded our CCaaS solution the Avaya Experience platform.
“The reason we call it the Experience Platform is that we fundamentally believe where the market is moving is in providing the underlying technology to a business to help enable their customer and employee experience.”
Masarek explained that all companies go through similar motions with their customers.
In the same interview with CX Today’s David Dungay, Masarek reaffirmed the company’s ‘innovation without disruption’ approach to introducing cloud solutions to companies with on-premise setups.
The Avaya CEO said that it is a message that has “resonated really well with [its] customers” as there is a prevalent fear that ripping up tried and tested on-premise solutions could lead to serious issues.
Nevertheless, Masarek pointed to the fact that most of its 90,000 customers are on some level of journey towards the cloud. Typically, he said, smaller businesses are able to move more quickly to the cloud, while large customers tend to be on a more gradual cloud journey.
Loyal Partners
Avaya’s partner base of 8,000 was also in the spotlight, as Masarek told CX Today that they never left Avaya.
He gave thanks to partners for staying with them throughout the recent turbulent times.
Avaya has just completed a financial restructuring of the company and is now ready for another cloud transition push, which its channel partners will be central to, according to Masarek.
New RingCentral Deal
It has been said that Avaya’s cloud model did not yield enough for VAR and distributors because of its agency model, resulting in RingCentral owning the customer.
In spite of this, Avaya’s partner base remained loyal and it has signed a new wholesale agreement with RingCentral. This time, however, Avaya and its partners will retain the customer.
Masarek said: “Our partner base [of] disties, VARs, and SPs have not left us. In virtually all cases, we’re still, as a vendor for that class of partner, top three.
“It’s important for both of us that there is a healthy environment because we’re important to them and they are important to us.”
Avaya recently announced a board reshuffle and Masarek spoke about his excitement at realising its business transformation and entering “a new future for Avaya”.
